Diverging Food/Memory

The stories on here often appear first in an Iowa newspaper. It's supposed to be a food column. And sometimes it is.

This column isn’t about cooking. Or eating. If it’s anything it’s stories that include food. There are recipes (sometimes) because the editor demands it. But mostly this is a few hundred words with food as one of the characters. 

I can’t say food has always been an important part of my life. For the longest time it was an afterthought. There were no nights around the dinner table as a child. Maybe a few special recipes before the grandmothers died. A holiday here or there. Depression. Disinterest. There were a lot of reasons I found a good meal was peanut butter on saltines and an adequate meal was peanut butter on a spoon.

As soon as I were old enough I got a restaurant job. 

Food became french fries and burgers. A steak if the chef happened to like you. But I didn’t learn to cook a meal until I was much older, married and raising children, and even then my techniques consisted primarily of boiling water or opening a box.

That all sounds woeful, but my point is this: If you grow up without enough food on the table you look at eating differently. Meals become important enough to plan and wasting one is a pity because there have been so many wasted chances already. The same goes for taste. There is a difference between those tinned tomatoes and ones you picked up at the farmers market. Why waste the energy on something that tastes like nothing?

If a co-worker brings in extra zucchinis — a regular occurrence as we wait for the first frost — I’m more than happy to take them because sometime soon real food, food that tastes like food, will be difficult to find. It’ll take some time and effort to bake a gluten-free zucchini bread or shred it up for fritters. 

Zucchini Fritters.

Peel and shred the zucchinis according to your tolerance for vegetables. Put the shredded zucchini in a colander, squeeze to take out as much moisture as you can. Place in a bowl and add 1/4 cup flour and a couple of eggs, salt and pepper. (Sometimes I’ll chop up an onion and drop that in too.)Try to form a patty. If it holds together nice, kind of on the damp side, you’re good. If not, add a little milk or a little more flour. 

All this time there’s been a cast iron skillet with olive oil or something on the stove on a medium-high heat. The oven is also on. Drop a couple patties in the oil. If you didn’t get enough moisture out, it’ll splatter, but no worries. Just step back. Brown one side, then the other. Put it on a cookie sheet in the oven and keep it warm while you finish the batch.

Cooking the Halloween decor

Bought as decoration, used as dinner. 

One of the first rules of entertaining is don’t serve a meal you’ve never made before. All sorts of things can go wrong in a new recipe because, like so much in life, what you see on the page isn’t always what you get. Recipes aren’t always carefully proofread and that 1 tablespoon of salt is meant to be a single teaspoon. Or the recipe creator mistakenly leaves out a very important ingredient. We’ll assume it’s a mistake although there was that one aunt who happily shared recipes, but not the whole recipe. She’d leave out an important ingredient or two to be sure that her version of the dish always tasted better than the copy. It took me years to figure that out. Years of feeling like a kitchen failure. Instead I’d lost to a cheater. A hyper-competative kitchen cheater.Don't be that person.

I’ve served more than a few meals that didn’t work, but many more that have. And yes, they’ve been served to guests. That first rule, the one about never serving an experiment is one I refuse to follow. Because of that, some friends recently had the opportunity to share a newly conceived Pumpkin Lasagna that came into existence only because there was a pie pumpkin taking up too much space on the counter. I thought it looked festive when I bought it. Then it just looked like dinner. If I'd bought a butternut squash I would have used that. 

Pumpkin Lasagna

Filling

1 pie pumpkin (or 2 14-ounce cans of pumpkin - NOT Pumpkin Pie Filling) Make sure it is a pie pumpkin. About 3 pounds. Those big carving pumpkins will not work. 

1 cup ricotta

1 cup mascarpone (or leave this out and double the ricotta. There was some in the fridge, so I used it.)

2 eggs

Salt and pepper to taste.

Sage, 1 teaspoon or more

Peel a small pie pumpkin and cut into 1-inch pieces. Toss with olive oil and bake in a 350-degree oven for about 45 minutes or until it’s fork stabbable. Puree. Should make about 3 cups. Leave it in the food processor and add the ricotta, mascarpone and egg.

Sauce

1 medium onion, diced

2 or more cloves garlic

1/4 cup butter

1/4 cup flour

1 1/2 to 2 cups cream or half and half

Pork sausage or 4 to 6 pieces diced Canadian bacon (optional) 

Sauté the diced onion in olive oil until translucent. Add the garlic and sauté. Set aside. Brown the sausage or bacon. Set aside. Make a white sauce with the butter, flour and cream. (Add some of the parmesan to the sauce if you’d like.) I use a large cast iron frying pan for all three of these steps. Combine the pork product and the onion/garlic mix in the sauce. Set aside.

Assemble

12 ounces of mozzarella

1 cup shredded parmesan

1 box of pre-cooked lasagna

Spread 9- by 12-inch baking dish with a layer of sauce. 

Layer 1: Noodles

Layer 2: Pumpkin filling.

Layer 3: Mozzarella and Parm

Layer 4 Sauce

Repeat, ending with a layer of sauce-covered noodles sprinkled with Parmesan.

Cover pan with sheet of oiled foil. Bake in 375-degree oven for 40 minutes. Uncover and bake 20 more. Let sit 10 minutes before serving.

The Tyranny of Perfect Fruit

           

 Everyone knows one of these people. Ask them to bring something for a potluck and they'll arrive with a 7-tiered Venetian fantasy. It looks amazing. Like something on a Pinterest wedding board. And it tastes like decayed plaster.

Food doesn't have to be pretty to taste good. Presentation helps, but it's that judging a book by its cover thing all over again. The outside doesn't accurately reflect the inside. I was thinking about this little lesson in morals while I was looking at the bushel of pears I'd acquired.

My friend, Lillian, has an abundant pear tree. Every year, she gathers the fruit and gives it away in exchange for a donation to a charity. So every year, for as long as I've known Lillian, I end up with a lot of pears.

Pears are one of those fruits that I am loath to use. Their odd shape makes them difficult to peel. Not like an apple, round and nearly symmetrical. Pears take a little knife skill. They are needy. So they sat in the refrigerator, picked off one by one for snacking.

And after a week there were still a lot. Too many. Time to bake. So when a friend asked me to throw in a dessert for an impromptu dinner, I thought "Pear tart!" like it was an epiphany.

Anyone who has cooked a pear tart - or seen one in a cookbook - knows that the fruit is supposed to be sliced into identical wedges and lay in a pinwheel on the crust. It is a daunting task with more effort spent on creating the picture than the food. I don't do that. (And that should surprise no one.)

Ugly Pear Tart 

FILLING

6 smallish pears, peeled, cored and chopped into pieces (enough for about 3 cups)

Lemon juice

1 t cornstarch

(Some people like a spice, like cinnamon or nutmeg)

CRUST:

3/4-cup flour, plus extra

1/4-cup sugar

4 Tbs cold butter

Ice water

After chopping up the pears, toss them in a bowl with a little lemon juice so they don't get brown and some cornstarch so they don't get watery. Then make the crust just like any other piecrust. I use a food processor and then put the dough in the fridge for a half hour before pressing into a tart pan. Or a pie plate if I can't find the tart pan. Bake the crust, which looks like a large sugar cookie, at 425 for 15 minutes or until golden.

Drain the extra liquid from the pears. When the crust is done, reduce the oven to 350, dump the pears on top of the crust and bake for 40 minutes.

If I'm feeling fancy I'll drizzle some melted chocolate across the top. That happens seldom.

Rainy days and risotto

It’s raining, one of those rains that clears out the gutters and turns the river a dark metallic grey, leaving a damp chill in the air between storms. It’s been raining on and off for days and because of this I have not shopped for food. On days like these I swear I will can more. Freeze more. Set aside a stockpile because if there’s one thing I won’t do, it’s leave the house when there’s rain or snow. If it weren’t for four-wheel drive and good county road crews proving me a liar, I’d happily stay home all winter, insisting the roads were impassible if my presence were necessary.

But that particular scenario is still weeks away. And while the calendar is saying Fall, the weather is insisting “Not yet.” But today there is a chilly rain, which means it’s slow cooker weather. For years, I avoided slow cookers, embarrassed to even have one in the pantry. I’ve relented, especially on days when I want something filling. Something rich.

Today want a creamy risotto, but I don’t have the right kind of rice. A starchy rice that breaks down into a creamy goodness when cooked. I do have barley, however, which is better of its high fiber content and I can claim I chose it because it is healthier, not because it is what I have left in the pantry. Risotto isn’t just the name of the dish, it’s also the cooking method, which roughly translated means Hours Stirring Grains and Broth On An Open Flame. Which is nice kitchen performance art, but I want something easy. And good. Adding the cheddar gives it a mac-and-cheese feel without the white flour guilt.

Crock Pot Barley Risotto

• 1 cup barley
• 3 cups chicken broth (or vegetable if you want vegan)
• 1/4 cup butter, cut into small pieces
• 2 Tbs leftover non-sweet wine (optional)
• 4 cloves garlic or equivalent garlic powder
• 1/2 medium yellow onion, diced and sautéed
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese (faux or otherwise)

Mix the  broth, barley, butter, wine, garlic, onion, salt, and black pepper in a Crock Pot and cook on High for 2 to 2 1/2 hours. Stir in cheese.

Tailgating for the non-fan

Peach Salsa, step 1

College football  has started, which around here means an empty house on Saturdays. Everyone is either at the game or watching the game somewhere else. It’s a day of catch-up for this non-fan. Reading, cleaning, cooking and just being thankful I’m not standing in a crowded stadium asking people around me to explain what just happened on the field.

I’ve stubbornly refused to become a fan. That might be different if I’d gone to a college where the football game was worth waking up for. And I know it’s possible to become a late-life convert. But there are only so many brain cells in a life. Why squander them on false enthusiasm?

There is one part of the football ritual I can get behind and that’s the tailgating. The guys man the grill, cooking manly meats. Bratwurst. Burgers. Steaks. Neighbors share, creating their own culinary currency. A breakfast bagel for 2 hotdogs. Pork burger for a veggie burger + a dessert to be named later.

The women have packed the accompaniments. Brownies, breads and baked goods. Chips and dips. Chips and salsa. A plate of cut-up vegetables that will go back home nearly uneaten because it’s football, not a bridal shower. Who tried to sneak this healthy stuff on the table? 

Tailgating is a communal meal of pre-thanksgiving, a ritual victory feast because no true fan would dare believe that there is anything but a win expected by day’s end. And like a celebratory meal, everyone brings an offering, more humble than fantastic because the setting — a truck bed as altar, lawn chairs as pews — necessitate a casual approach to both food and comfort. China is replaced by paper plates. Forks by fingers. Napkins? They’ve blown off the table in a gust of warm wind. 

On a quiet Saturday, when I’ve stayed home after waving the fanboys goodbye, I begin my own football ritual of preparing for next week’s tailgate. A mountain of peaches wait and I’ve got peach salsa on my mind. It’s 88 degrees, a horribly hot day for football and canning alike. But peaches don’t wait and neither can I.

Peach Salsa (Canned or not)

6 cups peeled, sliced and pitted peaches, about 4 pounds

2 or more jalepenos, diced

1 1/2 cup diced red onion

1 cup diced yellow, orange or red pepper)

1 tsp cumin

1/4 tsp cayenne

3 tsp garlic powder or 3 cloves garlic

1 1/2 cup vinegar

3/4 cup sugar

Combine everything in a large dutch oven and boil for 10 minutes. Reduce heat and simmer until liquid becomes syrupy. This makes about 4 quarts. Divide it up and can it with 15 minutes in a hot water bath. Or cool it in the refrigerator and eat at the next couple tailgates.  (Adapted from “Food In Jars” by Marisa McClellan)

This is what we eat here

It's home.

Some people love the bed and breakfast experience. I’m not one of them. It’s the breakfast part I hate, sitting at the dining room table, forcing interest in your fellow boarders. Just give me a cup of coffee and a piece of bacon. That’s all I’m asking.

But last fall, we found ourselves in just such a situation in Willamette Valley. Oregon’s wine growing region has beautiful views, interesting wines, amazing restaurants and a handful of housing options. So it’s no surprise to find a self-proclaimed foodie or wine snob sitting across the B&B table, as hung-over as a college student. 

They are generally gregarious, anxious to impart their wisdom about a super-secret restaurant that they’ve stumbled on, to add to their street cred, drive traffic to their blog. And after the soliloquy on last night’s food rapture, they ask the question: Where are you from.

“Iowa. On the Mississippi River.”

And a look of horror passes over their face. It takes a moment for them to form the words.

“What do you EAT there?” As though Iowa were a vast food desert. Nothing but flat acres of corn fed to cows somewhere else. 

It’s a question I struggle with sometimes and I have learned that most often the question means “Where do you eat there?” The food tourist isn’t as interested in the meal as they are in the stamp in their mental passport so of course they’ve never considered Iowa.

We have our restaurants and they serve us admirably. But there aren’t many where I can say “This is what we eat and you can get it nowhere else, nowhere better.” 

The question comes down to local foods, meals that remind a homesick Iowan of home. We’ve got our Maytag cheese. We’ve got our morels. We’ve got our Sterzings. We’ve got pork tenderloins and Windsor chops. We’ve got … that’s my list., my You Know You’re From Iowa When … list. We have our points of pride.

But I didn’t run down that list when confronted with the “What do you eat” question. 

“We cook at home. We have friends over. We raid our friends’ gardens.” 

Because a meal isn’t just about the food. It’s about the people you share it with. The connections you make and keep and cherish long after your favorite restaurant goes the way of arugula pizza. 

Sweet Potato Breakfast Hash For People Who Hate Breakfast Food

Diced up an onion and toss it into a skillet where you’ve already melted some butter. Peel a sweet potato and chop it into little 1/4” squares. Or grate it. I don’t like it grated as much, but you might. Toss that in with the onions and fry it on medium heat. Too hot and the outsides brown but the insides don’t cook. You’re looking for that nice brown caramelized outside. When it’s almost done, toss in some left-over chicken cut into little bits. (What, no leftover chicken? I thought everyone had leftover chicken.) Season with salt and pepper. 

A history of Labor Day in 3, maybe 4, beers

Nick at the tavern.

The last Hooligans Picnic was probably 40 years ago. The guys that hung out at my grandparent's Southside tavern — that's the south side of Chicago, Roseland to be exact — would reserve some tables in a forest preserve, rent a few kiddie carnival rides to keep us occupied and throw some charcoal in a 55-gallon drum that had been sliced in half and sandblasted at the corner auto body repair shop. It was Labor Day and the neighborhood celebrated it vehemently. St. Patrick's Day was for rookies.
    A few kegs of PBR or Schlitz were rolled in, the neighborhood beer, back before they were ironic or cool. The ladies circled their aluminum chairs near the kegs because that was the best shade. They refused the beer and drank highballs out of plastic cups.
    I remember the drinks. Remember sneaking a sip when no one was looking. And I remember making 7 and 7s for the aunties (Seagrams 7 and 7-Up, but not too much 7-Up. They were very specific in their instructions.)
   But I don't remember the food. Hot dogs, I'd guess. It was Chicago, after all.
    The Hooligans broke up, moved away, drank themselves to death. It's what you'd expect from a group created on a bar stool. I moved too. To Carbondale — Southern Illinois University — where the Labor Day picnics were on rotting old porches and the beer wasn't much better. But the entire bottle was now mine. I didn't have to sneak sips.
    A grill was always going. There were hot dogs. And hamburgers. Standard grill fare, far better than standard cafeteria fare. Some ambitious girl would show up with a salad of shredded iceberg lettuce and grated carrots, not realizing there was nothing to eat it with. We were moving up in the world.
    Years later, the calendar pages flying past as if blown by a tornado, I flip through a pile of cookbooks, looking for a great Labor Day meal. I already chosen the beer. A home brew quietly aging in the basement. But the meal? It has to have zucchini in it. And tomatoes. Because that's what I picked up at the farmers market. I've found several complicated recipes, a dozen ingredients that look beautiful in the after pictures. But so much work.
    Last week, a friend, Nathalie Girod, posted a picture of her lunch on Facebook. Just slices of the freshest vegetables, lightly grilled. I didn't ask her for the recipe, because she won't have one. She never does. Great cooks don't work that way. So I made one up.

Grilled Zucchini

Cut  zucchini lengthwise into 1/4 inch slices.. Brush with olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt and pepper and put it directly on a medium hot grill until the grill makes marks on it. That'll be about 6 minutes. Flip it over and repeat on the other side. I'll sprinkle some parmesan on top sometime. Maybe.

The Other Blog

Let's just call this Concordia, shall we?

I've writing the second in a series of books set in Concordia, an old Mississippi River town on the upswing. By now, the place is become very real to me and there's all sorts of things going on that the characters are part of. Art fairs, church activities, weddings, weather incidents. Not all of it's going into the books, so I started a faux news site http://concordiainthenews.blogspot.com

You can take the old reporter out of the newsroom, but you can't always take the newsroom out of her blood.

Best dressed

Look what I found at the local resale store. A trip to the past. I was that girl in high school, the mid-'70s version of Goth, wearing vintage before vintage was much of a thing. It was stuff my mother had saved, hoping to lose enough weight to fit back into the clothes she'd worn in her 20s. (That, apparently, has always been a thing.) They were beautiful dresses in extraordinary fabric and I felt beautiful and extraordinary in them. 

I can try to relive that, even though it will take every shred of dressmaking skills I've ever learned to resize these. (The Vogue Pattern Size 14 is for a 32-inch bust. The Size 14 I now wear is for a bigger rack.) They were hidden, tucked on the bottom shelf at the charity store, three huge bins of patterns. I bought 76 from the '50s to the '70s (in case I ever want to dress like I was in high school.) I'll make a few, if I find perfect fabric. Will it be a lot of look? I'm sure there are going to be people that say that. But I'm going with Miuccia Prada on this, with my own twist: Wilder, yet with refinement. 

Off kilter

My virtual ass is dragging. Dad died a couple weeks ago. 10 days since the funeral. I don't feel like doing much but sitting in the corner of the couch and drinking, so not-drinking is taking up all my energy. All of it.

Led Zepplin saved me

I wrote this back in September and it was published on one of my favorite sites, Better After 50 while I was on vacation. Just found it.

http://betterafter50.com/2013/10/rock-on-pretty-baby/

Rock On, Pretty Baby!

October 11, 2013

By Criss Roberts

inShare

I’m driving home from the grocery store with a case of cheap Pinot Grigio in the trunk because I’m hosting what my husband calls “a little family gathering.” What that really means is I’ll be feeding more people than I want to be feeding and the only thing that’s going to make that OK is a lot of wine. The “family” in this case is HIS family and since this is our second marriage, his family doesn’t always like to share him with me, the interloper.

I’m not happy about this whole thing, which is redundant to even mention because we’re smart women here. We’ve been there. We’ve all soldiered on, taking a back seat so someone else can ride in the front. We’re starting to feel invisible and it doesn’t help when the check-out girl at the grocery store doesn’t stop chatting with the bagger long enough to even acknowledge us. If it wasn’t 10 a.m., I’d start on that wine.

And then, like a gift from the universe, the song comes on the radio. It’s one of those songs that burst out of you in moments of joy, a song from your youth which reminds you life can be … amazing. So, since I’m sure no one can see me in my car, I start singing along. “Hey baby, pretty baby …”

Then it hits.

The Pretty Baby in that song is in her mid-50s now, probably pushing 60 or maybe even 70…a true Baby Boomer. Those moves that sat one man down with a pen to write a song that lives on are now less noteworthy, crippled by bad knees and aching joints, and if Baby was, oooh-oooh, in the front row today the only person eyeing her with interest would be security. But, hey baby, that was us. That was me and it was probably you. We wore concert shirts unironically. We danced in the aisles and no one told us to sit down. We may not have specifically been the girl the songs were written about, but we knew that girl. We knew we could have been that girl if we wanted it enough.

But then we wanted other things more and that was OK. We grew up. Those concert t-shirts became cleaning rags and those songs dropped off the charts and on to oldies stations. The 8-tracks we’d played were replaced by cassettes and then again by downloads which we’d secretly listen to on the treadmill, a little embarrassed by our stunted taste in music. Embedded on my iPod, Pretty Baby never grows up, she’ll always be a catchy anonymous refrain. Once, we were the face of a generation. Now, no one would guess we were that girl. On bad days, even we forget that was us.

But today, I remember. It plays in my mind like an opening bass riff. Sitting there at the stop light, I remember that there is no song without an inspiration and that inspiration is always there, somewhere inside, waiting, hidden, a little afraid its time has passed. So sitting there with my a trunkful of warm white wine, I vow to reclaim that inner Pretty Baby. It is time to write our own verses and if we must, our own song. It may only be in the quiet of a car. Or it may be in a bustling kitchen, surrounded by family and friends, where we rock on and on and on.

Emergency woodworking

Building tables from old house parts

Someday I'll remember to take better pictures. This is the first of several planned tables using reclaimed lumber from Burlington, Iowa's, Preservation Station, a non-profit run by the Heritage Trust that strips old houses of useable parts before they're torn down. They were kind enough to donate the materials to the Art Guild, where we're creating high-tops for our social events. 

Here's the plans. Quarter sawn oak from baseboards, accented with brass kickplates aged with ammonia and coarse salt.

We chose baseboard, stripped the finish off on the jointer then glued it up to form the thickness necessary.

These brass plates came from an old school, where they protected the bottom of doors. Aged them with a mixture coarse salt and ammonia, then let it sit in the sun. Finished it with a spray of clear fix. Below is the base laying on the shop floor.

So here's the thing. This old wood is VERY dry and the cracking forced us to give up on details like mortise and tenon joinery for pocket hole screws and lots of glue. And because pieces kept cracking I had to substitute wood I had in the shop, which was often pine, when I ran out of oak baseboards... did I mention the tight deadline? So instead of the tung oil finish I'd hoped to use to bring out the grain, I ended up using a a Minwax gel stain in Cherrywood..The top is pine covered in blackboard paint, which was fun for the partygoers. Since these are all donated materials we're hoping for a nice soapstone for the remaining 4. Maybe slate. Maybe chalkboard. If not, it's all good. 

When the barn gives you a gift...

The husband's story goes something like this: It was in a barn. He thinks. Maybe a garage. He's not sure. It has a tag that says HAWKEYE, Burlington Iowa on the cabinet door

Its a sweet upper half a cabinet. And as much as I love painted furniture... and as much as I SWEAR I'll do everything I can to keep that original paint ... this time I just couldn't 

The green had crackled nicely, revealing a nice white. But that was only on one side. There was also the metallic silver used on a couple of drawers, the black sprayed on half a cabinet face, some blue that had dripped down the side and the outline of a can of red enamel that had been left sitting and puddling on top. 

 It's nearly stripped now ... I used a heat gun ... but I haven't decided what to do next. To paint or not to paint. Stain? Bleach? Paint ... definitely paint.

In the beginning

It's in the entryway now. No stain, a few coats of poly, wax, Rebuilt the drawers, added legs. Miracle... saved all the hardware. Nothing particularly creative or interesting about it beyond repair work, but sometimes a piece screams "Don't mess with me" 

CUTE, right. I like it.