An excuse to eat crap on August 9

I usually crave gelato rather than Dairy Queen, but this evening will find me lining up for a Blizzard. Today, August 9, is the day that Dairy Queen donates all proceeds from Blizzard sales to Children's Miracle Network. (In our area, that's Beaumont Hospital.)

I've never actually had a Blizzard because I've been turned off by the utterly disgusting Blizzard combo that my husband orders every time we go to Dairy Queen: A mint Blizzard with Heath bars and Reeses mixed in. Yup, mint, toffee and peanut butter--it always makes the person behind the counter stop, squint at him and say, "are you sure?" when he orders it. I tasted it once and never want to taste it again.

Find out if your local Dairy Queen is participating in the fundraising--this web site has a zip code search. In Ann Arbor, that means going to the one on Stadium Blvd (the other Ann Arbor stores aren't participating) or to the one in Dexter or Ypsi.

We'll be having salad for dinner to prepare our bodies for the onslaught of corn-syrup based confections later in the evening.

Strategies for staying cool while still eating

Eat Chlodnik. I think I could happily replace all my body fluids with this stuff. I know many people have the same feeling about gazpacho.

Cook anything that needs to be cooked at night. Want to make a salade nicoise for dinner tomorrow? Boil up the potatoes, eggs, and green beans at night when it is cool and leave them in the fridge to be accessed tomorrow. Heck, if you have a strong attic fan, like my friend Lea, bake a quiche at night.

Pretend you are someplace where it doesn't feel like a swamp outside and have a picnic for dinner at your dining room table. Buy some good stinky cheese and salami and loaf of crusty bread; uncork a bottle of red, slice up a few tomatoes and cucumbers. Make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the kids. Eat fresh peaches with ice cream for dessert. Let the kids draw pictures of ants on a big sheet of paper and spread it over the table for authentic atmosphere!

Get someone else to feed you. Drop hints to your friends that it is time for them to invite your family over for dinner. Let them heat up their kitchen!

Don't forget that many stouts and porters are rich in B vitamins. Drink your dinner. Or you could be all healthy and make smoothies, if beer-for-dinner isn't your style.
Employ your grill. If you can stand to be out in the swamp air for just a few minutes, make grilled shrimp. They take about 2 minutes per side to grill when threaded on a skewer. Or make a beer can-chicken which cooks almost entirely untended so you can stay in the air conditioning.

But using grill does go with this warning: do not, I repeat, do not leave food untended on high on the grill to run upstairs and break up a fight between your kids. Let them throttle each other. If it sounds like there will be blood to clean up, turn it to low before you sprint for the stairs. Otherwise you will return to this:

Look, I made charcoal briquettes out of sweet potatoes.

Lesson: don't panic

For the love of god, do not make that chocolate zucchini cake I mentioned I was going to try. Dis-Gus-Ting. I wish I had done a little research and looked at more recipes before baking it. The one I made was dense, and oily and totally flat in flavor. I cut one wedge of it, ate about 3 bites and dumped the rest of the (huge) cake in the trash.

Chocolate and Zucchini has, appropriately, a much more palatable sounding Chocolate Zucchini Cake or this recipe, from the Simply Recipes blog sounds decent. I don't know what I was thinking when I made the lousy version--I think I panicked in the face of the zucchini onslaught and just went for the recipe that used the most zucchini.

I did make something good with a substantial portion of the rest of the zucchini lurking in the kitchen, but don't have photographic evidence. (Yes, lurking. If you pick up a dish towel and find a zucchini hiding underneath it, I think it can be accused of lurking.) I made some zucchini feta pancakes with a dilled tatziki sauce and they were terrific; so terrific that we ate them all before I laid my hands on the camera. I'll definitely be making them again and I'll try to write down the recipe (I was improvising and hope I can repeat it) and take a photo before they are all gone.

The onslaught

The produce is starting to flood in from my garden. After this week's heat, there were four huge zucchini to greet me when I went over to my garden (which is located in my Mother-in-law's backyard since she has direct sunlight and our yard has lots of shade). I swear they were tiny when I last checked them four days earlier. I have a promising recipe for chocolate zucchini cake which might mean I can actually sneak some zucchini into the small people (it looks especially good for using up the huge zucchini that might be too spongy for sauteeing--the recipe calls for 3 cups shredded). They are too suspicious to eat zucchini bread, but the cocoa powder should cover up any green flecks in the cake.

There were also more beans in my garden than we could easily consume in a meal or two, so I decided to take the opportunity to make some Dilly Beans.

What? You have never heard of Dilly Beans? I don't know where my mom got the recipe, but I remember munching my way through a whole jar of these when I was 8 years old and a bit of a salt fiend. They are semi-crisp, sour, salty, spicy, long pickles without any of the potential excessive slipperiness factor that homemade cucumber pickles sometimes fall into. Dilly Beans are great along side a good sandwich or laid out in a bowl for snacking with beer. I also am looking forward to trying them in a martini instead of an olive--I think the little kick they have will be a nice complement to the gin.

One could conceivably can these things with a real hot water process so they are shelf stable. I'm way to lazy for that, so I just make enough to store in the fridge.
Here are my beans, packed and ready for their hot vinegar salt brine.

The recipe looks nicer if you have pint jars, but I only had two big quart jars on hand, so the beans are a little wadded up in there. With the pint jars you can get your fingers down to the bottom to arrange them so they are all nicely lined up and vertical. But really, wadded up Dilly Beans still taste fine.

I'll use some of the extra dill I have left over from the beans to make my favorite summer soup, Chlodnik, which also uses up 4 of the beautiful sweet cucumbers that I picked today!

Dilly Beans
This makes 4 pint jars and assumes that you will NOT do a boiling water bath so will store the finished product in the refrigerator.

2 pounds green beans, trimmed
1 tsp cayenne
4 cloves garlic
4 heads of dill (or good sized wads of fresh dill)
2 1/2 cups water
2 1/2 cups cider vinegar
1/4 cup salt

Blanch the beans for about one minute in boiling water then cool rapidly in ice water to prevent further cooking.

To each pint jar, add 1/4 teaspoon cayenne, 1 clove garlic, 1 head dill (or a generous amount of fresh dill).

Pack the beans lengthwise into the jars, leaving 1/4 inch of head space.

Combine remaining ingredients and bring to a boil.

Pour, boiling hot, over the beans, covering the beans. Put on and tighten the caps--carefully! The jars are hot hot hot!

Let cool down and then refrigerate.

Store for about 2 weeks to develop flavor before eating.

Dilly Beans will keep for 2 or 3 months in the refrigerator before losing their crispness.

Poetry and knitting

If you appreciate both of the above subjects, you must head over to today's post at A Fuse #8 Production. The poem is by Susan Ramsey (Fuse #8's mom, who I vaguely seem to remember lives here in Ann Arbor) titled "Mariah Educates the Sensitive." The poem makes me want to pull out my stash and dig my wrists into woolly goodness!

Flight

While many people think of summer as a leisurely time to tackle long books, the opposite is true for the majority of the women in my book group. Summer is a pretty crazy time, especially if you did what I did this summer and scoffed at the cost of day camps and decided that "Mommy-Camp" would be just as much fun and cheaper (I did send them both to camp last week--Ian full-day and Fiona half-day and man was it nice to have a little break from each other). Coming up with interesting stuff for a 7 and 4 year old takes a hell of a lot of time and energy, so a good, fast moving book is always appreciated.

Flight, by Sherman Alexie, was a really wonderful book which was also really fast read. Zits is a really compelling character--funny and perceptive, but wild and scary in the way that only a lost adolescent can be. This mix makes the massacre at the bank all too easy to understand. Without Zits' voice--bewildered, funny, smart, hurt--the book could spiral into a depressing soup of the worst humanity has to offer: oppression, deception and violence. But instead, throughout the time travel incidents, Alexie manages to show Zits' longing for contact and trust, while never dropping the defenses and suspicions of a damaged adolescent.

The group all agreed that the relatively happy ending helped a lot and we could have seen a totally different ending plunging the book into despair. But Zits' sharp sense of humor kept it from feeling too sentimental when things do seem to work out.

We also had some interesting questions about what we guessed was the writer's process. Ami and I felt that the book might have come in a rush and wasn't cut much from draft to draft; the voice felt so pure and consistent, I could only imagine Alexie inhabiting this consciousness for a finite period of time to keep it from being watered down. But Meagan thought the original manuscript was probably4 or 5 times the length of the book, with many more time travel incidents, and then Alexie pared it down a great deal. Obviously, we don't know the answer to these questions, but it was fun to talk about the process of writing and not just the product.

Food-wise there wasn't a lot to go on--a couple of references to gloppy oatmeal in a foster home and a guy picking through a garbage can for food. Zits' quest is about his identity as half Native American and half Irish so we figured that was an open ended invitation to focus on the bounty of summer and go with a kind of local, fresh vegetable and fruit based cuisine. And here is what our groaning table looked like:
Counter clockwise from the top left--trout and wild rice with ginger, scallion, sake sauce, tomatoes stuffed with goat cheese, olives, pine nuts, basil and bread crumbs, calabacitas (summer squash and roasted chilies sauteed with sharp cheddar), a salad with lots of peppery arugula and beets, pasta salad and a bowl of cherries.

And not pictured on the table is the sweet corn and hominy chowder:
and the peach black raspberry crisp:
It was all fabulous (of course!) and we ate and drank a lot of wine until the mosquitoes descended (though it was nicely mosquito-free for most of the night).

The next book we plan to read is Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. I read the book back in January and loved it, but haven't had anyone to talk it over with and there is lots there to talk about.

What a kindness

It seems that the library knew that I'd be coming down from my Harry rush and so supplied me with a literary cushion--a fantastic novel.

I finished Peter Ho Davies' new novel The Welsh Girl on Thursday at about 5 am (bad thunderstorm, bad insomnia, but excellent book to keep me company!)

The novel is beautifully written, really exquisite prose, and the author has that ability to end chapters with the perfect sentence; you know the sentence that makes you take in a little breath and hold it while you relish the language, before you dive into the next chapter. The funny thing is that this ability reminds me of Charles Baxter, who used to live in Ann Arbor and teach at U-M, which is what Peter Ho Davies currently does. Maybe U-M's creative writing program likes to hire people with this (all too rare) writing ability?

The novel focuses on three disparate characters--a German POW, the "Welsh girl" of the title, and a half-Jewish, German refuge who is now a part of the British military intelligence and who debriefs captured Germans. The interesting thing is that there are actually very few chapters where the characters encounter each other, though that doesn't stop them from thinking about each other. The internal lives of each of these three characters are so vivid and full and unique that it is actually startling when they do interact. To go from internal to external, from meditative to the snap of direct encounter, could be really messy and discordant, but Davies makes it seem effortless.

There are all sorts of lovely thematic resonances in the book too: what it means to surrender, what is courage and what is cowardice, the longing to escape, how to define the concept of "home" and the comforts and the confinements of the familiar. Each of these themes is picked up and expressed differently by the three characters so that the reader gets to roll each theme around, like a faceted ball, seeing a glint of insight here, and then a different flash as the ball is passed to the next character.

I'm going to return the book to the library, you know, just to help with some other reader's potential Harry crash, but I certainly won't forget this book. Of the books I've read this year, this book is now front and center in the purchase list for holiday gifts.

I know it wasn't a race

(Don't worry, no spoilers here!)

I finished HP7 at 12:47 this morning. With the breaks I took for meals, kid time, going to the bathroom, showers and an afternoon burst of scone baking (the mention of comforting cups of tea in any English book triggers the scone-making impulse in me), I figure I averaged about 60 pages per hour. I know it wasn't a race.

Yesterday was bliss--I picked up the book from Nicola's at 7:45 am and went to the gym and read while on the recumbent bike for almost an hour. And after this burst of activity I completely regressed to my 11-year-old self and hardly moved from a sitting position on a beautiful summer day. Some kids have summer camp, or playing baseball, or riding bikes (or in the case of my husband, digging a trench around his house, adding gasoline and a match and giving his mom a heart attack) as their most fond memories from summertime when they were kids. My favorite memory is of days and days of unlimited time to read.

My parents were tolerant of it then--yes, books were allowed at the dining room table so long as you also ate without complaining--and yesterday, god bless 'em, they enabled me to re-live a day of it. At about 11:30 am they came and took their two darling grandchildren away for a full day of granny and grandpa fun: playing at their house, eating lots of fruit leathers (which have replaced goldfish crackers in our house as "kiddie cocaine"), swimming at the pool. They brought them back at about 6 PM and then Brian took the kids out to eat at a local diner (and brought me home a huge Greek salad with grilled chicken).

I snuggled with the kids, tucked them in to bed and then went back to my book. I confess I did need a couple of Tylenols by the closing hours since there is only so much left-to-right tracking that my eyeballs can do before it causes my skull to throb (kinda like Harry's scar! But in a good way!)

I loved reading the book, but I loved even more the way I got to read the book--like a greedy little 11-year-old without a care in the world.

Chicken-y goodness

Despite the appearance of a tornado in Whitmore Lake at 4 PM and some crazy strong rain shortly thereafter, the skies cleared in time for us to head out to the 54th Annual Manchester Chicken Broil last night. I've meant to go to this every year and never got my butt out there, but finally got to witness the smoky glory of 19,000 lbs of grilled chicken. The timing was also terrific as this is Art Fair week in Ann Arbor and when hundreds of thousands of people pour into our town, well, I want to flee in a different direction entirely. And it helps if that direction has smoky chicken air to guide me.
I don't even want to think of thevolunteers who did all the cooking.

When the wind picked up and the smoke cleared for a second I was able to see the actual humans bent over the pit:
Sparkles-the-Rescue-Cat (Fiona's most frequent alter ego) was excited about getting to sink her teeth into some chicken.
And for $8 ($7 if you planned and got advance tickets) you got:
Half a chicken (which you can see she is already decimating), radishes, a pile of really good coleslaw (which I will attempt to reproduce tonight and post the recipe if I am successful), potato chips, roll and butter and soda, ice tea or water. The dark meat of the chicken was fantastic, the white meat was a little dry, but better that than an undercooked chicken. The food safety geek in me was happy to hear the announcer say that they use an instant read thermometer to temp test every chicken before it is served--with approx 14,000 dinners, that is a busy thermometer.

I was amazed by the efficiency of the operation. We waited for about 10 minutes in one (smoky) fast moving line outside the gates to get our tickets but once inside we went through the food line immediately and were sitting down at a table before a) any of the kids started to complain and b) we lost them in the crowds.

The proceeds of the Chicken Broil go to building playgrounds in the town--and I wish I had remembered to take a picture of the playground the kids managed to drag their full bellies to after dinner called the "Chi Bro Playground" whose name clearly tells you who paid for the place. They had taken some pretty standard playground equipment but had customized it with panels on the sides which transformed the structures into a huge fire engine and a police car. The actual equipment was pretty basic--tubes, slides, fireman poles, platforms and steering wheels--but by decorating the thing with the panels it opened up a great level of imaginative play to be mixed with the standard crazy kid-at-a-playground energy. I heard one mom whose kids were playing in the back of the police car happily telling her kids they were dangerous criminals and she was taking them to jail, which would make a nice change from my kids repeatedly threatening to take me to jail...

Ginormous

Did you know that "ginormous" was recently added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary?

Good thing too since I have the perfect opportunity to use the word when addressing blueberries I picked today:
On the left is Mr. Ginormous The Insane Berry and on the right is a "typical" berry. There were way more of the Mr. Ginormous berries than the "typical" berries at the Dexter Blueberry Farm where I picked about 3.5 lbs ($1.35/lb) in about 40 minutes.

And lest you think that anything that large must be watery and flavorless (as I've found huge strawberries to be when compared to their petite brethren) these babies have lots of flavor. In fact the flesh to skin ratio means that they have less of a sharp, acidic bite to them and taste even better raw. I just made a batch of the Lemon Prune whole grain muffins and substituted blueberries for the prunes so as soon as I get the kettle going and make myself some tea, I'll be able to report back on how they taste when cooked.