Sticky Toffee Therapy

We had a doozy of a day today. No sun. No snow to play in (plenty of ice to slip and break your neck on though!) And Brian was gloomy too. I usually count on him to be able to pull me out of my funks, but he's fighting off a cold and had a crappy night sleep so his humor reserves were at a low.

I tried. I really did. I went to the gym first thing in the hopes of having endorphins help me out. I made a good breakfast: spinach sauteed in garlic and olive oil, egg cracked on top then sprinkled with feta accompanied by multigrain toast and strong coffee. We took the kids to see a planetarium show about the stars in ancient Egypt. I even wore the cheerful socks my sister gave me for Christmas:
But no go. Gloom still permeated the air. I decided it was time for some Sticky Toffee Pudding Therapy. Brian has never had Sticky Toffee Pudding which was everywhere you turned in England when I was there one winter in the early '90s. I figure that the English know something about gloom and how to treat it. Bring on the toffee!

It helps that it is a pretty simple recipe. The only "specialized" ingredient is the heavy cream for the caramel sauce. I made it in a loaf pan because as I accurately predicted, my freaky kids wouldn't eat it, so I halved the recipe (which would normally make an 8 inch square steamed pudding).

Sticky

Stickier
Stickiest

After devouring one piece, Brian looked up at me with the first sign of a smile I'd seen all day and asked: "How sick would we be if we ate the whole thing?"


Sticky Toffee Pudding Cake
serves 4-6 people, depending on gloom levels
adapted from Cook's Illustrated

Pudding cake
2 T butter melted
1/2 C plus 2 T unbleached all purpose flour
4 oz whole pitted dates, cut into 1/4 inch dice
a little less than a 1/2 C warm water
1/4 t baking soda
1/4 t baking powder
1/4 t salt
a little less than 1/2 C of dark brown sugar
1 egg
1 t vanilla

Toffee sauce
2 T butter
1/2 C packed dark brown sugar
1/4 t salt
1/2 C heavy cream

Pudding cake:

1. Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour a 4x8 inch loaf pan.
2. Combine half of the dates with the warm water and baking soda and soak for 5 minutes.
3. Whisk flour, baking powder and salt together in a medium bowl.
4. Bring a kettle of water to boil.
5. Process other half of the dates and the brown sugar in a food processor until it looks like damp sand, 45 seconds. Drain soaked dates--save the liquid, but set the dates aside. Add soaking liquid to the food processor. Add egg, vanilla and melted butter and process until smooth, 15 seconds.
6. Plop wet stuff from food processor on top of the dry stuff in your bowl and sprinkle the softened dates on top.
7. With a spatula, fold wet into dry until just combined and date pieces are distributed. Spread batter into prepared loaf pan. Put loaf pan in a bigger pan and pour boiling water in the bigger pan until it is about 1/4 inch deep. Cover the whole thing tightly with aluminum foil so the pudding cake will steam inside.
8. Bake for 40 minutes until puffed and springy.
   
9. Flip cake out onto serving platter.
10. Take a toothpick and stab holes in it for the toffee sauce to seep into (very therapeutic!) Spread about 1/4 of the sauce and let soak in. Do it again.
11. Cut into squares (or rectangles) and top each serving with more toffee sauce.

Toffee Sauce:

1. Melt butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Whisk in brown sugar and salt until smooth. Continue to cook until sugar is dissolved and slightly darkened, whisk occasionally (about 4 minutes).
2. Add 1/4 C cream and stir until smooth. Pour in remaining cream and whisk. Reduce heat to low and simmer until frothy, about 3 minutes.

Christmas meats

I left it until the last minute, but today, on Christmas Eve, I started (and finished) a revision of the decorations to Brian's stocking. Some folks who've been reading this blog waaaay toooo long may have a vague memory of our personalized stockings. Fiona's robot decorated stocking is pictured here. Mine has a pile of books; Ian's has a train. And Brian's used to have an assortment of cheeses. But cheese just wasn't right (I think it was just the first word that popped into his head when I asked him what he wanted on his stocking. It could very well have been "pontoon" on a different day.) Don't get me wrong, Brian likes cheese just fine, but he does not fetishize cheese the way he does meat. This is a man who has a "wall of meat" display of weird meat-related items next to his desk at work.

Here's a close up of the meats:
Ham, bacon and sausage (with fluorescent mustard) in a roll. The sausage was by far the hardest to pull off. The meat-man gave an appreciative nod of approval to the alterations.

And today, poking around at the Vault of Midnight, I found the perfect item to stuff in said stocking:
It looks revolting, but will be warmly appreciated.

When it comes to real meat, tomorrow I'll be making a prune stuffed pork loin for Christmas dinner, loosely based on this recipe.

The annual granola factory

It's a good thing I got my fun baking done last week because this week, the granola factory has been churning along:

This year's variety: Cherry Cranberry Granola

Here are the bags, all lined up and ready to go.
We're dropping them off a day early since 7-11 inches (!!) of snow are forecast for tonight and my guess is the last day of school before the break will be canceled. I do not need 10 pounds of granola sitting in the house waiting for school to start up again in January!

And yes, I did mention fun baking at the beginning of the post. On Saturday I attended my first cookie exchange with the Michigan Lady Food Bloggers. Patti hosted us (again!) and I have to say, the selection of cookies way exceeded my expectations:
Now that is a groaning table of bounty!

I made the cookies on the three goofy floral plates at the lower center of the photo: chocolate chocolate chip shortbread, mini mince pies and cranberry orange shortbread.

Want a closer look? (Of course you do!)
There were mincemeat spirals, date nut spirals, Italian wedding cookies, chocolate espresso cookies, chocolate biscotti, chocolate chip with coconut cookies, ginger snaps, jam thumbprint cookies, gingerbread mittens, pistachio bars, ginger cookies with candied ginger, homemade toffees and truffles and probably a few others that I'm forgetting.

Whew! And it's funny thing, but there aren't very many left from the heaped up container I brought home. Fiona gobbled up the ginger snaps and gingerbread, I appropriated the Italian wedding cookies and anything with mincemeat, and Brian has been coming to bed with chocolate and nuts on his breath (Ian thought they all looked too scary. Sigh.) So I might have to do a bit more fun holiday baking to get us through until Christmas, especially if the 7-11 inches of snow trap us in each other's company with no escape. Butter, sugar, chocolate and spices are almost as good as therapy in such a situation.

How does anyone get any work done?

These days, my brain is completely preoccupied with a) anxiety about the auto industry and b) the chaos of the holiday season.

Book? What book? I'm supposed to be writing a book?

The task of sitting down and spinning ideas into reasonably comprehensible prose seems even more impossible with the lack of sunlight, short days and hostile weather. It has felt much colder than usual--this Saturday I made the boy critter walk with me to the Farmer's Market when it was 18 degrees out. We got down there, got our 2 dozen eggs and we were about 1/2 a mile from home when I felt like I was ready to give up (the boy was fine, having fun kicking chunks of ice). I whimpered for the remainder of the march, then came home and sat in the tub until my thighs defrosted.

So that does it. I'm taking a break from the book; maybe once the holiday piano recital, the school multicultural fair and other holiday get togethers are over I can contemplate having enough of my brain back to devote time to my characters. But right now, it is dopey to keep fighting an uphill battle and making work that has been a wonderful pleasure into a chore.

The problem with peanut sauce....

....is that it looks like someone barfed on your food.

Despite this unpleasant aesthetic reality, I ate three bowls of the pictured (barfy-looking) goodness last week. Brian was off on a work trip and that meant I got to do some more single-girl cooking. I chucked bean and cheese quesadillas at the critters more times than I care to count, and then assembled the big bowl of brown rice, steamed vegetables and tofu topped with tasty but ugly peanut sauce for myself. I layered raw spinach on the bottom, then hot brown rice (which wilts the spinach a little) and then the cut up steamed zucchini, red pepper, broccoli, green and yellow beans, carrots and tofu cubes. Then a few glops of barf-sauce and ta da! Dinner!

Here's my master recipe. I know that it's hard to crave something so completely un-photogenic, but I'm thinking that keeping a container of this peanut sauce, along with my favorite tahini lemon sauce, ready in the fridge at all times would be a good idea.

Peanut Sauce

1/2 C peanut butter (I like chunky, though it makes the sauce look even more like barf)
1 T soy sauce
2 T brown sugar
juice of 1 lime
1/2 C coconut milk
1/2 C water
1 large clove pressed garlic
about 2 inch knob of ginger, grated (microplane does a great job with it)
2 T fish sauce (optional) or add a little more soy sauce

Combine all the ingredients in a small saucepan and heat over medium heat. Whisk to combine all the elements until the sauce bubble and thickens. Can be served hot or cold.

Thirds

Yum yum.

I'm giving a big old brain-burp now after a week of binge reading my way through two helpings of thirds in two series of books by two of my favorite authors. Follow that?

First I finished Inkdeath, the last book in Cornelia Funke's Inkheart trilogy.

This was one of the most fun books I've read this year; it isn't stand alone, but it was a rollicking good read as the culmination of the (significant) amount of time I've spent in Inkworld. Most of all it fulfilled my appetite for the characters and I think I'm ready to let them go, not because I'm bored with them, but because I like where they are and don't feel a perpetual need to know what happens next. Funke did leave herself an opening for another book, but not in a cliff-hanger way: the meddlesome Orpheus disappears into the northern forest, but he isn't dead and could make a reappearance.

I've read some criticism that the character Meggie is more passive in this book, which is true, but I always thought of Mo as the main character of the series, not Meggie. I liked how his wife, Resa, finally got to play a significant role in the adventure. Also there were plenty of meta fiction references to how adventure and fantasy books are traditionally written (such as when Meggie comments on how Finoglio never lets his women characters do anything in his books) which seemed to be playing with and winking at narrative convention.

Then this past weekend I gobbled up When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson*. This is the third book that has featured Jackson Brodie, a not-always-competent private investigator. While there are crimes committed and investigations mounted, these books are not traditional detective fiction. When the crimes are solved, it doesn't feel like the culmination of the novel; rather it is the characters and their growth and development, their struggles to overcome their pasts and attempts to live relatively moral lives in the present which capture our attention most fully.

And despite loads of traumas and injuries endured by all the main characters, the humor is dark and biting and feels so right. You can feel the author's pleasure when she makes some of the jokes (the Yorkshire town of Hawes is repeatedly misheard as "whores"--soften your "rs" and read both words with your best British accent) and there are loads of little digs buried in the text: sing-song nursery rhymes and bits of Virgil coexist and twist their way into the plot. I think I could easily read the book again just to decipher all the hidden bits that are embeded in the text.

But I'll put that off for the moment. After two helpings of thirds, I'm a wee bit full.

*If you'd like to read the first few pages of the book to get a feel for the tone and see if it is to your taste, the NYTimes kindly published an excerpt here.

Longhand

One of the reactions I had to the outcome of the election was to have trouble sitting at my computer. For the past year I sat here following all the twists and turns of the primary, tearing my hair out at the idiocy of the Michigan Democratic Party. And then from the conventions to the election I entered a new level of dependence on my computer, spending waaaay toooo much time anxiously trying to keep the reality of Sarah Palin (aka the puppy skinner) from knocking me flat on my ass. I scoured the internet looking for anything with a glimmer of hope, reading and rereading reports that would (hopefully) assuage my anxiety. Oh sure I did some fiction writing too, but the stiffness in my fingers could not be attibuted primarily to story output, but to a personal/political anxiety problem.

Perhaps it is not that surprising that I feel like I've expended a whole lot of mental energy while sitting in one place and wouldn't mind a wee change of scene.

In the week following the election, I printed out my current draft of my novel and went elsewhere to work on it. I write on a desktop, not a laptop, so this meant going longhand. And before you feel pity for me being the last person on the planet who is not mobile with her technology, I have to tell you something:

I really enjoyed it.

It was fun marking up my draft and making little sloppy stars to show where to insert new text and then writing that text on old spiral bound notebooks with a leaky blue ball point pen. It reminded me of how I used to write when I was less computer dependent, not that I've ever really been computer-free. My mom was a grad student in computer science way back in the '70s so I used to do craft projects with old punch cards and we had computers in our home way before they were being marketed in home electronics stores (anyone care for a game of Pong?). I learned about 6 different word processing programs before I graduated from High School, by which time most of them had started to look and behave similarly. Anyway, I've never written totally longhand or with a typewriter, but I used to do a much more significant portion of my writing with a pen.

My handwriting is worse than ever and I don't even remember how to form most of the cursive alphabet (which the boy critter thinks is hil-ar-i-ous since he's learning cursive in school now) and my hand got a little cramp in it for the first week from holding the pen too tightly, but I feel like I accessed a dormant-ish part of my brain and, considering that I'm writing a novel for kids, it feels like a good thing to go back in one small way to a way I wrote when I was younger.

Reading what I've written from start to finish and not letting myself go back to the computer until I had worked my way through the entire draft and written about 30 more longhand pages to add to it, made my novel seem more whole and real and alive to me than it ever has. Maybe I've reached that crucial word threshold where I feel like I can see the whole book. I'd estimate I'm a little more than a third done, but have the whole book pretty decently organized and some chapters written for each of the 7 major parts of the plot.

So today, having had a good long break from excessive-obsessive computer usage, with my newly fattened draft (though a lot of crappy bits were cut in the edit, the process as a whole was still a significant weight gain), I started a different form of organization: I created a spread sheet that tracks the book scene by scene. I tried this earlier in the draft and just didn't have enough to make it work. But now I'm loving the fact that I can enter in scenes that I know need to be written and haven't written yet--helpfully highlighted in the spreadsheet with yellow--between once sentence summaries of the scenes that are already written. It feels like I'm making a terrific, fun To-Do list. If I wake up dull and blah in the cold December morning and can't get writing, instead of (or in addition to) dosing the hell out of myself with yet another strong cup of Ethopian Natural Sidamo Mighty Good Coffee, I can open the spread sheet and decide which yellow scene I feel like writing that day.

And once I add another 20,000 words or so, I'll be stepping back from the computer and doing another longhand edit.

A bowl of warmth

It was 19 degrees F outside this morning when the critters and I went on our walk to the Farmer's Market. We go every Saturday morning, partly because I like the ritual, and partly because the boy has a piano lesson later in the morning and if we don't get him some exercise before it, then he! bounces! off! the! walls! and has trouble concentrating on the music. It's about 1 mile each way from our house and that is sufficient to get the spazz out (well, most days...)

There isn't as much to buy in the winter, though we usually still pick up a dozen eggs, some cider, and maybe some hoop-house spinach. And the kids each get a cookie--the kind I don't make at home with frosting and sprinkles--as a reward. I'm kind of amazed that they are always game to go on this forced march with me (they even went last week when there was horizontal sleet hitting us in the face!) but I guess dangling a crappy cookie in front of them does wonders in the motivation department.

So now that we have established that it is cold outside but that we must go out in it, the project becomes making warming foods as a reward for those of us not motivated by crappy cookies. Soup is always good, but I have a new favorite warming dish of late:
It may just look like pasta with a meaty sauce, but look a little closer. There's ground lamb in there, and cubes of soft roasted eggplant, and some of those slow roasted tomatoes I made last summer. There is a tangy garlic-yogurt-mint sauce to offset the richness. And then, my favorite and the feature that makes the recipe over-the-top-comforting: some browned butter poured over the top.

This tasted really good served with a plain spinach salad with a sharp vinaigrette, but I can also imagine making a big bowl of this and just curling up on the couch with it while reading a good book, or watching a decent movie.

I adapted this from a recipe in the NYTimes that describes itself as deconstructed Turkish dumplings. I've never had Turkish dumplings but now I would like to try them!

Warmth-in-a-bowl

1 large or 2 small eggplants, about 1 pound, in 1/2 -inch cubes
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon kosher or coarse sea salt, more to taste
3 fat garlic cloves, minced
1 medium onion, minced
1 pound ground lamb
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 t dried dill
1 C canned diced tomatoes (drained) or your own slow roasted tomatoes, if you have them
1/2 pound bowtie pasta (I made it with bowtie the first time and the corkscrew noodles pictured above the second and kind of prefer the bowties)
2 to 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, to taste
1 cup plain yogurt, set in a towel lined sieve to drain for about 1/2 an hour (or use about 2/3 C Greek yogurt)
1/2 C chopped fresh mint (optional, but good)

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Bring a pot of water to boil for pasta.
2. Toss eggplant with 2 tablespoons oil and a large pinch of salt. Spread on a baking sheet, making sure there is room between pieces, and roast until crisp and brown, stirring a couple of times, 15 to 20 minutes.
3. In a large skillet, heat remaining tablespoon oil. Add 2 minced garlic cloves and the onion and sauté until fragrant, 1 to 2 minutes. Add lamb and sauté until lamb is no longer pink, about 5 minutes. Drain off excess fat (after all, you will be dumping butter over the resulting dish...) Then add 1/2 teaspoon salt, red pepper flakes, dill and black pepper to taste. Stir eggplant and tomatoes into lamb. Taste and adjust seasonings--you may need more salt.
4. In a small bowl, stir together yogurt, remaining garlic, chopped mint and a pinch of salt. Cook pasta according to package directions.
5. When pasta is almost done, in a small saucepan, melt butter: the amount is to your taste (at least 1 T per serving). Let cook until it turns golden brown and smells nutty (about 5 minutes) but be careful not to burn it.
6. Drain pasta and spread on a serving platter. Top with lamb-eggplant-tomato mixture, then with yogurt sauce. Pour melted butter over top. Sprinkle on additional red pepper and more mint or dill, if you like. Serve immediately.
   

5 stupid things I regularly do in the kitchen

I'm starting a new meme! My not-so-little internal self-critical voice is being more chatty than usual lately, so I though it was time to share:

5 Stupid Things I Regularly Do in the Kitchen

1. Use a metal knife to pry bagels out of the toaster.
2. Boil stuff over. Particularly beets because the magenta juice is fun to clean off of a white stove top.
3. Yell at my kids to get their own damn snacks and then realize I've put all of the possible foods out of reach on the top shelves of the cabinets. They can either stack chairs to reach them or they are left with dried beans, rice and flour that they can munch on. Yummy!
4. Forget to use my potted herbs that sit in the window behind the sink. My rosemary is turning into a shrub and I don't think I've remembered to use it in the past 6 months. I made roast chicken and potatoes last week and forgot--again--to snip off a little. I think I need to equip my herbs with microphones so they can yell at me. And brains. And mouths...
   
5. Blame the fridge-that-I-hate for my poor memory and habit of letting vegetables in the crisper liquefy before I remember they are there. I'm sure that one of the $1500+ fridges-that-I-covet-and-will-never-own would poke me or something before the scallions turn to slime.
   

So please, to the 5 people listed below, help me feel that I am not alone and share with me some of the stupid shit you chew yourself out about, and yet continue to do:

Teacher Patti at Teacher in the Hood
one (or all!) of the lovely ladies at Gastronomical Three
Mom at Mother's Kitchen
Ed, at Vacuum
Jen, at A2eatwrite

out of the mouth of my surly babe

I promise I'll stop talking about the election soon. But first I must report this conversation between Fiona and her Granny Jan:

Scene: a small girl and her Granny are driving in the car. On the side of the road, they see someone walking a dalmatian dog.

Granny: Fiona, see the dalmatian? Does that make you think of the 101 Dalmatians movie?

Fiona: I don't like that movie.

Granny: Why not?

Fiona: Because Cruella De Vil wants to take the skins off the puppies and make a coat out of them.

Granny: That is a really mean thing to do. Really nasty.

Fiona: I bet Sarah Palin would do that.

(Granny has to concentrate hard to keep the car on the road because she is laughing so hard.)