Doing our part to help the retail sector this holiday season...

We pulled the plug on commercial television early in the first Clinton administration.  This was before marriage and kids, and it wasn’t because we had any particular moral or aesthetic objection; we just decided the money we were spending on the cable subscription could be put to much better use.  

So far the children are growing up without any serious psychological scars.

We’ve always kept a television set, though, tucked away in cellar with the old living room furniture, which we use regularly for watching movies and the occasional TV show on DVD.  (Huge Big Bang Theory fans.  Huge.  And that whole Netflix on demand thing through the Wii?  Brilliant.)

And a while back we got to thinking that it was time upgrade the old set.  Current sale prices convinced us to make said upgrade the Christmas “family gift.”

So yesterday we loaded everyone into the truck and drove to Augusta to do some comparison shopping, and we came home with a new 55” LED HDTV, which is an vast improvement over the old set in about four hundred sixty-seven ways.  

Getting the thing up and running - between the wall-mounting device, the new Blu-ray player, the A/V receiver and surround sound, the Wii, the Interweb – was kind of an event.  You know something is complicated when Himself has to spend two hours on the phone with tech support; that was last night, and he’s still at it down there, but I think he’s almost done.  

It’s a school night but we might have to watch a movie anyway…

Simplest appetizer on the planet

My mother-in-law used to make this.  Very popular and festive, but absolutely no work...

Shrimp spread

8 oz cream cheese
1 8-oz jar cocktail sauce
1 7-oz can shrimp, drained

Put the cream cheese on a small rimmed plate.  Dump the cocktail sauce on top of the cream cheese.  Dump the shrimp on top of the cocktail sauce.  Serve with crackers.

Passing the torch

Lot been going on the last few days, getting ready to host Thanksgiving.  The type of cleaning that I should do more regularly (dusting the curtain rods, Windexing the chandelier bulbs, mopping underneath the sofa), and of course planning a meal for a couple dozen people.  There were spreadsheets involved.  ‘Nuff said.

This is a bittersweet experience for me.  Thanksgiving has always been my mother’s holiday.  When I was growing up, she would always pull off an incredible Thanksgiving dinner – and when we were living god knows where away from family, which was most of my childhood, Thanksgiving was a celebration of friendship, because the people who joined us around the twelve-foot walnut table were a collection of folks who didn’t have anywhere else to go – some of whom we knew better than others, but all of whom were grateful for a good meal and the company.  

This year, though, she finally admitted she couldn’t do it.  Couldn’t get her tiny house ready to pack in all those people and manage the logistics of a meal that runs to twelve dishes, plus appetizers and pies.  The goddamn cancer has sapped too much of her strength. 

So have it here, I said.  We have the room.  I do know how to cook.  I started suggesting this some weeks ago but it took her a while to realize she really did need to pass the torch.  

But realize she did, and then she devoted her not-inconsiderable force of will to helping.   

There were twenty-two of us around the table – four generations, from my grandmother down to my three-year-old first cousin once removed.    

Everyone brought food.  There were two turkeys, ham, mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, turnips, squash, sweet potatoes, peas & pearl onions, green bean casserole, and cranberry sauce, and seven kinds of pie.  The battalion of aunts did their usual blink-and-you-miss-it kitchen cleanup afterward.    

It was a lovely event.

My house is very clean.

And I have three whole days off to recover. 

Saturday night supper

I think our dour New England forebears must have had some sense of humor, to come up with a tradition of serving baked beans for Saturday supper.  

Sure, I know that dried beans and salt pork were year-round staples, I understand that it was economical and nutritious, I get the whole serve-leftovers-for-Sunday-breakfast thing ensured the Puritan housewife was in compliance with the fourth commandment.  

But how could there not have been a bit of wry fun derived from packing into a small sanctuary for a three-hour church service the morning after everyone had eaten a meal consisting primarily of beans?  Particularly if any of the congregants were thirteen-year-old boys?



Baked beans & brown bread



Biscuits or brown bread – that dense, dark, steamed whole grain bread – traditionally accompanied the beans, and somewhere along the line we started serving them with hot dogs.  Anyone who is over sixty years of age and grew up around here can tell you about having beans and franks every Saturday night.  



And the tradition is still very much alive and well, though for most of us it is no longer weekly fare.  Saturday night bean suppers are a popular community event.  Diners of a certain variety still offer baked beans – and codfish cakes – on their breakfast menus.  

Saturday night supper

 Though there are any number of decent canned varieties available, when we make this, which we do a couple times a year and yes, it’s always on a Saturday night, we do it the old-fashioned way.  Both the beans and the brown bread take a bit of planning ahead, some specialty equipment and several hours to cook, but are easy to put together and require scant attention. 

Baked beans

1 lb. navy beans, sorted and rinsed

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 lb. salt pork

1 large yellow onion

1/4 cup dark unsulphured molasses

1 teaspoon dried mustard

1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

1/4 cup packed brown sugar

1 cup hot water, plus additional

Salt & pepper

Soak the beans overnight, then drain, cover with ample water, stir in the baking soda, and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes.  Drain.



The usual suspects - onions, salt pork, beans & molasses



 While the beans simmer, peel and slice the onion and dice the salt pork (discard the rind).  Combine the molasses, dried mustard, cider vinegar, brown sugar, water, salt and pepper; stir to dissolve everything.  Preheat the oven to 300. 

In a bean pot, make three layers of beans/onion/salt pork (using 1/3 of each ingredient for each layer) – ending with salt pork on top. 

Pour the molasses mixture over the beans and add additional water to just cover the beans – not too wet.  Put on the lid and tuck into the oven for about four hours.  Stir it occasionally, and keep an eye on the moisture level to keep it from drying out.  I’ve never had to add additional water but I always check.



Four hours later...



The beans will cook to a silken tenderness, the sauce cooks down to a rich brown, and the salt pork and onions melt into the beans.  


We aren’t churched people so we keep the side effects within our own four walls.

Brown bread

1 cup cornmeal

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup rye flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

¾ cup dark unsulphured molasses

2 cups plain whole-milk yogurt

1 cup dark raisins

Mix together the dry ingredients ...

... then add the molasses, yogurt and raisins; stir to blend.  

Pour into two well-greased 1-qt. pudding molds (the kind with a lid – I’ve never had luck with the coffee-can-and-tin-foil method).

Secure the lids.  

Place in stock pots with a cake rack in the bottom (a few balls of tin foil can work, or a handful of stainless steel forks – the idea is to keep the pudding mold from resting directly on the bottom of the pot).  

Add boiling water to come about halfway up the sides of the molds and cover.  Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer about 2 ½ hours.  Check the water level periodically to make sure it isn’t drying out.

Remove the pudding molds from the water bath and allow to cool slightly.  Remove lids and unmold the brown bread.  Slice and serve immediately with plenty of butter.

Leftovers are great for breakfast and also freeze well.

Thanksgiving Subterfuge

My 89-year-old grandmother is a teetotaler of the strictest Calvinist variety.  She is also one of those people blessed with the ability to simply not see that which she does not wish to be true. 

                                            

Therefore, not only does she herself not drink, but she is quite convinced that no one else in the family does either.

And – this is the thing that just slays me – we all play along.  So in order to allow Grandmother to remain blissfully oblivious and the rest of us to enjoy our Beaujolais Nouveau, Thanksgiving preparations involve some tactical planning.  My mother, who hosted Thanksgiving dinner for many years, developed this strategy which I will employ next week:

Set up two beverage stations:  one which we show to the assembled old people in denial and one for the rest of us. 

The first one is clearly visible and easily accessible; the second one is somewhere unobtrusive, preferably with sufficient physical obstructions – stairs or dog gates are good – to discourage old people in denial from inadvertently stumbling upon it. 

The first one showcases cranberry juice, and the second one the wine. 

Both stations are equipped with decorative paper cups, but of different designs (thus minimizing the chances that any of us inadvertently grabs the wrong type of beverage).  Cranberry juice and wine in paper cups appear sufficiently alike to maintain our little fiction.

Everyone’s happy except the beer drinkers.

Keg’s down cellar in the fridge.  Here’s a coffee mug.

Food drive

The place where I work employs about 65 people.  In the way that is peculiar to Mainers, it seems that no matter how serious our internal squabbles (and we crank out some doozies), when it comes time to rally for something, we are unstoppable.

Every year this time we have a food drive for the local food pantry.  The combination of a good cause and a little healthy competition brings out the best in us, and we usually manage to come up with a little over a ton of food.

This year I threw out a challenge to my direct reports – I said whatever poundage of food they contributed, I would bring in double.

They’ve just given me their totals.  I think these people have it in for me.

It’s all right.  It’s for a good cause. 

And I will remember this when I do their performance evaluations next month.

Now I’m off to the grocery store. 

Pointless exercise

I purged the refrigerator today – just found out we’re hosting Thanksgiving for the extended family and assorted random old people that my grandmother collects (at least 18 guests, possibly as many as 26), and this is one of those things that needs to be done along with blacking the wood stove and vacuuming out the registers.

By “purge” I mean not just getting rid of the fuzzy science experiments in the back of the bottom crisper drawer.  I’m actually not bad at keeping ahead of leftovers.

No.  By “purge” I mean hauling out, sorting, consolidating, coming to terms with, discarding and/or keeping everything else that’s in there.  By the time I got everything pulled out and organized into rough categories, of the approximately quarter of an acre of counterspace in this kitchen, two-thirds of it was covered by jars, bottles and containers of stuff.

This is what went back into the fridge.  This is embarrassing.

Mustards:

Chinese hot

Dijon

Grainy Dijon

Gulden’s Spicy Brown

Horseradish

Jalapeno

Chipotle

Sweet hot

Raye’s Old World Gourmet

Hot sauces:

Louisiana style

Original Tabasco

Habanero Tabasco

Jalapeno Tabasco

Cholula Original

Cholula Chipotle

Asian sauces:

Teriayaki

Black bean

Sambal oelek

Plum sauce

Hoisin sauce

Duck sauce

Fish sauce

Oyster sauce

Red curry paste

Green curry paste

Salad dressings:

Chipotle ranch

Caesar

Chipotle cheddar

Italian

French vinaigrette

Two kinds of bleu cheese

Buttermilk ranch

Russian

Thousand Island

Jams & preserves (which we DO NOT USE EVER):

Grape jam

Grape gelly

Strawberry preserves

Strawberry jam

Pomegranate jelly

Blueberry spread

Pear jam

Apple butter

Ginger preserves

There were also six kinds of ice cream topping, assorted pickles and a number of random sauces and condiments.  

My fridge is still full, but at least it’s squeaky clean and organized now….  

Yamdankee's baked potatoes with creamed fish

In my great-great-grandmother’s day, cod was unimaginably plentiful and easily preserved by salt-curing, so it was a year-round dietary staple.  Potatoes grew reliably in our acidic soil and also kept well over the winter.

Thus were potatoes topped with a thick salt-cod cream sauce a fairly common cold-weather supper – most definitely not low-fat or low-calorie, but back then it was about keeping bellies as warm and full as possible. 

The weather is turning here, with frosty evenings that call for a warm fire and old-fashioned comfort foods.  Some leftover CSF pollock was at hand last night and made a nice substitute for cod in my version of this dish.   

(Apologies to my great-great-grandmother for the inclusion of cayenne.  I believe cayenne was one of the things she foreswore when she signed the WCTU pledge.)

  (more bad food photography)

Yamdankee’s baked potatoes with creamed fish

3 cups whole milk

1 small onion, diced fine

1 tablespoon parsley flakes

½ teaspoon garlic powder

Salt & pepper to taste

1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 bay leaf

1 ½ lb. cod or other thick white fish, cooked, cooled & flaked (one good-sized fillet should do it)

2 eggs

6 slices bacon

¼ cup butter or margarine

¼ cup all-purpose flour

4 baked potatoes

In a large saucepan, combine the milk, onion, parsley, garlic powder, cayenne, bay leaf and salt & pepper to taste.  Simmer for ½ hour or until onion is soft. 

Meanwhile, hard-boil and shred the eggs.  Cook and crumble the bacon.

In separate saucepan, melt the butter over low heat and whisk in the flour.  Cook until bubbly; do not brown.  Gradually stir a little of the hot milk mixture into the roux until it’s of blendable consistency, then add it to the hot milk mixture and whisk to combine; continue stirring over medium heat until thickened.  Add the fish and shredded eggs; heat through. 

Spoon sauce over hot baked potatoes and top with crumbled bacon.

Serves 4 very generously.

Unrouxly

Making roux bugs me.  I spend the half hour or so stirring and thinking of all the things around the house that are not being attended to because I am stirring.  Also that it is a half hour or so of my life that I will never, ever get back.

A recent gumbo test recipe from Cook’s Illustrated included an intriguingly different method:  it’s baked, not stirred.  No kidding. 

This is now my go-to roux. 

                                                                                 

·     Adjust oven rack to lowest position and heat oven to 350º.

·     In a Dutch oven over medium heat, toast ¾ cup flour, stirring constantly, until it’s just beginning to brown.  This takes about five minutes and when it happens, it happens quick, so you have to watch it like a hawk.

·     Remove from heat and whisk in ½ cup vegetable oil until smooth.

·     Cover, put it in the oven, and bake “until mixture smells toasty and is the color of an old penny” – 45 minutes.  Remove from the oven.

From here, you can either:

·     Gradually whisk liquid from a soup or stew into this, until it’s thick but blendable, then add it back into your stew pot; or

·     Return to stovetop, whisk to combine, sauté onions/carrots/celery etc. right in the roux, and continue to build your stew from there.

Aunt Fanny (and her Italian Sandwiches)

Frances Butler Sherer was my maternal grandmother’s maternal grandfather’s brother’s second wife. 

Got that?

She had no children, was widowed in 1946, never remarried, and lived to be 105.  I was in high school when she died. 

When my mother was a girl, growing up as one of five kids (or more, depending on what poor unfortunates her parents had taken in that week), Aunt Fanny spent a lot of time helping my grandmother with the housework and cooking. 

                                                       

She was a family institution and is very much a presence, to this day.  Everyone remembers how she would put a bit of vinegar into an almost-empty catsup bottle to stretch it.  And her sayings – like “use your head to save your heels.”  And her recipes.

Hereabouts we have a tradition of “Italians” – these are small sandwiches of meat and vegetables on a soft white roll, and bear little resemblance to anything actually from Italy, but fifty years ago salami was exotic and we had to call them something. 

This is how Aunt Fanny made Italian sandwiches.  She didn’t have a recipe per se; she said you just had to remember that there are seven ingredients. 

(I can remember that there are seven ingredients, but I can rarely remember what they all are.  It’s like trying to name the Von Trapp kids or the damn dwarves.)

Aunt Fanny’s Italian Sandwiches

Sliced salami

Sliced Provolone cheese

Bell pepper

Red or sweet onion

Tomatoes

Whole dill pickles

Iceberg lettuce

Top-sliced frankfurter rolls

Salad oil

Salt & pepper

Cut the salami and cheese into strips.  Thinly slice the pepper, onion, and tomato; slice the pickles lengthwise.  Tear the lettuce into manageable strips. 

Put a little bit of everything into the frankfurter rolls.  Drizzle with oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. 

The best bread evah

I don't have the patience of a food stylist, sorry.  Many people do it much better.  But you get the idea.  This is the bread I made yesterday, requested specifically by the friends we visited for dinner.

We make a lot a lot a lot of bread, usually of the French/Italian peasant free-form variety - I have maybe three or four recipes that I turn to regularly. 

The New York Times' 2006 no-knead bread recipe is a favorite:  easy peasy (as long as I can plan a day ahead), no fuss, and consistently produces the kind of loaf that prompts questions about which bakery I bought it from.

I've used all-purpose flour and bread flour with equal success, but for the ultimate rusticity (is that a word?) I substitute half a cup of white whole wheat flour for the white, and throw in a pinch of ascorbic acid.  The antique cast iron Dutch oven serves admirably for baking.

Our "friends" kept the half of the loaf we didn't finish last night, darn them.

Wondering

During last weekend’s dance shoe ordering fiasco, I discovered that this…

...is now within half a shoe size of me.

When the hell did that happen?

Shameless Plug: Matinicus

Matinicus is an island about 22 miles off of Rockland.  It’s remote to the point of frequent inaccessibility and the climate is brutal, unless 60-knot winds and 20-foot seas are your thing.  Only a few dozen residents have the intestinal fortitude to stick it out year-round. 

The place has quite a reputation.  It’s been in the news most recently because of a flare-up of lobster wars.

Eva Murray went out there in 1987 on a one-year teaching contract and has lived there ever since. 

(It is said there are two things which never come back from Matinicus:  a piece of lumber and a woman.)

For a number of years, Ms. Murray’s columns about life on Matinicus (everything except the lobster wars) have appeared in local publications.  She is insightful, sometimes blunt, frequently funny, and always honest. 

A lot of her writing gently prods this dichotomy:  In order to survive in a place as isolated and harsh as Matinicus, the same people who drill holes in each others’ lobster boats also have to pull together and work (sometimes literally shoulder to shoulder) for the good of the community. 

It’s fascinating.

Ms. Murray has (finally) published a collection of her columns (Well Out to Sea:  Year Round on Matinicus Island).  It’s a candid look at what is required, mostly behind the scenes, of everyone who lives out there.  Read it, and be prepared to feel inadequate and just a teensy bit spoiled.

Movie Night

Is it just me, or is one of the greatest joys of parenting introducing your kids to all of the movies and TV shows that you yourself loved in the ’80s?  Behold the magic of DVDs and Internet streaming, which allow one to inflict all sorts of classic programming on one’s offspring.  Family movie night at our house is a blast, and not just because for once everyone is allowed to eat dinner in front of the TV.

Me:  “Okay, guys, the deal here is the car actually talks and drives itself.  Isn’t that cool?”

Them:  “They don’t make Pontiacs anymo–  whoa, that’s, like, an analog display on the dashboard.”

Me:  “Don’t think about that.  It was really high tech 25 years ago.”

Them:  “Hey, isn’t that the old dude that we saw eating a burger drunk on YouTube?”

Me:  “Did I mention the car talks?”

Them:  “Here’s another glass of wine, Mom.  Can we play with the Wii now?”

Seriously, they’re good sports and some of my favorites have become their favorites as well.  So now I have good excuse to watch them.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Halloween at 44ºN

The people who come up with Halloween costumes evidently all live in very warm places. 

Diaphanous fairy gowns and flimsy little Power Ranger bodysuits are simply not designed to protect small children from temperatures which, fairly reliably on late October evenings in Maine, hover around the freezing mark. 

Every year we face the same challenge:  Convince the children to trick-or-treat in Sasquatch suits.

(“No, mommy, noooooooo!”)

This year Thing One decided he’d be just as happy buying himself a bag of candy and staying home, so we only had one potential frostbite situation.

Thing Two put a heavy black cape over a thick sweater and long black skirt – long johns underneath, and gloves, of course – and topped it with a fun witch hat for a decidedly Professor McGonagall look.  Thus did she, lone among the herd of fifth-grade girls with whom she foraged, stay toasty warm.

Dance shoes

Thing Two has outgrown her dance shoes. 

Our children’s above-average height combined with extreme slenderness presents a challenge when it comes to fitting shoes and clothes.  The dance teacher (a wonderful instructor and otherwise very patient and kind human being) has in fact thrown up her hands when it comes to finding dance shoes for Two.  So I am on my own. 

We have lots of things locally but a dance outfitter is not among them.  I must utilize the Interweb.

Now, street shoe sizing bears little to no resemblance to dance shoe sizing.  Finding the correct fit requires one first to convert the child’s street size to an adult street size through a complex mathematical calculation which varies according to the manufacturer. 

Next one either adds or subtracts sizes depending on how each brand’s size compares to street size. 

And of course it works differently for ballet and tap, so I get to go through this exercise twice. 

Two’s aforementioned aspect ratio complicates this even further.  We can easily find shoes of adequate length, but they are designed for feet twice the circumference of hers.

Thus it becomes so complex that it requires a NASA engineer to figure it out, but we don’t have those locally either.

What I have ordered is Bloch women’s size 4 Narrow split sole ballet shoe with drawstrings and elastics that hopefully will hold it in place securely enough that she won’t fall flat on her face executing her next pirouette, and a Sansha women’s size 9 (!) Medium T-split lace-up tap shoe. 

They will arrive later this week, whereupon we will try them on, shake our heads, send them back, and start over again.

Is it too early for a glass of wine?