Meditations on love

I stumbled upon a tragic story quite by accident this past week: food blogger Jennie lost her husband suddenly and unexpectedly.  In her 30s, she now finds herself a young widow and single mother of two girls.  Jennie recently posted about how she and her husband had made time for a date after he'd finished a busy work project.  She talked about the peanut butter pie - his favorite - she'd been meaning to make for him.  She talked about how important it is to tell our loved ones how special they are to us because you never know when tomorrow won't come.

Several years ago a friend loaned me the book The 5 Love Languages.  In reading it I realized that my love language is "acts of service".  In fact, my favorite act of service is cooking.  Spending the day in my kitchen to concoct a variety of delicious things is both my idea of entertainment and a way to show others that I care enough to do something special just for them.  Besides, cooking is a gift that we can all enjoy.

The challenge comes when people speak different love languages.  If one person values physical touch over acts of service, the time I devote to a locally sourced, homemade, multi-course meal will matter less than the accompanying hugs and kisses.  The opposite is true: an embrace is more enjoyable if preceded by some choreplay.

When I cook for someone, I spend the time thinking about them, reflecting upon what they mean to me and making sure that what I'm making will be a treat that takes into consideration their favorites.  For me, cooking is more than assembling food: it's about translating the love I feel for someone into a tangible, if fleeting, gift.

As I assembled the ingredients for this pie it dawned on me how many of the items in our home came into our possession due to love.  Just on my kitchen countertop you see a small colander of new potatoes from my garden, squash from a friend, the battery charger for the camera I gave Gene when we were dating, my grandmother's cookie jar, an orchid a friend gave me for my birthday, and the food processor my mom gave me.  Each of these items represents a gift of love.

I suspect that many cooks are acts-of-service people. 

Jennie requested that readers make a peanut butter pie to share with their loved ones:

For those asking what they can do to help my healing process, make a peanut butter pie and share it with someone you love. Then hug them like there's no tomorrow because today is the only guarantee we can count on.

I used her recipe, changing it slightly to swap lower fat ingredients where possible (reduced fat peanut butter, no peanuts, graham crackers, neufchatel cheese).  You can find the recipe on Jennie's blog linked above, as well as more recipes and tribute blog posts on the Food Network blog.

To the people in my life for whom I cook: every bite is my way of telling you that I love you. 

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p.s. When I took the springform sides off the pie it slowly oozed onto the countertop.  What a mess.  I slid the whole thing into a deep dish pie plate and froze it.  This made for a very tasty frozen pie. 

Despite the lower fat ingredients, it's really quite rich.  Don't be gluttonous with your first piece as I was: I couldn't even finish it.  Me... the pregnant chick... couldn't eat a whole piece of pie.  I'm a shame to my kind.

Blackberry-sour cream muffins

On weekend mornings I arise before Gene by at least 2 hours.  I'm enjoying these quiet mornings while I have them, knowing that once our little boy arrives I may well lose the morning solitude for, oh, a decade or more.

My favorite way to pass the morning hours is to brew a pot of tea, make a pastry of some kind, and read the paper with the dog snuggled on my legs.  I make some kick ass scones and considered it this morning but ruled them out in lieu of muffins.  Last weekend we bought a half-flat of mixed raspberries & blackberries at the farmers market.  There was still a half pint of blackberries left and I thought they'd mix into a muffin batter better than into a scone dough.

I started out with my favorite muffin recipe, and tweaked it just a bit to accomodate for ingredients I had in the house and to make them a little sweeter.  If you have some lemon zest, throw that into this recipe to make it even better. 

BLACKBERRY-SOUR CREAM MUFFINS

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
1/2 t cinnamon
1/4 t salt
1/4 c lemonade
2 T vegetable oil
1 t vanilla extract
1 cup low-fat sour cream
1/8 c milk
1 large egg
1 cup fresh blackberries

Cooking spray

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. Combine all dry ingredients in a large bowl and mix with a fork.
3. Combine all wet ingredients in a measuring cup and mix with a fork.
4. Dump wet into dry and stir until just barely incorporated. Do not overmix.
5. Fold in berries.
6. Spoon batter into muffin tins.
7. Bake for 18 mins or until wooden pick comes out clean.
8. Remove muffins immediately & cool on a rack

By the way, if you're wondering why muffins should be removed from the tin ASAP, it's because they'll steam themselves soft if left in the tins.  Nobody likes a gooey muffin (except chickens, which aren't known for having discerning tastebuds).

Cherry soda

In saying hello to pregnancy, I've had to bid adieu to my daily glass of red wine.  I've had a small tipple of wine here and there, but nothing like what my regular routine used to include.  I went through a cranberry spritzer phase until learning that the quinine in diet tonic water is not recommended for preggos.

Great.  There's only so much water and lemonade you can drink before you're sick and tired of both. 

One thing I committed myself to this summer was trying a variety of homemade, non-alcoholic, summer beverages.  Being that our summer has been less than warm, I hadn't had much inspiration.  I did make the lime syrup a while back and only recently finished it - it was divine with soda water!

Our local paper ran a feature on homemade sodas.  One of the recipes was for cherry basil soda.  I had a quart of bing cherries in the fridge.  It was perfect!

I altered the recipe and method just slightly.  First off, I didn't have any basil.  Secondly, I was not in the mood to pit a quart of cherries.

I started off by putting a quart of cherries, a half cup of water, and a half cup of turbinado sugar into a saucepan.  I used turbinado because I was out of white sugar amd thought honey would overpower the cherries' flavor.

I cooked this for about 5 minutes, pushing on the cherries with a wooden spoon to help break their skins.

I pulled out my food mill and put in the finest strainer attachment.  This is because I hadn't pitted the cherries.

The food mill made quick work of the cherries.

Because I wasn't happy with the amount of juice that had been extracted, I pulled out a sieve and worked the rest of the pulp through that.  I'm not sure if it was worth the extra dirty dish.

I added the juice of a half a lemon, then put the mixture into a jar to cool and store.

Mix this with cold soda water to your taste.  The recipe suggested a ratio of 1:1, which I found overpowering.  I liked 1 part cherry syrup to about 3 parts water better.

The recipe also suggests using this syrup immediately. There's a reason for this: the cherries have a very high pectin content.  Once they cool and are refridgerated, the syrup becomes a jelly.  Try mixing cherry jelly into soda water and you'll find that it looks like blood clots.  Ew gross.  Just don't.... or stir it really well with a fork to break it up first.

A little yeast inspection

I wrote not too long ago about cooking with yeast.  In talking with people I had found out that many are intimidated by yeast. 

The fact is, if you screw it it, you can throw it away and start over.  Flour and yeast are relatively cheap.

Here are some photos of an in-progress bread to help you understand what's happening and why.

In the USA yeast is most commonly available in granules.  Each granule contains a tiny cluster of living bacteria.  I buy jars of yeast because I use it often enough to justify the quantity.  If you're just starting out with yeast, I suggest you try the packets before committing to a whole jar.

When hydrated with milk or water (see above photo at right), the granules will dissolve and expose the living bacteria, allowing them to start digesting the sugars in the mix and doing their yeast thing: creating gas.

Frankly, it's the nicest and most pleasant burping you'll ever encounter!

Most recipes will begin with having you "proof" your yeast.  This is when you put the yeast and sugar into the liquid to rehydrate it.  The mixture should get foamy after about 10 minutes.  I only proof my yeast when using a new jar.  It's not a necessary step if you are certain that your yeast is good.  Be sure to store your yeast in the fridge.

Yeast needs sugar in some form in order to do its thing.  I use honey in my breads because, well, I have a half gallon of it.  Note that when you cook with honey, you use half the amount of sugar called for in a recipe.  This is because honey is twice as dense and sweet as granulated sugar.

When you're ready to start mixing the dough, let your mixer do all the work for you.  I just dump the rest of my ingredients into the bowl, attach the dough hook, and let it crank away.  It won't look like it's going to come together, but I promise that it will.  Keep an eye on it to make sure that the dough isn't sticking to the side of the bowl.  It should be wound up around the hook like in the last pic.

After you've kneaded the dough (using the mixer), you need to let it rise.  If you want to freeze some or all of it, don't allow it to rise yet.  I often make several batches of pizza dough and this is the step where I freeze it in baggies.  The morning I want to make a pizza, I pull out a baggie and leave it on the counter.  When I come home from work, the dough has thawed and risen on its own.

Before you put the dough somewhere to rise, be sure to lube up the bowl.  Pull out the dough and either spray it with cooking oil or pour a little puddle of oil into the bowl.  Turn the dough over a few times to make sure that it's well coated.  If you don't do this, the dough will stick to the bowl and make removal an impossibility.

This is my secret weapon to a reliable rise every time, even during the winter.  It's a baking dish filled with boiling water.  The heat from the water warms up the oven to a perfect temp for the yeast to work quickly, and the humidity prevents a crust from forming on the bread.  You can even leave the water in the oven when you go to cook the bread.

That said, yeast will make a dough rise even in the fridge, albeit quite slowly.  The Mother Earth News no-knead bread that I linked from my last yeast post works on this very principle, as does the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.  My beef with the latter is that you have a ton of batter hanging out in the fridge.  Gene and I couldn't get through it all.

Check your dough after about an hour to see if it has doubled in size.  My risen dough looks rather smug, doesn't it?

I've been on a grilled flat bread kick lately.  It's a great summer recipe and is easy to transport.  Try it and you'll never look at your grill quite the same way again!  In fact, I need to go make some right now.

I hate my attic a little less

When I bought my house, I was single and had 2 cats.  I had recently broken up with the last of a string of Michaels (4 in a row, if you count the weird Brit who surprised me by sucking my toes on our 2nd date when my roommate left the room).  I was glad to be on my own.

Eight years later I still have the same 2 cats.  I'm also married (and NOT to a man named Michael), and have a dog and 9 chickens.  Gene and I are expecting a baby to join our merry little household in December.

On our first Valentine's Day together, Gene and I were watching "The Blues Brothers", which I'd never seen.  His cell phone rang and he left the room.  He was gone for over a half an hour.  When he returned, he was sobbing: his mother had suffered what would be a fatal heart attack.  As the only child of a single parent, he was responsible for decisions about her health care.  He flew from Seattle to Sacramento the next morning and ultimately made the difficult choice - alone - to remove her from life support.

It was a pivotal time in our relationship and clarified what we meant to one another.
He returned to Seattle after the funeral, then drove with his best friend back to Sacramento to pack his mother's apartment and bring back her possessions.

Those boxes sat in the garage of his rental house then migrated to my attic when we decided to cohabitate some time later.

Gene didn't have the heart to go through the boxes.  His mom, whom I never met, collected a variety of things.  Blue glass and anything with butterflies were her favorites.  Sorting through her prized possessions, even years later, was too difficult.  Over the years I've gone through some of her things and taken much of it to the Goodwill.  The only things Gene wanted preserved were his military gear, photos, and a couple of heirlooms.

Before Gene moved in, the only things I had in the attic were my wrapping paper supplies, Christmas decorations, luggage, and my spare dining room chairs.

In the years since Gene and I have lived in the same home, the attic has become a dumping ground.  First, there was all of his mom's stuff.  Then Gene's computer paraphernalia moved in and somehow started having babies.  One cable begat a dozen more; a replacement video card left behind detritus of foil pouches, cardboard boxes, tiny screws, CDs, bubble wrap. and mystery cords.  None of these items ever was discarded.  Hidden amongst all this were military gear, every paper and exam he ever produced in college, books, geeky gamer rules, and about half of our household screwdrivers (WTF?).  All of these items were carelessly strewn about on the floor.

My once neat attic looked like something from Hoarders, only without the dead animals, rat nests, or nagging adult children:

(I am really, really embarassed to show it to you, and can only do so because it no longer looks like this.)

The mere thought of the attic threw me into a sour, pissy, resentful mood.  In order to set up the nursery, the attic had to be cleaned so that the things from the spare bedroom/office could be sorted and moved to new locations.  Gene's out of town and I got rid of nearly everything.  I did save a teddy bear from Gene's mom's things for the baby.

After a day of toiling away - thank goodness temps were only in the 70s today - my attic now is respectable.  I wouldn't mind of you walked into it at this very moment.

Midway:

About 99% done:

Those boxes in the middle of the floor are all empty and waiting to be recycled.  I'll let Gene take care of that - I climbed the stairs to the attic at least a dozen times, which was utterly exhausting at 19 weeks pregnant.  Better now than at 29 weeks, I suppose.

My gift-wrapping things are now fully accessible.  The rolls are on an old wine rack I wasn't using.

(Don't you loooove the crappy paneling?)

Luggage, miltary gear, and various computer parts are now grouped, visible, and accessible.  I've gotta find a bin for the motorcycle gear.

Extra seating for our dining room table is - say it with me now - "accessible".  In the nooks behind them are all the photos, as well as most of the Christmas stuff.

I have no idea what's in the trunks.

Here's the view looking back toward the stairs.  And yes, this ceiling is quite low.  I'm 5'8" and my head hits the flat part of the ceiling.  It's not exactly the "third bedroom" the listing agent had promised.

And finally, all my preserving things are stored up here as well: canning jars, kettles, pressure canner, pickling crock, dehydrator, etc.  It's not as bad as it looks in the photo.  I should be able to sort, arrange, and organize all of this, plus what's piled in the corner you can't see, in less than an hour.

Here's what my kitchen looked like after I'd finished the attic:

My car was so full with donations that I couldn't see out the side or rear windows!  I didn't even try to take the recycling or trash: there was simply no more space.

Thank god it's all done.  I'm exhausted... but no longer pissy or resentful.

For Norway

To our Norwegian brethern we give our hearts to share the pain of loss, our tears to cry for your loved ones, and our shoulders to help bear the burden of your grief.

A scary story with a surprise ending

This story has nothing to do with sustainability, green-living, or raising local food.  In fact, the key players are men in their 50s who like to drive enormous gas-guzzling trucks up the sides of mountains.  It could have had a tragic ending but it didn't, thank goodness.  I'm sharing it because the prologue was so shockingly unexpected that I literally threw up when I heard it.

And that's a good thing.

Last Saturday Gene and I were are having dinner with friends in Redmond.  Their home is easily 45 miles north of us, so we don't get up to see them as often as we'd like.  They have a lovely yard, an incredible vegetable garden, and are fantastic hosts.  We adore them.

Around 8:15p Gene got a phone call from his boss, R.  R explained that he and his buddies has been out in the sticks with their massive trucks and jeeps, 4x-ing in the woods outside of Enumclaw (about 40 miles southeast of Redmond).  One of the guys, J, attempted a slope that was too steep and didn't make it.  His truck had subsquently rolled eight times and he was evacuated to a nearby hospital.

J's friends split up after the wreck.  Some went with him to the hospital while others stayed behind to extricate his truck.  One guy, C, exhausted himself getting his friend out of the truck, then getting the truck out of the woods.  He collapsed and was also evacuated to the hospital.

R was frantic: he needed us to come to Enumclaw because there were still some vehicles up in the woods and he needed help getting things back to town.

We left right away and arrived at the Enumclaw hospital near 10p.  Did I mention that Rosemary was with us?  Good thing that dog is good in the car!

Gene met up with R, whom we took to a grocery store for something to eat.  He's diabetic and in the frenzy of the day hadn't eaten or drank anything.  After that, we headed to the logging access road up in the mountains, about a half-hour's drive outside of Enumclaw, to fetch R's rig.  It was an uneventful ride and allowed R to come back to Earth after a harrowing day.  We dropped him off, made sure he was following us back to the road, and headed home.  We arrived at our house near midnight.

It was a long, tiring night, but one that was relatively unremarkable.

PROLOGUE

On Monday evening Gene came home from work with updates on the guys who had been hospitalized.  J, whose truck rolled, got a number of staples to close a head wound and had been discharged fairly quickly.  C had been kept overnight for observation because the doctors weren't immediately sure what was the cause of his collapse.

Gene: "So.... they figured out what was wrong with C."

Me: "Isn't he diabetic?  Is he OK?"

G: "Yes, he's also a cancer survivor."

Me: "Oh no!  Did he have a heart attack or something?"

(dramatic pause from Gene)

G:  "No, nothing like that.  He's fine actually.  After he made sure J was on the way to the hospital and had gotten J's truck out of the woods, he realized that his blood sugar was getting really low.  He didn't have anything to eat with him but he had noticed that J's truck had a crushed baggie of snacks in it.  So he ate it."

Me: (I'm terrible about trying to guess a story's end) "Oh crap, did he get food poisoning or have an allergic reaction to something??"

G: "Well, sorta.  C found J's brownies, about 3-4 of them, and ate all of them because he was so hungry..."

Me: (realization dawning...) "... nuh uh..."

G: "Sooo... yeah.  C collapsed because J has a medical dispensation to take marijuana to treat chronic back pain."

Me: (starting to chuckel)

G: "Not only that, but when J eats a brownie to relieve his pain, he only eats about a quarter of one.  C got about 12 or more doses of medical grade weed when he scarfed down all those brownies.  When he called my boss today, 48 hours after having eaten the brownies, he was still flying as high as a kite."

At this point, I was laughing so hard that I couldn't see straight.  I started to cough, a fun remnant of the cold I had back in May & June.  My coughing turned to hysterical hacking and wheezing.  I even threw up a little - sort of a "vurp" (vomit burp) - during one particularly bad coughing/laughing fit.  Our neighbors even heard me laughing and coughing!

Lesson learned: do not ever, EVER eat brownies that you find in your buddy's recently rolled truck. 

And if you do, for God's sake don't be a glutton.