Birthday Bounty

I am 26 now, as of last Friday.

And a glorious day it was. 

Friday has always been my favorite day of the week.

I have been thinking about the placement of birthdays, and I am glad to have my birthday at the beginning of the year. 

Probably each month has its benefits, but January has a crisp newness that is bigger than me. I like that. Plus, now that I am old enough to forget how old I am, being born at the beginning of the year makes it easier to calculate, which is probably why most of Asia traditionally adds a year to their age on the Chinese New Year regardless of their month of birth.  (Happy Year of the Dragon by the way.)

Nathanael was the crafter of almost all of the things that made my birthday so fantastic.

The main thing I created was the wonderful brightly colored outfit that is not shown here...but probably would have landed me a part as one of the Wizard of Oz munchkins back in the day just so that Technicolor triumph could have been fully appreciated. Though, Nathanael did help me decide that it was not too ridiculous for work...being that it was Friday and all.

Isn't this wrapping job fun? 

Newspaper never looked so fine.

Nathanael received some restaurant recommendations from people in his office, but he decided that he could make a more delectable meal at home (and without spending our using up all of our money). So, while I relaxed in the living room reading some junior fiction, he created a mystery dinner masterpiece. The first course, was beer cheese soup fit for any Wisconsin palate.

Next was a salad of romaine lettuce, pecans, craisins, and apple poppy seed dressing. 

Next, because our kitchen is small, he brought these into the living room to cool, which should have probably keyed me in on the main course, but I was still oblivious...

to the seasoned hamburgers sizzling away.

But once I figured it out I was pretty excited about both the burgers, and the toppings; red wine caramelized onions, slices of avocado, and shoe string potato chips for a bit of crunch.

I went to bed stuffed to the top.

Then, the next morning, my second day of 26, Nathanael took me out for a mystery breakfast. I was a little worried he was taking me to ihop (I love waffles, but I just wasn't in the mood for that particular atomosphere). Not only was I not disappointed, but I was quite excited. He brought me to a beignet shop. The setting of which is more like a European cafe. 

(Taking more pictures of the two of us together is my one New Year's resolution. As you can see, it is in its early stages. Also, those are the clothes we are wearing indoors and out these days.)

Ah beignets.

If you haven't tried them...

well...

get yourself down here to Louisiana to visit us!

Oatcake Fiction

 
    Nathanael and I enjoy reading to each other in the evening while dishes are being washed or pecans being cracked. Most of the time the book captivates us enough that we find other times to read, like having one person brush their teeth at a time, which is one of the current methods as we read Sir Gibbie by George MacDonald. It is best if there is some activity going on, because if we choose to read while just sitting, especially before bed, Nathanael needs to watch me carefully to make sure I am legitimately awake...actually even if I am the one reading, I may in fact be sleeping. During graduate school I read an entire chapter of Harry Potter to my roommate Lucy while she knitted, and despite the pages having been full of excitement I could not recall a single thing that had happened once I stood up to get ready for bed.
     Most of the books we read together are classic literature, and we especially enjoy the unabridged works of George MacDonald. His novels are the epitome of fiction which does not leave your brain to sit idly by, but engages it to play with philosophy, expand vocabulary, and envision situations and scenes rich with detail and feeling. I know some people who only read non-fiction, but I think they would appreciate a book such as Sir Gibbie, The Castle Warlock or Malcolm as evidence that edifying truth can often be more poignantly delivered through substantial fiction than through biography or historical reflection (though no author conveys the whole truth of course; some are much closer than others).

A friend gave us a neat little notebook where we record the books
we've read and movies we've watched...with ratings of course.

 
     Since George MacDonald was Scottish, his books are mostly set in Scotland with characters who enjoy Scottish fare, and quite often oatcakes. Nathanael would probably have made a good Scotsman back in the day. Of the 30% of Nathanael that is not water, about 60% is oats. We enjoy our oats in many forms around here. We nearly always have hot cereal, often have granola around for a snack, and sometimes we sprinkle oats into the crackers or sour dough bread. And whenever Nathanael needs to pack a lunch and we have no bread or convenient eaten-cold foods, he packs oatcakes and goes merrily on his way. Oatcakes are a plain food, and very healthy tasting, which I enjoy and Nathanael could eat every day. They're not junk food. I think they are an excellent medium for butter and jams, or savory spreads, but Nathanael delights in them just as they are with their roasted oat essence as the main attraction.

Scottish Oatcakes
from A Feast of Scotland by Janet Warren
1 1/3 cups Old Fashioned Rolled Oats
1/4 tsp baking soda
a pinch of salt
1 Tablespoon of Butter or Lard (Oil would probably work out alright)
6 Tbs hot water (approximately)
A bit of flour to dust the rolling surface; any variety will do.

1. Mix the oats, soda, and salt together.
2. Melt butter and pour into the center, then add enough water to make a stiff dough. Stir briefly with a wooden spoon.
3. Turn the dough onto a flour dusted surface and knead well. Divide in half, and roll each into an 8-inch circle about a quarter of an inch thick.
4. Cook the oatcakes in a dry, heavy based frying pan. They should take about 3 minutes on each side and be golden brown and slightly crisp. Alternatively they can be baked at 325F (160C) for about 30 minutes.
Serve with butter, honey and marmalade for breakfast or with soup and cheese for lunch.



Do you read to each other in your family (or with your roommates)?
What's on your summer reading list?
I would love some good recommendations! (And yes, we read non-fiction too!)

Red: Grapefruit Cranberry Marmalade

I have always loved grapefruits. But grapefruits also play a small part in our love story, so Nathanael and I enjoy them a little bit extra. 

Remember how the first installment of the story ended with me not jumping to conclusions, and then Nathanael calling my Dad? That was the beginning of the fall semester of my senior year of college, and in my strong efforts to not jump to conclusions about him liking me or not, I hadn't mentioned Nathanael or his letters to anyone...so my Dad didn't actually know he existed until he called that day and asked to pursue me in a relationship headed the direction of marriage. Needless to say, my Dad was a little surprised. He told him he'd get back to him.

Red: Fruit Bowl Rejects

 I love fruit, I really do, but if you stayed with us for a few days or weeks you might notice that there are always one or two runt fruit neglected in the fruit bowl. I am not sure how it happens, and it doesn't seem to be caused by the initial appearance of the fruit, but slowly, after an apple or pear has been sitting just longer than it should have, both of us lose all desire to eat the given fruit and the remaining ones sit until they're ugly.
My solution to this problem is to cook that fruit! Usually into a breakfast food. In the past couple of weeks our hot cereal has contained both spiced apples and pears, and in the past I have put an old apple or two into a soup with wonderful reviews from tasters. Bananas usually end up in bread or peeled, in the freezer, waiting to become smoothies.
   The last time I had extra granny smith apples around, however, I really wanted to do something memorable and scrumptious, so my vote was muffins. And cranberries. I have had a magnetic attraction to cranberries all my life, and I just love eating them any way I can....as you will see as our red series progresses. When I was little, my grandmother always bought two kinds of canned cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving: jelly and whole berry. I usually ate most of the can of whole berry myself, until grandma began making the cranberry sauce homemade each year as her contribution. How could I go back after tasting that freshness? I now make cranberry sauce for myself multiple times a year to eat on my yogurt, in sandwiches with peanut butter, on toast, or just on a spoon.
    Cranberries are not only beautiful, tart and magical, but they are also recommended to help maintain your urinary tract health. (This is where I took a ten minute detour from writing to explore the Ocean Spray website and its recipes.) And did you know that Wisconsin, and not New England, is the world's top cranberry producing region? I didn't realize how much less popular cranberries would be after moving away from those places. But alas.
 

To make these even more red you can use red skinned apples, but choose a tart, firm variety if you can. Do not use red delicious. Actually, a large portion of fruit bowl neglect can be avoided if you just don't buy red delicious in the first place. If you have neither apples nor cranberries, you can substitute just about any non-citrus fruit into this recipe, but if they are frozen do not defrost them before baking or they will taste funny and  you will end up covered in goopy muffin. This was the first time I used cupcake wrappers on muffins, and I recommend it particularly because the high fruit content makes these a little...not crumbly, but having more perforations lets say.

Best Ever Apples-Cranberry Muffins  yield 12 muffins
(Based on Best Ever Muffins by Better Homes and Gardens)
1 3/4 cups sifted all purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 well beaten egg
3/4 cup milk (or yogurt and a tiny bit of water)
1/3 cup salad oil or melted shortening
1/2 cup diced tart apple (cut to berry size)
1/2 cup fresh or frozen cranberries, rinsed (do not defrost if frozen)

Sift dry ingredients into bowl; make well in center. Combine egg, milk, and oil. Add all at once to dry ingredients. Stir quickly just until dry ingredients are moistened. Add fruit and gently mix until just combined, do not overbeat. Fill greased muffin (or cupcake wrappers) pans 2/3 full. Bake at 400F for 20 to 25 minutes (at a slightly lower temperature if you or your oven tend to overbake things).

Enjoy.

The Dessert Vegetable

In early summer there are very few vegetables ready to eat; peas and lettuce are plentiful, but not much else is far enough along. The rhubarb plant, however, is a wonderful spring vegetable requiring no work other than being harvested. It comes back each year without any coaxing, thinning, weeding or transplanting; and what is best of all, you eat it for dessert! In the grocery store rhubarb can cost up to $4 a pound, but if you live near gardens it is likely that even a stranger would be willing to share rhubarb with you because the plants are such prolific producers.
Even if you don’t own any pans to cook in you have to appreciate the beauty of rhubarb stalks. In which other plant can you observe such a splendid shade of crimson without visiting an equatorial climate? And if you do bake, or someone will make a rhubarb concoction for you, doesn’t each bite make you think to yourself, “Rhubarb is sweet and tart and splendid. If I had been in charge of inventing vegetables I never would have thought of this!”
While I hope that you have the opportunity to experience strawberry rhubarb pie—no other pie can measure up to it. I am not sharing that recipe here. (Ok, ok, 2 ½ cups each of strawberries and rhubarb, 1 cup of sugar, 2 Tbs of flour, mix it together, let it sit for 10 minutes, put a homemade pie crust below and above it and bake at 350 for 30 minutes. Go!) For I would like you to taste for yourself that rhubarb need not be limited to use with strawberries. The two of them do make a wonderful pair, but strawberries are usually fairly expensive while rhubarb is just about falling from the sky. I was skeptical of the rhubarb alone concept when I was little (especially after tasting it raw; it’s very strange and tastes like plastic), but my Mom gave me a piece of this bread and I am fairly certain I ate half of the loaf myself as a picky 6 year old child. Really. You’re going to love this.
If you haven’t baked with rhubarb before or don’t have buttermilk on hand see my notes at the bottom.




My Mom’s Rhubarb Bread (Or muffins!)
Yeild: 2 loaves or 24 muffins

In a large bowl mix:
1 egg
1 ½ cups of brown sugar
2/3 cup of oil (I use canola)
1 cup of buttermilk*

In a separate bowl sift:
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp. salt
2 ½ cups unbleached flour

Sprinkle the flour mixture onto the wet ingredients about ½ cup at a time and stir to combine.
Fold in:
1 ½ cups of diced rhubarb**
1 ½ tsp vanilla
½ cup of chopped walnuts (you could skip these, but they add a really nice texture, so even if you are not a fan of nuts I would encourage you to add them anyway).

Pour into two greased bread pans or 24 muffin tins. Optional topping: Mix ½ cup sugar with 1 Tbs of butter, divide into two portions and sprinkle each over one of the breads before baking. Bake one hour at 325F or until a toothpick inserted to the centers comes out clean.


*Cultured buttermilk can be found along side other dairy products in the grocery store, but can be easily substituted for by adding 1 Tbs of white vinegar or lemon juice to 1 cup of milk. The milk will thicken and curdle slightly, which is perfect for most baking recipes because the beneficial cultures in purchased buttermilk would be killed during baking anyway. In this recipe yogurt or sour cream are also good substitutes.

**Rhubarb is related to celery and has very similar thick vertical strings, which will not be noticeable once baked. Rhubarb is best cut into 1 cm wide pieces (across the stalk in the narrow direction) with a good sharp knife. I usually cut a few long stalks into thirds and line them up to chop a bunch at once. The whole stalk can be used, though I usually cut off the bottom, which is white and a little tougher, as well as any dried out or insect eaten spots.

Oh what bacterial cultures can do...

When I was little I was a very picky eater. (My parents are both fabulous cooks by the way.) In the last few years I have often looked at the food I am cooking and thought,"First grade Sarah would not have appreciated this food." I cook some pretty odd things these days, which I now consider delicious, but I know that if I think about it, I would still be able to point out the characteristics of a given food that have would have determined why my little self could not have done anything but despise it. Some of these traits include soggy, slimy, mealy or plastic-like textures; bitterness which adults often fail to notice; sulfurous, fishy, or otherwise strong unpleasant odor; and unidentifiable ingredients (which was often solved by cooking with my Mom).
Thinking back to those times, I find it funny that even though I would need to receive punishments before I would eat plain chicken or hot dogs, I and my sisters always ate my Dad's soup. You may think to yourself, "Oh, kids always love chicken or tomato soup." But my Dad has always been more creative than that. He is inspired more by ingredients than by recipes. Some of the soups we curiously consumed included a beef soup with mandarin oranges and watermelon in it (both turned to odd strings of sponge); a multi-vegetable soup of family legend which prompted me to ask, "Do I have to eat the black corn?" (ask us about that one); and various soups using Chinese ingredients such as reconstituted fungus or dehydrated vegetable protein. I am not sure what led my sisters and me not to flinch at such unusual combinations. Perhaps we felt daring, or perhaps we knew that the recipes could not be reproduced and so it was a one time obligation.
The one constant in my relationship with food has been yogurt. I have and could eat it for any meal of the day throughout my life. Sometimes we purchased it, often my Mom made it for me, and now I regularly make it for Nathanael and myself. Making yogurt is less expensive (especially here in Wisconsin where the milk is well priced, but virtually no local yogurt companies exist), and this makes me feel a lot better about using it as an ingredient for indian food, or eating it frequently with cranberry sauce.
If you've never made yogurt before, the process is neither difficult nor precise...







1. Put some milk in a pot.
I usually measure out 8 cups of whole milk, but you can use other milks and you can certainly use smaller amounts.
2. Heat the milk (while stirring) until it steams and has some foam on top, but not to boiling.
3. Turn off the burner and allow the milk to cool until you consider it comfortable to touch. It should still be very warm but not have that sharpness of heat that would make you call it hot.* (If using a thermometer this is between 90 and 120 degrees F.)
4. Mix in a few tablespoons of store bought yogurt, preferably something with three or more bacterial varieties that is fresh (not opened more than 14 days ago).
5. Pour the mixture into glass containers. Jars or bowls both work.
6. Cover and place in a warm* (90 to 120F) place for 6 to 8 hours.
I usually turn the oven to the lowest temp (200 on mine) for 10 minutes, then place my jars in a water bath, turn off the stove, slide them in and leave them overnight. But the heat for our building is turned up so high I could probably just leave them by the radiators.
7. Refrigerate. (This will cause additional thickening.)

*If the yogurt cultures are exposed to temperatures over 120 for very long they will begin to die off. You might get some thickening, but your yogurt will probably be less than satisfactory.
If the temperature falls below 90 the cultures will not continue to multiply and thicken your yogurt, but you can return them to the proper temperatures for a longer period of time and it will continue to thicken (even if you have already refrigerated it).





Finally, a few wise words from New Hampshire's yogurt man, Gary Hirshberg, who spoke at my most recent graduation...he gave us all free yogurt.

Pumpkins a’plenty

The graduate housing at the university has a community garden associated with it, and though we do not live there, through some good connections Nathanael was able to rent one of their garden plots last year. Since we were married in August, I had no part in the hard work of gardening. Nathanael did all of the seed selection, planting, weeding and maintenance of the garden on his own all summer and I arrived just in time for the easy part: harvest time. From the time I arrived there was no rain at all for more than five weeks, but water is available to each of the plots. Through the end of August until early October we made weekly or bi-weekly visits to the garden usually on our tandem bicycle, filling a backpack with the basil, tomatoes, carrots and peppers, which became a large part of our diet. As the season wrapped up there was one thing we could not carry on our bike…well, twelve things actually.
Nathanael had planted two pumpkin seeds, which resulted in two enormous vines that merrily took over our garden and filled it with twelve large Cinderella pumpkins. In order to collect these beasts we would put them in a wheelbarrow and rolled them down the long hill to our car.
One Saturday afternoon, when we had not been to the garden in over a week and our kitchen compost was brimming to the top, we decided to venture out and collect a few pumpkins and a bit more basil and tomatoes before the frost came. When we stepped outside we realized that it looked like rain was coming, but we were pretty determined and anticipated a quick trip. When we arrived at our plot there was strange stillness. Out of the acres of plots covering the hillside ours was the only one with gardeners foolish enough not to have realized that enormous thunderclouds were blowing in at quite a ridiculous speed.
Hurriedly clipping basil and picking tomatoes, the two of us stuffed our bags and piled pumpkins into the wheelbarrow as all layers of our clothing stuck with wetness and our shoes began to slosh. Not wanting to be struck with lightning, we decided to leave the pumpkins and run to the car. By the time we were half way down the hill we could hear each other when we shouted but not make out the words.
After we had waited out the thunder, we returned to the plot and collected our pumpkins while the purple swirled sky subsided to a drizzle. The square bottomed wheelbarrow had about a centimeter of water covering its bottom.
The storm did not pick up again until we had begun to drive, increasing to cherry sided hail for about three minutes while we found street parking. The roadsides were flooded with rushing water, melting hail and bits of garbage, but our shoes were already soaked through, so we sloshed our way to the door and made our way inside, relieved at the warmth.
Since then we have been canning, cooking and baking with pumpkins, and attempting to give them away.
There are still three in our apartment.


















This pumpkin using recipe is adapted from the book Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld, which I recommend to anyone with excess vegetable purees lying around, or to cooks who serve a crowed that just doesn’t have a taste for ordinary vegetables.

















Pumpkin Banana Peanut Butter Muffins

1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
½ cup peanut butter
½ cup pumpkin puree (or nearly any mild vegetable really)
½ cup thoroughly squished banana
1 egg
½ teaspoon vanilla
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt

Mix ½ cup of the sugar with the pumpkin, banana, egg, vanilla and peanut butter. In a separate bowl combine dry ingredients. Add wet and dry until just mixed. Divide into a greased muffin pan (12 muffins), and divide the remaining ½ cup of brown sugar onto the muffin tops and stir once shallowly to make the sugar stick.
Bake at 350 for 15 to 20 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Remove to a wire rack. Store when completely cool.