the hot sweet

A late-afternoon moment this weekend found me and my daughters gobbling raspberries and grapes off the bush and vine, respectively, like bears laying it in for the long winter sleep. For many reasons, certainly including the golden September light, it was heavenly.

Faced with a perfect grape, or berry, or peach, or moment, sweetness is enough.  

Another moment this weekend found me wanting to make an apple crumb bar.  This can happen to a pie-averse person in New England in the fall, even in a year (like this one) that is pretty light on apples.  In this case, sweetness didn't seem like it would, in fact, be enough.  The idea of an apple bar lightly seasoned with (snore) cinnamon made me feel tired.  I found I was thinking of a spicy apple bar, and let me tell you, my thoughts did not run to nutmeg. 

A little toodle around the Interwebs reminded me of another thing that's very hot and now, which is caramel, especially with salt in it.  I generally hide under the couch when the Hot and the Now are out and about, but I do like caramel.  My grandmother used to send little kits with sheets of caramel and wooden sticks to make caramel apples.  I am pretty sure we just ate the caramel sheets neat.

A number of bars trotted across the screen with caramel sauce in them.  But they all said, 'oh, how nice, an apple bar, sleep well,' to me.  I wanted something with a little more presence.  I know every other thing that doesn't have bacon (so hot!  so now!) in it all of a sudden has chiles (very hot, very now), but trendiness aside, I really do like a little heat with the sweet.

A plan began to take shape.

Having gone on record that caramel sauce is a snap to make, I stand by this assertion.  I also stand by the assertion that I had 10 caramels from Trader Joe's left over from assembling some party bags, and thanks to that I could move from plan to action like a sprinter.  By all means make your own caramels.  Homemade caramels are excellent for your self-esteem.  But you don't have to make them, for this.  I won't tell anyone.

There's some nutritional merit to these bars, though I don't think that will register for most of the people you feed them to.  I used white whole wheat flour, but I bet you could use regular and still not be found out.  You could replace some of the whole wheat flour with almond meal, if you wanted to enhance the healthy aspect of things, or even add some nuts to the filling if that appeals.

APPLE BARS

base & topping

1.5 cups whole wheat flour

1/3 c sugar

1/4 c flax meal

1/2 t baking powder

pinch of salt

pinch of cinnamon

1 stick of butter (half a cup, or 8T), cold

1 egg, beaten

filling

1 t red pepper flakes

2 t finely grated fresh ginger

1 large apple, peeled, cored and chopped in about 3/4" dice

2t cornstarch

1T sugar

10 caramels, chopped up

A fat pinch of coarse, flaky salt

Heat the oven to 375.  Lightly butter an 8x8 baking pan. 

Combine the dry ingredients and cut the butter into them until you have a coarse, mealy texture.  Pour in most of the beaten egg and toss everything together; you are aiming for a crumbly dough that will come together when you squeeze it.  Add more egg if you need it, and even a splash of water.  But keep it crumbly, overall.

Pat 2/3 of this mixture pretty firmly into your prepared dish, and set it aside. Reserve the remaining crumbly bits separately.

Toss the apple chunks with the sugar, ginger, chiles and cornstarch.  Now toss in the caramels and the salt, and then spread this out on the waiting crust.  Crumble the reserved dough on top of this, and bake for about 35 minutes, until the crust is golden and firm.  You can spoon it out while it is hot, but for cutting purposes, best to cool completely before slicing.

seedy indeedy

We re-homed four of our eleven roosters this week.  Thanks to the miracle that is Craig's List--who is Craig?  the patron saint of loons who know there are other loons out there who want their stuff?--I found a lady who would take as many as we were willing to give her.  That number, for me and my husband anyway, was nine.  Roosters are useful, but not in the concentration we are presently hosting.  When the numbers get too high, it's just a big frat party and the feed bills go up while the poor beleaguered hens go bald and form unions.

Posting something on Craig's List definitely opens your world up to some chaffy emails, but the woman we ended up with seemed like the real deal.  She and I made a date.  Here at the homestead, we prepared to load the boys up.  I wish I could give you the entire transcript of my younger daughter's litany as we considered the menfolk of the coop.  (Not him--he was the little brown chick we loved so much!  Not HIM, for goodness' sake--he is Fern's brother!  Not him--he is too old to have to get used to a new place. And so on.) In the end, we parted with four, because it was very clear that four was as many as we were parting with peacefully in one day. Maybe you know that look that children can develop, around the edges, when the needle on their main gauge is jumping towards "overload."  

I drove with four quiet roosters to an exit on the highway halfway between the lady's loony home and my own.  I stopped at the appointed meeting place, having arrived first.  Quietness ceased.  Mad, competitive quadrophonic cock-a-doodling commenced.  It was pouring with rain, so I sat in the car with the windows up and let me tell you, sound accumulates quickly in a space like that. Mercifully, this decibel level prevents deep introspection.

Per my husband's suggestion, I frisked the lady for marinade, large casseroles and recipes for coq au vin.  She came up clean, so I transferred four roosters from my kennel boxes to hers without, I am pleased to say, releasing any live birds into the Friendly's parking lot or onto the Massachusetts Turnpike.

Four down, five to go.  It's a process.

Today, it's not raining anymore. It's a nice day, and someone left the door open...

...so you-know-who was discovered in the dining room.  I think it's sweet that she shares my interest in cooking.

Food news, you ask?  

Hmm.  When I am operating under an appreciable but manageable amount of stress, I try with varying degrees of success to take the whole "body is a temple" approach to self-care.  Here, dear carriage of my being--here is a green juice for you.  Here is a yoga class.  Here is some balanced nutrition, served at regular intervals on a plate while you sit in a chair.  Perhaps this is just me, but when the going gets tougher, when the needles on my gauges are heading for the red area, that strategy goes out the window faster than whatever it is that comes to your mind that defenestrates quickly.  (Suddenly I cannot think of a thing, other than the flaming log my uncle threw out onto his suburban lawn in 1972, shortly after lighting a festive Thanksgiving fire, when it became clear that the fireplace in his home was more decorative than functional, but that mental image may not speak as directly to your mind's eye as it does to mine. Trust me: he did it rapidly.)  

When I need it most, when my weary self would derive the greatest benefit from that good nutrition and tender care I spoke of, then what I begin to crave runs more to gummy bears and whoopie pies and I have to watch myself very carefully.

Things like sugar and wheat, which I can flirt with to a degree when all is right with my world, are things I need to steer quite clear of when I am taxed.  But I am a big believer in comfort food.  A dilemma.  Enter pudding!  I love things on a spoon, and despite my devotion to spicy food, I loooooove things like tapioca--gloppy and gummy and mild.  My friend Laura turned me on to chia seed pudding a while ago, and it is just absolutely the ticket at the moment. Here is her sophisticated version, and below is how that panned out in my kitchen.

If your thinking about chia seeds, like mine, was stuck here:

 

then you might like to know that chia seeds, like flax seeds, are rich in a certain useful kind of omega-3 fatty acid that your body can use to reduce inflammation, and you might also like to know that very little time and few kitchen skills indeed are called for here.  This is a quick experiment. If you like tapioca, you are likely to like it.  You can customize the flavor as you wish and I bet you could use a packaged nut milk or coconut milk to make it--I just happen to vigorously dislike the packaged kind, and the home kind takes about three minutes to whip together and totally smokes the boxed stuff in terms of flavor and consistency.

I am not really sure how to weave it into the narrative here, but I feel you should also be aware that this exists, and so does this.  I would not want your errant googling to lead you there, and think I was holding out on you.

chia pudding

a scant cup of almonds (or maybe hazelnuts, or cashews if you lean that way), raw or toasted

a couple tablespoons of sesame seeds (optional, if you like the flavor)

1/2 cup chia seeds (for reasons I cannot explain, the dark ones are much easier to work with than the white ones, which are very prone to clumping)

3T honey or maple syrup or sorghum

dash vanilla

pinch of sea salt

Put the nuts and sesame seeds in the container of your blender with about 3 cups of water, and let them soak for a bit--I have soaked them for a minute, and for an hour, and seen recipes that suggest you soak them for 8-12 hours, and while there may be levels of nutritional difference between the various outcomes, they all taste the same to me).  Grind them entirely, and pour into a fine mesh strainer, or a cloth-lined one if you don't have the mesh one.  Press or squeeze the solids until they are as dry as you can get them. You should have about 2 1/2 cups of nut milk, maybe a little more.  [The paste that is left behind can be turned into nut butter (by combining it with some coconut oil and maybe a little flavoring of your choosing), used in baking, thrown into your oatmeal or smoothie, or be cast straight into the yard for whatever kind of bird dwells in yours.  You can also use a food dehydrator to make crackers out of it, but I am going to spare you those details for the moment.]

Put the nut milk and all the remaining ingredients into a jar with a tight-fitting lid and shake it like you mean it, until everything is well-combined and evenly distributed.  Refrigerate for a few hours, shaking periodically for the first half hour, until chilled and set.  You can garnish it beautifully with chopped nuts or orange sections, like Laura did, or you can sneak off with the jar and a spoon, like I did.

sandwiched between

 

My son is a big eater.  He is not a very big person, not in any direction, but he can pack away an enormous amount of food.  Though you might expect he would finish a big meal looking like The Little Prince’s boa-constrictor-who-swallowed-an-elephant (that creature, if you recall, resembled a fedora--see drawings #1 and #2, below), in fact he does not.  I am not sure where he keeps the food.

illustrations by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

When he was in kindergarten, his Lunchbox Lament was “never enough.”  I assembled bigger and bigger lunches, and we began to project that when he got to first grade, and required both snack and lunch to be packed for him, that he would need a wheeled suitcase to carry it all.

This has not come to pass.  I sing the Lunchbox Lament now, and it goes a little something like this: “why didn’t you eat your lunch?  Why, oh, why, did you not eat the nice lunch that I packed?” His standard story is that the allotted lunch time is too short.  This defense has been cross-checked with his teacher, and it did not bear up under further investigation.  It is suspected that chatting occupies the jawbone in question more than chewing does.

Recently he has made it known that he has covetous feelings for his seat-mate’s vanilla sandwich cookies, and so I spent some time last week making a cookie that could carry some nutritional firepower and still taste like a cookie.  This is version 2.0, and maybe you will try it out and let me know how you tweak it, and I’ll let you know if they make a round trip in today’s lunchbox.

The fine print:

• I used a combination of shortening and butter in the cookies, because that makes them taste (to me, anyway) more bakery-ish, and makes them crisper, but you could use all butter. 
• In my quest to boost nutrition, I replaced the standard powdered sugar in the filling with nonfat dry milk powder, which is quite sweet and hardly required any additional sweetener to make them feel dessertish.  I reckon you could use powdered other kinds of milk, too. Just be sure it is entirely free of lumps.
• The fillings may look too runny when you mix them up, but once they are in the cookie sandwich, they set up more firmly. 
• I used the no-stir kind of peanut butter for the peanut version (I have a secret passion for Skippy--do not tell anyone); if you use all-natural peanut butter, you may want a slightly higher proportion of shortening to PB for the sake of texture.
• My brilliant friend Alana (who has a dandy recipe for the straight-up dessert version of the classic tooth-blackening chocolate sandwich cookie in her wonderful book) taught me to slit open a paper towel tube lengthwise and roll the dough log in it to create round cookies, but all my empty paper towel tubes get turned into telescopes or marble runs almost immediately and are probably under the couch.  Lacking that high-tech tool to mold with, I punted and made square-ish cookies: 

sandwich cookies

makes about 36 sandwiches

8 T butter

4T shortening

½ c sugar

1 egg, room temperature

1/2 t vanilla

pinch salt

1 ¾ c flour (all purpose, or a mixture of ww pastry flour and all purpose)

½ c almond meal

¼ c golden flax meal

Cream the butter, shortening and sugar until quite smooth.   Beat in the egg and vanilla.  Combine the dry ingredients, and mix these in to make a smooth dough.  Don't over-beat.  Scrape the dough into a fat snake onto a long sheet of wax paper, and roll it up, either using a slit-open tube to create a smooth round log, or using the counter to form a smooth square.  Chill for at least one hour in the fridge.

When you are ready to bake, line two baking sheets with parchment and preheat the oven to 350.  Use a sharp knife to cut the chilled dough into 1/4" slices (thicker cookies create an unsatisfactory cookie-to-filling ratio, and lower your yield) and lay these on the parchment. They will not rise or spread much in baking so they can be pretty near each other.  Bake 8-10 minutes, reversing the sheets halfway through to ensure even baking, until the centers are firm and the edges barely golden.  Remove to a rack to cool.

When they are completely cool, fill them with one of these things:

peanut butter filling

4T creamy (not chunky) PB

3T shortening

1T honey

¼ c milk powder

Cream everything together well and try not to eat it all.

vanilla filling

3T butter

4T shortening

¼ c milk powder

1T honey

¼ t vanilla, or 1/2 t finely-grated lemon zest and a teaspoon of lemon juice

Cream everything together really well.