Friday, December 22, 2006

Salad is for grownups

They say a child has to try a food several times before they can really decide if they like it or not. The exception to this rule has to be salad. Granted, my experience is based on a very small, scientifically invalid sample (my two boys), but anecdotal evidence (parking lot conversations with other parents), backs it up.

Every night, there is a cooked vegetable and a salad on our table. Every night. Every night, we offer each child the same thing, and they're expected to take a bite or two of at least one of the veggies (granted, sometimes the vegetable is in the main dish). Every night until he was around six years old, number one son opted for the cooked veggie. Sometime around then it changed, and he decided he liked salad after all. Now he chooses the salad most every evening, often in addition to the hot vegetable.

Darling husband went to Costco this week to pick up a mega-pack of jelly bellies for our exchange student for Christmas (two pounds of pure refined sugar really ought to blow his mind). While he was there, he made a couple of impulse buys: a dozen bagels and two dozen croissants. Which means I'm getting creative in making them interesting. Yesterday, the boys got BLA (Avocado, since I was out of Tomato) croissant sandwiches, garnished with a huge leaf of local green lettuce. And that little kiddo couldn't stop raving about the lettuce!

And whaddyaknow, at dinner last night, he opted for the salad, and proceeded to eat a real-sized portion. Guess he's big now!

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Heat, no brownies

That's right, five days after the storm, and I've got a girlfriend still without power. Her genius husband (really, he is excruciatingly intelligent) finally figured that it would be more energy-efficient to hook up the generator to the blower motor on their gas furnace than to run electric space heaters. So they're warm.

But she's craving comfort food, and I can hardly blame her. You can only do so much soup and tea. She wants brownies, but no power means no oven--her gas one has electronic controls. So here's what I told her to do. Fire up the charcoal grill--in the backyard--and grab the Dutch oven out of the camping gear (mine lives in the regular cupboard since I use it even when not camping). Take some brownie mix, or mix up your favorite recipe if you're feeling ambitious, and dump the whole mess into the pot. You might want to butter your pan, but mine is so cured nothing would dare stick to it, especially not a buttery batch of brownies. Now, take the whole covered mess out to the grill, use nice long handled tongs to put 16 coals on top, leaving 8 coals below. Set the timer for 20 minutes, then come and pull the pot off the coals. Another five minutes and you can scrape the coals off the top and use them to roast weenies or whatever. You could cool the brownies and cut them into pieces, but I'm not inclined to do that. Grab a spoon instead. They should be nice and gooey and make you forget all about wind and trees and downed power lines.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Heimweh

When I took German 101 at the community college to prepare for life with my new-found love, the teacher showed a film that we all found hilarious. One scene in particular prompted riotous laughter: a woman filling an immense tin--really the size of a carry-on suitcase--with Christmas cookies. I mean nobody bakes that much, right?

Fast forward twenty years: I bake German Christmas cookies this time of year, since I now understand the wistful feeling that true Germans get this time of year, and how well their favorite cookie helps allay this angst. And, so help me, I even have a huge tin, courtesy of my Nuremberg-dwelling sister-in-law, who in true Swabian (read skinflint) fashion, buys them factory direct, and sends huge packages via DHL. It appears that cookies in quantity make homesick Germans feel better.

My husband's favorite are Vanillekipferl, little melt-in-your-mouth vanilla crescents, made with butter, egg yolks, ground almonds and a token amount of flour, then dredged in vanilla bean-scented powdered sugar. Their companion cookie is Zimtsterne, cinnamon stars, since they use the egg whites. They're essentially nut meringues, cut into six-pointed star shapes and dried in a slow oven. These, it turns out, are the favorite of our exchange student.

This year presents the wheat/egg/dairy free challenge. Rather than start by adapting recipes, I hit the Internet, looking for German gluten free (GF) sites. Bingo! My hunch was right: even Germans with health issues were not going to do without their Christmas cookies! The Vanillekipferl turned out lovely without eggs and flour (I don't consider butter dairy, since it's pure fat). There were other surprises: I didn't expect much of Elisenlebkuchen, those delicately chewy gingerbread made with honey, orange peel and ground almonds, but they turned out to be the best of the bunch, chewy and tart with their lemon icing. But I thought Marzipanhoernchen would behave, since they're mostly marzipan with a few eggs to bind. Clearly egg replacer doesn't make the grade on these: they absolutely lost their shape. I saved them by slicing the thin, bubbling mess into squares before it cooled, then drizzled the squares with chocolate (no sense wasting all that marzipan!). I can always pretend I intended them to come out that way.

It does help to think out of the box, even--or especially--when dealing with tradition. One hot August day back in our student days in Freiburg, I went into the community kitchen in our dorm to bake up some chocolate chip cookies. I was writing my thesis, and really needed some of those gooey bundles of home (together with a tall glass of cold milk) to feed my muse. In waltzed a fellow student (pre-law), asking what I was doing. When I told him I was baking cookies, he looked puzzled, then alarmed, and stated with Teutonic authority, "but it's not December!"
Nope, they're not the way Oma made them, but they're just right for right now.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Aftermath

There are still many in the dark at this point; we are realizing how very lucky we are. But even this misfortune has its upside: for this is the point where the Feast of the Thawed begins. One dear friend had 100 pounds of salmon in her freezer; the top layer thawed too much to refreeze, but not too much to eat! We came home with eight huge King salmon filets, which we promptly reduced to three by giving some away to the neighbors, re-freezing some and making a pot of soup.

Half of one filet, sliced thinly on the diagonal, went into a pot of onions simmering in olive oil. It was joined shortly thereafter by dill, salt, milk and a splash of California Gewürztraminer. A light green salad with avocados and tomatoes was all this meal needed for a tasty Sunday supper. (A loaf of warm crusty sourdough would have been perfect, but between not eating wheat for a while and the absence of bakeries with power, we had to make do with oyster crackers...)

Celebration of Lights

With the power back on, we're back to the task of celebrating. The hard-working linemen got us back on the grid just as the sun was going down. There was great jubilation all around--as you can imagine. But we decided that we still wanted to share our suppers, so the neighbors, whose freezer had barely anything in it, cooked up the thawed spaghetti sauce (being British, they call it ragú sauce, which is of course a brand name here).

I threw together a pot of my vegetable curry. Brown onions in oil and butter, add curry paste and garam masala, throw in chunks of firm tofu, garbanzo beans and simmer. Ten minutes before serving, I place broccoli on top to steam. Basmati rice is in the rice cooker with a generous pinch of saffron to give it a beautiful color and flavor.

For dessert, I needed to use up milk, so I made chocolate soup: 1 cup of milk to 3 oz. good quality semi-sweet chocolate and 1 T of Dutch process cocoa powder. Heat milk, add chocolate & cocoa, stir it to melt, then pour into serving dishes. I've got a set of little espresso cups from IKEA that I use. We had German Christmas cookies, satsumas and comice pears to dunk in the chocolate. We didn't sing, but we did enjoy!