Headache

My head hurts. I think it's from falling off the October Unprocessed wagon and eating hallowe'en candy.

Serves me right.

Here's a delicious mild salsa from pastry chef Lindsay Shepherd. I guess pastry chefs like to walk on the wild side every now and then!

Roasted Tomatillo Salsa (Salsa Verde)
1 pound fresh tomatillos (about 8-10 ripe tomatillos)
2 serrano peppers (if you like heat) *optional- if you want mild salsa, use 1 large bell pepper (prefer chocolate bell peppers)
2 jalapenos
1 medium sweet onion
2 garlic cloves, unpeeled
¼ - ½ cup fresh cilantro (depending on how much you like cilantro)
¼ cup fresh lemon basil
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt
2 Tbsp. fresh squeezed lime juice

Preheat broiler.

Remove husks from tomatillos and rinse under warm water to remove stickiness. Remove skin from onion, and cut into 4 wedges. Place fresh tomatillos, serranos (or bell pepper), jalapenos , onion, and garlic (with skin on) on rack of a broiler pan 1 to 2 inches from heat. Broil, turning once, until tomatillos are softened and all ingredients are slightly charred, about 10-20 minutes.

Peel garlic, and rub the charred skin off the peppers. Pull off tops of chiles and jalapenos and take out the seeds (leaving just a few for heat).

Place all of the ingredients (including the remaining cilantro, basil, salt, and lime juice) in a blender, and puree until desired consistency.

October Unprocessed: snacks

Can't get away from the topic, seemingly. I wrote about an unprocessed treat on Friday, and here we are two days later, snacking again.

Here's what I "snacked" on today:

Fresh-squeezed orange juice
A 6-oz glass of locally pressed apple cider
A pear
A donut from the farmers' market, freshly made on Saturday
Some dried cranberries (from Mick Klug Farm, bought through the CSA, so not commercially processed)
Popcorn, the old fashioned kind

In other words, to snack "unprocessed," just eat food. Snacking isn't about the type of food you're eating, it's about timing, convenience and quantity. If it's 3:00 in the afternoon and you're eating an apple, that's a snack. If it's noon and you're eating it with a sandwich, that's lunch. If it's 7:30 and you've put it in a pie, that's dessert (the pie also counts as a snack in the middle of the afternoon, but mother says you may only have a small piece).

The problem is we've let the industrialized food system and Madison Avenue tell us what a "snack" is, and have swallowed wholesale, if I may, the idea that "snack food" is somehow different from "food."

Unprocessed snacks can include nuts, raw fruit, dried fruit (but read the label, the grocery store ones contain a lot of preservatives, artificial colors and even sweeteners), potato chips are easy to make if a little tedious, popcorn–the old fashioned kind, you pop it in the microwave just like “microwave” popcorn. Just stick it in a paper bag and hit the “popcorn” preset, bread and butter, jam or nut butters, hot cocoa or a hard boiled egg.

Here's the homemade hot chocolate my mother used to make for us when we were little (I never had commercial hot cocoa til I got to college; didn't know what it was, despite watching Bosco ads all my life). I remember traveling with some friends, they asked me to make hot cocoa and handed me little bags filled with brown powder. I knew what it was, but had never seen it, let alone made it. I did it wrong. They were really mad, and I was really embarrassed, but in retrospect, I'm very glad I did not know that dirt-colored powder was considered an acceptable drink.

Homemade hot cocoa
from the Woman's Home Companion Cook Book

2½ oz unsweetend chocolate (2½ squares)
⅓ cup sugar
pinch of salt (just a few grains)
½ cup boiling water
4 cups milk

Melt chocolate in the top of a double boiler, add sugar and salt; add boiling water, stirring until well-blended. Place pan back over heat and boil about 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Gradually add milk, heat just short of scalding, again, stirring constantly. Beat until frothy. Pour into mugs and top with whipped cream or a marshmallow.

Here's a recipe for a homemade chocolate syrup that can be used in milk, or on ice cream.

A is for Apple Salad

I'm doing Alphabet August with Chiot's Run. Can't promise a recipe every day, but I'm going to try for a word!

The Peterson Garden Project is making a cookbook all about growing and using your own herbs and vegetables. I'm testing four recipes, and recruiting my hapless friends into testing some more. I made three of them for our annual Lammas Fest, and tested them on those same hapless friends. I'll give the bare bones of the ingredients here, but if you want the whole recipe, you've got to buy the cookbook!

Herbed Goat Cheese dip has fresh goat cheese with olive oil and plain yogurt, giving it a lovely lemony taste. Six herbs, all of which I managed to have in my garden!
Thai Apple Salad was the hit of the day--a wonderful fresh combination of unexpected tastes with a secret ingredient!
Pesto Genovese. Oh, pesto. It's a great recipe with the clearest step by step I've seen, but in the way of pesto turned black within seconds. Sigh.

There's a few dozen more recipes in this book! Subscribe to our newsletter at the Peterson Garden Project website to get the updates! So I guess while I'm at it, A is also for Advocate, and Advertise!

What to do with Mahlzeit

Mahlzeit started as an online cookbook of family favorites for my kids, and then I discovered that I really like blogging, so I kept it going.

But it's never really found its voice. It's been a cooking blog and a gardening blog. Sustainability, editorializing, this that and the other thing. So I'm permuting again; we're going to try just free associating here. So now this is just about what I do on any given day-- empty nester, working mother, athlete, gardener, artist. Days in the life of a Renaissance woman.

I made the following crackers last week for a friend whom I forgot does not eat land-based meat. So then we had to eat them all ourselves.

Darn.

Bacon Cheese Crackers
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup corn meal
4 oz. of cheese (cheddar, gruyere or Parmesan) grated
6 T (3/4 stick) of unsalted butter, cut into pieces
about 3 T heavy cream
8 slices thick bacon (pastured pigs, please)

Cut the bacon in small pieces and slowly fry it until it is quite crispy. Drain well.

Mix all ingredients except cream in a food processor; run the machine until dough forms a clump, adding the cream a little at a time to get a nice maleable texture. (I only have a 3 cup foot processor, so I have to divide the dough into thirds). Form into logs about 1 1/2 x 8" each, roll in plastic wrap or wax paper and place in freezer until firm (a couple of hours). Slice into 1/4" or thinner rounds. Only have one log out at a time; leave the others in the freezer until you're ready to use them. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and bake at 350 for 15 minutes.

Update (thanks barrel-racer) Refrigerate in a closed jar. Don't leave these out, not sure if the bacon will keep.

Convenient stuff

I need a phone.

Mind you, I have a phone. In fact, several phones. I have a cell phone, as does my son, my daughter, and my husband. Then there's "Phone Henge," an archeological site of marginally functional cell phones that we mine for plugs, headsets, and exchanges. They need to be recycled, but recycling phones is another errand, plus my brother-in-law never lets us get rid of electronic items because he's convinced the evil-doers are out there just waiting to get into the memory chips and get numbers from old bank accounts, from which they will reconstruct our lives and steal all our money.

I also have two truly ancient old-fashioned wired phones and a wireless. They were all purchased for a couple of bucks at the resale shop. I consider wired phones a necessity. I always have phone service in emergencies, because the wired sets don't need either the house electricity or a cell phone grid. They work even when the power goes out. This is the number I give to stores when they won't accept "you don't need my phone number" or "000-000-0000."

But there isn't a phone in the kitchen anymore, because the resale specimen that was there died. When the phone rings and I'm in the kitchen, I have to go two whole rooms over to answer it.

I understand there are people who feel this way about tvs.

Peppery shortbread cheese crackers

3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup corn meal
4 oz. of cheese (cheddar, gruyere or Parmesan) grated
6 T (3/4 stick) of unsalted butter, cut into pieces
about 3 T heavy cream
seasoning: 1 teaspoon each white and green peppercorns, 1 1/2 teaspoons coarse sea salt, ground together, 1-2 teaspoons pepper flakes, or use the pre-mixed seasoning of your choice


Mix all ingredients except cream in a food processor; run the machine until dough forms a clump, adding the cream a little at a time to get a nice maleable texture. (I only have a 3 cup foot processor, so I had to divide the dough into thirds). Form into three 1 1/2 x 8" logs, roll in plastic wrap or wax paper and place in freezer until firm (a couple of hours). Slice into 1/4" or thinner rounds. Only have one log out at a time; leave the others in the freezer until you're ready to use them. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and bake at 350 for 15 minutes.

Update, Feb 27: Made these again using a pepper-jack cheese instead of the seasoning. Also good.

Inherited stuff

No buy February

My mother died when I was 22. I bring this up not to gain sympathy, but rather to point out a peculiar facet of my adulthood, namely, that I never had to furnish a household. I simply kept using everything I'd grown up with, from the living room furniture right down to the mismatched forks.

Not only that, but because of the trauma of losing my mother so young, her things took on huge emotional significance, to the point that losing or breaking something of hers sparks a feeling close to grief. I find it difficult to replace her things when they wear out, or to admit that either her things aren't good enough or that I need something she didn't have. So I use pot lids that have no handles, and pots with giant dings and dents. I burn soup because I can't bring myself to retire the 1947 Revere Ware and replace it with some nice double-walled Calphalon.

More than 30 years later, I'm still using her things.

I complain that Americans have no "culture" but this investment of emotional gravity into things is actually part of our American culture. We come, all of us, from people who left their belongings behind. Whether through voluntary or forced migration, America is a land of people who abandoned stuff, so the new stuff that we acquired when we got here was important in a way that it won't be for a people in the old country, surrounded by stuff accumulated over centuries.

Marketers take advantage of this need for things to be important by attaching emotional resonance to the stuff we buy and the places we buy it. Unfortunately, the only emotion that marketers REALLY want is the toddler version of desire-- I want THAT, NOW (or I will hold my breath til my face turns blue).

Things are important, no doubt about it. But let's remember that importance attaches to specific things-- my mother's salad bowl, my grandfather's sword, my great-great-grandmother's wedding dress, my wedding ring-- and not just to things. Buy too many things and you'll start to attach importance to them, to gratify this emotional need.

Just for this month, at least, enjoy the things you have.

Trail mix (something you don't need to buy)
Combine, in approximately equal amounts:
Raisins (dredge them in a little cinnamon sugar first, for a sweeter mix)
Dried cranberries or other dried fruit*
Granola
Lightly salted peanuts
Unsalted crushed almonds or walnuts
*if using a larger fruit like apples or apricots, chop it fine first, to pieces slightly smaller than a raisin

Season to taste with:
Sea salt
Nutmeg
Finely chopped candied ginger

Just keep a big jar of this around.

Things that annoyed me at the Safeway today

• I live 50 miles south of Wisconsin, the richest dairy country in the world, yet milk at Safeway comes from Colorado and California.

• The lady who didn't like the canned pumpkin because of "additives" but didn't have time to buy and bake a pumpkin, which I believe is guaranteed additive free, by definition.

• No concord grapes

• Identical free range eggs (at least they had them!)-- same brand, grade, quantity, and even package wording and design-- but one was 70c more expensive. No one could figure out why.

• It's hard to use the self checkout if you have your own bags; it senses when you put an item into a bag, but only its own bags. You have to get the clerk to keep entering a "skip bagging" code.

I'd like to once again thank Whole Foods for buying up or shutting down all the local organic and coop markets. Also, if that lady had just bought the damn pumpkin, she could have made these:


Roasted squash seeds with candied ginger

Seeds from 4 small butternut squash or 2 small pumpkins
5-6 pieces candied ginger
pumpkin pie spice (cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, ginger)
allspice
sea salt
sugar

Heat oven to 350F

Clean and drain the seeds, then lay them out on parchment paper until they've dried to slightly sticky (don't dry them all the way). Place in a bowl. Dice the ginger into very small bits, mix with the seeds. Sprinkle with the spices, sugar and salt until completely coated. Transfer them to a baking sheet lined with parchment, spreading them into a single layer. Bake in 5-minute bursts for no more than 15 minutes, until browned and crispy. Allow to cool and then hide them because otherwise everyone will steal them from you.

What the kids remember

From Proust to your grandma's pot roast, food memories are primal. Mine are all tied up in my mother's illness when I was a teen. I strain to remember what she taught me before she got sick and gradually stopped cooking (when I was about 14). I seek those tastes and smells. Forty years later I still scour her cookbooks, looking for the pages that are stained, or where the binding stays open, because then I know she made that item a lot.

If I could give one piece of advice to young parents it would be "pay attention." I don't mean for them to turn every precious second of Princess's life into a Kodak moment, I mean observe, and savor. Be mindful.

I asked my 24 year old son and 21 year old daughter for their memories of food growing up.

From my son, Seng Lim:

My earliest food-related memories with you were of that little organic grocery store we used to go to. I don't remember the foods very much, more the smell and look of the store. I don't quite remember when you stopped doing as many home cooked meals, but I feel like it had to do with a combination of you taking on more work and Nga Jee coming along and getting picky.

I feel like the food started with good, healthy food in early childhood, followed by "the dark side" when Nga Jee and I were 8-12 years old. Once I got to high school, I remember full family dinners became less frequent—I can recall many evenings when I would get back from school around 5pm and be the only one there until 8 or 9 at night, or I would be out doing something late and have to buy dinner for myself. The summers around that time were different—you were growing lots of vegetables by then, and our schedules were less crazy so we were together for meals more. But during most of the year, I ate a lot of popcorn for dinner (hey, I was pretty lazy back then). Overall, I think we were pretty typical kids as far as randomly refusing to eat things, but I think we all always appreciated and enjoyed your meals, especially the "family favorites."

My memories of the garden are mostly of forced manual labor. I enjoyed the fresh vegetables and the colors when it was in bloom, but mostly I think about digging flower beds, laying paths and patios, and mowing it soooo many times. Also, I remember your compulsion with it—picking weeds to and from the garage every time we left the house. That one's easy to remember, because I'm pretty sure you still do it!

Also, why did you feed us lima beans? Do you actually like lima beans? I am never going to feed any child of mine lima beans.

From my daughter, Nga Jee:

I can't remember much of when you started feeding us crap*, but I'm almost certain it was because of me, because I don't think Seng Lim cared much about what he ate and if he did he's not really the kind of person to complain about it. Most of what I remember about the garden is you FORCING me to work with you (and not liking that). But I remember when we had the patio and the old porch. The flower beds on the left have always been there for me and I can just remember before there was the little side paths and all that stuff.

I always really liked the garden veggies. I thought the carrots were lame compared to the grocery store ones because they were so puny but they tasted better. And I remember walking to and from the grocery store with the red wagon. Strangely all my memories of groceries occur in the summertime. I can't even remember recent grocery trips in the winter. I remember even when we drove we would load the wagon in the garage with all the bags and drag it to the bottom of the porch too. Which seems funny to me now, cuz the garden's only like 7 meters long.

I actually really liked when you got new plants and we had to dig the hole and then put in the plant and then fill it with water.

*this would be because she was the fussy one, eating not so much "crap", as she puts it, as an all-carbohydrate diet. The child lived on bread and noodles. Neither of them were big candy-eaters until they were well in high school, meaning I ended up eating most of the contents of their Easter baskets and Halloween haul. This is how mothers get fat.

What do your offspring remember about food growing up? What do your younger ones think about it now?

Old-fashioned popped corn
about 1/4 cup oil
3/4 cup popping corn
(I got mine through freshpicks.com from a local farm. Most farmers markets will have a vendor selling locally-grown popping corn.)


This is how we made popcorn when I was a kid, before air poppers and before microwave popcorn (in fact, when I was a kid, only The Jetsons had magic ovens like microwaves)

Get a large, lidded pot. It is important to use a pot large enough, so that your popcorn won't overflow and cause a mess. Coat the bottom of the pot with a thin layer of oil (about 1/8 inch). Heat the oil on medium on top of the stove until it's hot, or until it appears to reach a watery consistency. (Another way to test whether your oil is hot enough is to stand back and flick a droplet of water into the pot and wait for it to sizzle.) Coat the bottom of the pot with a layer of popcorn. A 1 gallon pot will take about 3/4 cup of popcorn, which will yield about 2 quarts popped. Try to ensure that there is only a single layer of popcorn and that none of the kernels overlap.

Cover the pot and turn the stove up to medium-high/high. As the oil begins to bubble, gently shake the pot in a left to right motion (not up and down) so that the popcorn kernels move and don't burn. After a minute or so, the popcorn will begin to pop. Continue to shake the pot on the stove until all of the kernels have popped. It's a lovely sound.

Transfer your popcorn into a separate container. Melt butter in the microwave and drizzle over your freshly popped popcorn! You can add any seasonings you like-- grated cheese, herbs, pepper, salt (of course).

Dial up a movie and kick back! I can't believe Seng Lim used to eat microwave popcorn for dinner. I am apparently the Worst Mom Ever.