Day 224

This week marks 32 weeks of quarantine life. We’re not quite as strict as we were at the start, but generally speaking our interactions and excursions are still pretty limited. We ate dinner at a local restaurant last week, sitting at an outside table, and that was the first time I’d done that since March. But most weeks are the same set routine of online school and work, and most contact with other people is through a screen. One of my local friends and I have recently resumed our regular coffee meetups - outside - and that gives me the opportunity to bake something to bring along and share.

In my baking experiments the last few months I have also discovered a new gateway ingredient for DP - this is what I call any ingredient that will convince him to try a new dish that he would otherwise ignore. Until now, the list consisted of two items - bacon and cream sauce - which could only be applied to savory foods. However, I have now added crumb topping to this select group, after I came upon him scarfing down a raspberry crumb cake that I had left on the counter. Since he normally shuns any cake that doesn’t have frosting or does have fruit, this was a staggering discovery - and one that opens up a whole new world of baking experimentation.

Apple-Cinnamon Coffee Cakes

Adapted from One Bowl Baking

You can keep your pumpkin spice whatever - apple and cinnamon is the essence of fall flavor for me. I concocted this combination after the first new season apples started showing up at the farmers’ market and the temperatures finally, finally began to feel autumnal.

Despite what looks like a long list of ingredients and steps, this comes together pretty quickly. My main adaptation was to add the applesauce to the original recipe; these are still delicious even if you skip that step.

Ingredients

Applesauce

4 medium-sized apples (I’ve been buying Jonathans, Empires, Braeburns - sweet-tart red-green apples are my favorites for both eating and cooking)

A healthy splash of apple cider or water

1-2 Tbsp maple syrup

Cinnamon and nutmeg

Crumb topping

390 g/13.75 oz/2.75 cups all-purpose flour

200 g/7 oz/1 cup packed light brown sugar

1 Tbsp cinnamon

.5 tsp salt

10 ml/2 tsp vanilla extract

255 g/9 oz/18 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted

Cake batter

215 g/7.5 oz/1.5 cups all-purpose flour*

100 g/3.5 oz/.5 cup sugar

10g/2 tsp baking powder*

3 g/.5 tsp salt

28 g/1 oz/2 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted (plus more for greasing the pan if necessary)

15 ml/1 Tbsp vegetable oil

20 ml/4 tsp vanilla extract

1 large egg

180 ml/6 oz/.75 cup whole milk, room temperature

*I swapped in the same amount of self-raising flour for all-purpose and eliminated the baking powder.

Method

Heat the oven to 350F/180C and prepare your pan(s). The original recipe calls for a 13x9x2 baking pan, buttered; I used my jumbo muffin tins, lined with paper baking cups, and got 9 big muffins/small cakes.

Make the applesauce: I didn’t really measure this, just peeled, cored and chopped 4 apples and put them in a pan over low-medium heat with the cider to cook while I did everything else. When the apples were soft (10-15 minutes), I mashed them up with a fork, added the syrup, plus generous sprinklings or cinnamon and nutmeg. Leave to cool a bit until ready to add to the final assembly.

Make the crumb topping: In a medium bowl, combine flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, and salt. Stir vanilla into melted butter and add to dry ingredients. Mix thoroughly. 

Make the cake batter: In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Stir to mix thoroughly, then add melted butter, oil, vanilla, egg, and milk and stir again to fully combine. (I used my trusted dough whisk to make both the topping and the batter.)

Assemble the cakes: divide the batter among the lined baking cups. Repeat with scoops of applesauce, starting with 1 heaping Tbsp per cup and then sharing out the remainder. Sprinkle clumps of topping over each cake evenly.

Bake: bake trays in the middle of the oven until the cakes are set and the topping is just beginning to brown, 15-20 minutes. Rotate the pans and switch their positions at the 10-minute mark.

Cool on a rack. Share with a friend or a neighbor (or both!). Enjoy the taste of fall.

Day 177

In my house, these are leftovers

Back to the regular routine means back to the usual round of chores, errands, and meal planning; unfortunately one of the effects of grief that I discovered four years ago is its dull but demanding presence in daily life. I finally defined it to myself and others like trying to do everything while wearing a 60-pound backpack: I could still do everything I needed to do, but with a lot less energy and enthusiasm than usual. 

I hadn’t thought about that analogy in a while, but I’ve thought about it a lot over the past two weeks. It’s one of the things that hits you when the ceremonial part is over.

One of the things it dampens my enthusiasm for is food: I don’t have as much appetite, or incentive to cook. So it helps to find ways to inspire some creativity. One of my meal planning habits is to include a MacGyver meal in the weekly schedule - this is usually Thursday night, to use up whatever’s in the fridge before the Saturday farmers’ market run. During quarantine I’ve also revived Wild Card Wednesday, which sometimes is already booked with a new dish I want to try, and other times...not so much.

Last week - not so much. When DP and Miss B asked what was for dinner Wednesday night (which normally happens no later than lunchtime), I said, “I don’t know” - not a response they hear often, and which they both find slightly unnerving - as do I, to be honest. We are nothing if not a routine-oriented household.

There was plenty of food in the fridge, including the leftovers of a roast chicken, potato, and veg dinner I’d made earlier in the week - usually a good springboard to concoct something new. So when I sat down to eat lunch, I took Love Your Leftovers with me to page through for ideas.

Jackpot! Not only did that prompt me to remember that I could turn the leftover potatoes into gnocchi for that night’s dinner; a later section also included ideas for using up leftover beer - which I interpreted to include the three bottles of beer that have been taking up space in my fridge since a beer-loving friend stayed here last summer. The next night, I cracked one of them open, and used it in two different recipes selected for the purpose. The first was a chicken fricassee featuring leftover roast chicken and sauteed green beans, and the second was a soda bread to soak up all the fricassee sauce. It made a tasty and frugal dinner, but the best part for me was that it gave me something to feel enthusiastic about beforehand, and satisfaction afterwards - for being a creative and thrifty cook as much as for the food itself. My mother would have approved, although I doubt she ever had leftover beer in her fridge.

Chicken fricassee
I did not follow the written recipe at all - just took the idea and adapted it to what I had on hand. Here’s what I did:

• Heated some fat on a medium flame in a large cast-iron skillet - about 2 tablespoons of olive oil, butter, bacon fat, or some combination thereof

• Chopped half a red onion and threw in to saute

• Chopped about a cup of baby bella mushrooms and ditto, along with some salt, pepper, and garlic

• Let this saute on a moderate heat for about 7-10 minutes, until the mushrooms were looking cooked, while I cleaned about 1lb/450g of cooked chicken off the carcass and chopped about 2 cups of cooked green beans into bite-sized pieces, then set aside

• Deglazed the pan with half a bottle of beer (IPA I think) and let it bubble for 2-3 minutes

• Added some combination of sour cream, stock, and lemon juice and stirred together; adjusted amounts and seasonings until I had a thick, bubbling tasty sauce

• Threw in the chopped chicken and green beans and stirred them into the mix to heat through for about 5 minutes

• Served in bowls with hunks of warm soda bread alongside
  

This served 3, with a lunch portion left over.

Vale Mater

 

My mother and me, circa 1978

This past weekend I made an unplanned but long-expected visit to Boston, to say goodbye to my mother, who died earlier in August after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Because of the constraints imposed by the ongoing pandemic, it was a very different event from our farewell to my father four years ago, but my immediate family was able to be together and I am very grateful for that. 

My sisters and I have shared the responsibility of eulogizing our parents as well as other family members who had no children to commemorate them, and this time it was my and my sister L’s turn to deliver the results of our group efforts. Having written so much about my mother here over the years gave me a ready source of stories and ideas, and over the last week we all compiled a long list of notes which my sister C and I then worked together to shape into a coherent narrative that presented who our mother was to us, as a person and a parent. This is my very shortened adaptation of that.

My mother was the youngest child of a large Italian immigrant family, and her family was the dominant force that shaped her life. She lived with her own mother for the first half of her life, until my grandmother’s death in 1977. She was both a traditionalist and a rebel: she firmly believed that her primary and most important job was to be a wife, mother, and household manager, but she also raised her six daughters to be independent thinkers, self-sufficient, and well educated. By word and by example, every day of my childhood she demonstrated the importance of a concrete set of values: people rather than things; education over performance; quality rather than convenience; service over status.

These values were exemplified in her dedication to preserving her family’s food traditions. Fiercely proud of being an Italian, she refused to lower her standards and disgrace her heritage by cutting corners or settling for lower quality. Growing up in the sixties and seventies, my sisters and I were surrounded by people embracing the culture of “convenience food”, a concept that was utterly alien to and firmly rejected by my mother. Healthy, nutritious food, cooked from scratch, was the essence of a well-run home to her, and my family of eight, regularly joined by my aunt and my grandmother who lived downstairs, as well as friends and boyfriends, sat down to eat a homemade dinner seven nights a week. Whether she was simmering beef soup on the stove for hours, spending summer afternoons in the basement canning tomatoes with my grandmother and us, or making 26 apple pies’ worth of crust from scratch in a washtub in preparation for Thanksgiving so that there’d be enough for everyone in her huge family to have some, my mother expressed her love of her family, her meticulous nature, and her unwavering standards through food. Her commitment to her family and mine, supported and shared by my father, who was her true partner and best friend, is the foundation and the framework of all that I am.

I have been missing my mother for years, as Alzheimer’s slowly and relentlessly took everything that made her the passionate, opinionated, intuitive, and caring individual that she was. Her death not only frees her from its long bondage, but all of us who loved her as well, to mourn her loss and remember all that she gave us. As I walked into the grocery store on Monday morning, re-starting my normal weekly routine after a week of discombobulation, I thought of her - and then of all the things I do every day that bring her to my mind and give me the gift of her memory and her love.

My mother was shy and reserved, but had strong opinions and emotions, and one of the things she loved was music - a love she shared with my father. This song will forever remind me of watching them dance at weddings and other celebrations - having fun together, exuding joy and love.