food and cooking

A Mess

Thursday 13 June 2019 | 0 Comments

I've been working to clean out our basement this week. Because of some shoddy renovation work -- well, shoddy cleanup -- we had a fair amount of concrete dust coating many things as well as the usual chaos that comes with leaving your basement to grow its on labyrinth of apathetic misplacement of tools and storage bins for four years.

Monday and Tuesday I worked on the metal and wood storage shelves that hold our plastic storage bins filled with camping items, old photographs, clothes the Boy has not yet grown into, and mysterious "why do we still have that?" items. Wednesday was the work bench as well as a few more shelves. (Everything takes so long because each item -- every single one -- needs to be wiped down, and the shelves took a long time because I moved them to one location temporarily to clean them and then had to move them back.)

Today, I began working on the other half of the room and final touches to the work bench. The after picture, as a result of not having time to put everything back in its place, looks worse than the before picture above.

In order to clean a mess, we often have to make one first. It's truism for most things in life, I think, but I often forget it. I want things to move ahead without ever moving back; I want lesson plans to come out perfect the first time; I want first drafts to be good enough to be final drafts; I want our kids to perfect things instantly. It's in the mess that we figure things out, though, and making a masterpiece always involves a mess beforehand.

I forget that when I come into the kitchen as K is cooking, though. I tend to clean things as I go along; K, not so much. The kitchen is a complete wreck when she's done cooking. Yet out of that mess comes little slices and ladles-full of perfection.

Thanksgiving 2018

Thursday 22 November 2018 | 0 Comments

The day began with the relatively new Thanksgiving tradition: K and L went to Mass at the church we used to attend (which we still attend once a month for Polish mass, said now for a couple of years in English by a Columbian priest) for the parish's special Thanksgiving Mass. The choir sings portions of the Mass in English, portions in Spanish, portions in Polish, and portions in Tagalog. As they do for any special Mass, the girls dressed in traditional Polish Highlander clothes.

While the girls were gone, the Boy continued with his help.

We prepared the turkey, made the requisite casserole, made the dressing, cooked the giblet gravy, and then baked it all. Except for the gravy.

We packed everything up and headed over to Nana's and Papa's for a quiet late lunch/early dinner. Everyone said it was delicious, but I wasn't entirely satisfied with what I delivered.

The dressing was a disaster: too much liquid. I forgot to figure the fact that I'd added orange wedges and cranberries, which released a ridiculous amount of liquid.
The cranberry sauce was a bit too sour for my taste. I'd cut the recipe's sugar requirement by about 30%, thinking, "American recipes are always too sweet." Perhaps not. It wasn't as much of a failure as the dressing, but I've made better.
The turkey probably could have cooked a bit longer. It was done, but it clung to the bone just a bit too much. A half an hour more would have made it better, I think, without overdoing it.
The syrup for the baklava was just a touch too thick. It didn't entirely absorb into the fillo dough -- at least not like I like it. It wasn't bad, perse, but it could have been just a little better.

Still, we're always a little too hard on ourselves. K pointed out that we could simply bake the dressing a little longer tomorrow. The cranberry sauce was perfect for her. The kids devoured the turkey. And even I can't really complain about the baklava. I just wanted a fourth bullet point for that list for some reason.

Dinner

Saturday 06 October 2018 | 0 Comments

Baking for the Kids

Sunday 28 January 2018 | 0 Comments

Theodor Seuss Geisel said it best:

The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
All [this] cold, cold, wet day.

We were stuck in the house all day. Rain, rain, rain. The Boy entertained himself with making fans through most of the afternoon.

In the evening, the Girl made molassas cookies. The recipe came from a book about the Great Depression she's reading in class, and she's been keen on making them all week. Of course E wanted to help, but what is true for many things is doubly true for baking: his help doesn't.

The Girl, though, has reached a point that she needs little to no help when baking. With experience comes confidence.

"Maybe I could take some to school tomorrow," she chimed in the midst of the baking. K emailed her teacher quickly, and L got the go-ahead.

So tomorrow she'll be taking one cookie each -- twenty-four total -- for her classmates.

The thoughtfulness of that gesture -- a proud little moment for us.

Solo Baking

Monday 15 January 2018 | 0 Comments

We made chocolate chip muffins last Monday during our unexpected snow day. I helped a bit -- not a lot, but a good bit, especially in the middle.

Today, the Girl decided she wanted to make muffins again, this time vanilla. She found the recipe online, checked the ingredients, made a shopping list, called K to see if she needed us to pick anything up for her while we were at the store, convinced me to go (didn't take much), mixed, poured, baked, and cleaned up after herself.

This is not to say there weren't moments of frustration. It turns out she didn't check eggs closely enough, a fact we discovered after we returned from the store. No problem: she went to the neighbors and asked for an egg, taking them some muffins when they were done.

She wanted to go to the store by herself, to walk down to the CVS about a half-mile down the street, but that was a bit much. Still, all these signs of growing up...

Snowless Snow Day

Monday 08 January 2018 | 0 Comments

We haven't really tried to force the Girl, as she gets older, to learn how to cook. She's learned how to clean her room, to dust, to wash a window, to clean the hardwood floors in our house, but cooking, we just didn't really make her. I don't know about K, but I figured that she'll learn when she's interested. That's how it was with me. Still, as she nears middle school, we've been talking about how, at the very least, she needs to begin making her own lunch for the day.

This weekend, she decided she wanted to make chocolate chip muffins. She didn't want help other than buying the ingredients and going over the recipe with her. The rest, she wanted to do. So when we went to bed last night, it was with the plan of making muffins in the afternoon after school.

Little did we know that school had already been canceled in anticipation of a front that was supposed to bring ice and freezing rain but never really materialized. We woke up, went through our normal morning routine, and somehow, though the local news was on, missed that Greenville County Schools had canceled everything for the day. We found out when L and I arrived at her school only to find an empty parking lot. "It can't be a two-hour delay," I thought, "because there would be some cars there. Someone would be there." We returned home to find that there was no school, so afternoon muffins became morning muffins.

She began cooking, and I, still not feeling 100%, took the opportunity to lie down for a while. I went to the kitchen occasionally to check on the progress, but overall, she seemed to be doing well, with a little help from the Boy. His help with her was much like his help with anyone: only slightly helpful, often less than helpful, but always eager.

L called me in to help her when she was filling the muffin forms. I looked at the dough and had my doubts.

"Did you follow the instructions very closely?" I asked.

"Yes," she assured.

"And you mixed this very well?" I asked, wondering how she could have done it without using the mixer. It was thick and not easily budged: it would have been a nightmare to do it by hand.

"Yes."

I took a spatula and found most of the sugar and a good bit of the flour still sitting at the base of the mixing bowl, untouched.

"Oh," she laughed.

We threw it in the mixer, combined the ingredients thoroughly, and got put everything in the muffin forms.

"Now put it in the oven," I said.

"Me?!"

The Girl doesn't deal with heat well. Things that seem only lukewarm to K and me threaten to scald her, to send her to the emergency room with third-degree burns. But with a little encouragement, she was able to open the door, put the pan in, and pull it back out in twenty minutes when the buzzer went off.

And the result? For a first attempt, utterly amazing. For any attempt, really very good. Moist, chocolatey, and perfect. A hit for the whole family.

The upshot of this: the Girl was eager to cook again. When it was dinner time, she wanted to learn to make the rice. Instead of just plain old rice, though, I taught her to cook a quick and easy risotto. After looking through a cookbook and finding a recipe for lemony broiled chicken, she's ready to cook a full dinner next week.

And the rain and ice that shut down schools? Nothing. The ground was dry until early afternoon. A district spokeswoman explained it to a local news outlet:

"When an alert of that magnitude is issued we have to consider the problems it would present not only for our bus riders, but also car riders, including high school drivers, who travel over bridges and on curvy roads," Brotherton said. "We considered the circumstances that occurred in Asheville on December 31st when even small amounts of fog and drizzle quickly turned to ice on roadways and led to treacherous road conditions and multiple wrecks. After a week of freezing temperatures and already cold roads, asking parents, students and employees to travel in the predicted conditions was not a risk we were willing to take. Safety always comes first."

It's not the first time something like this has happened; it won't be the last. But we'll always make the most of such days.

Thanksgiving 2017

Thursday 23 November 2017 | 0 Comments

12:50

Three hours in the kitchen yesterday morning; five hours in the kitchen this morning; I've listened to over half of Paul Auster's Sunset Park in the meantime. (Does he ever write anything that doesn't have a writer in it? I love his style, but sometimes I get the feeling I'm just reading variations on his autobiography. This one, so far, has no connection to Paris.) I'm thankful that it's almost done. The turkey is in the oven; the dressing is cooling; the soup and cranberry sauce (this year stewed spiced chai with a bit of bourbon as an experiment) sit in the refrigerator; the broccoli casserole (yes, there simply must be a casserole or else it's not Thanksgiving) is ready to go in the oven; the giblet gravy is almost ready. It's time for a cup of coffee, a pipe of tobacco (after years of smoking English and Virginia/Perique blends almost exclusively, I've begun exploring burley-based blends--it's like smoking a pipe again for the first time), and some quiet.

It's been a crazy morning: the dog, less than twenty-four hours after being spayed, has returned to normal energy levels and is highly irritated about being stuck inside with an Elizabethan collar on. The Boy wanted to help, of course, but the difference now is that he's able actually to help. He broke the dried bread into chunks for the dressing; he crushed crackers and mixed the liquid components for the casserole; he willingly taste-tested the pumpkin pie baklava; he kept an eye on everything. How did I listen to a story and talk to the Boy? Simple: his fits of helping merely punctuated his playing.

10:24

It's always the same -- Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, you spend all that time cooking and it's over before you know it. Even when you slow down, even when you're mindful, even when you want to stretch things out, you can't.

You sit and listen to the Boy's stories, plow through the food, and it's done. Of course, when you compare the amount of prep to the time eating, even two hours would be "plowing through." But you can't complain: people aren't eager to eat food that tastes mediocre at best, so I take it as a complement.

And go for a meandering walk afterward, the first quarter of it with the family. The rest head back because the poor dog, with her radar hat on, probably shouldn't be out too long.