Mendolonium

Well, it finally happened…

No, no, no, not the birth of our daughter, but I have officially run out of freezer space.

I suppose I could stop cooking, but let’s be serious, how else I am going to work through all my anxiety (so many anxieties – each deserving of their own post).  You know how some people are fond of retail therapy – I engage in cooking therapy.  Given my lack of freezer space I have moved on to more shelf-stable items.  Tuesday we made caramel corn; not that it needs to be shelf stable seeing as how we (read Jeff) have already eaten more than 4 quarts of it.  Today it was granola and I have a pan of brownies baking in the oven at this very moment.

I really do, for the most part, enjoy being pregnant.  I am well aware of how lucky I am to be able to get and stay pregnant relatively easily.  However, over the past two weeks I have morphed from “Pregnancy doesn’t slow me down…still doing cardio barre…I love feeling so round and full of life” to “I feel so slow and achy…nights full of heartburn, trips to the bathroom, and contractions…please boys don’t wear shoes with laces because Mama is not able to bend over to tie them.”  It is really quite strange how intellectually I know that I probably have, at most, two more weeks of being pregnant, yet emotionally I feel that this might actually never end.  Despite the fact that there is a person hiccuping inside of me multiple times every day (seriously, most hiccupy baby ever) and that she is now so big (probably around 7 pounds) that things such as her feet trying to poke through my abdomen are clearly visible, and that I have done this two times before…I still find it hard to believe that I am actually about to produce another human being and not just stay cranky and unwieldy for ever.

I can’t give you the gift of a cheery or exciting blog post right now.  All I’ve got is “Meh”.  But I can give you the gift of a great, and surprisingly easy, caramel corn recipe.

Caramel Corn

Ingredients:

• 8 quarts popped popcorn
• 2 cups brown sugar
• 1 cup butter (or dairy free margarine if you wish)
• 1/2 cup light corn syrup
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 teaspoons vanilla

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 250 degrees F.
2. Boil brown sugar, butter, corn syrup, and salt together for 5 minutes.
3. Stir baking soda and vanilla into sugar mixture.
4. Pour mixture over popcorn and mix to coat thoroughly (Note that you will want a BIG bowl or container to do this in).
5. Pour popcorn mixture out onto two cookie sheets.
6. Bake for one hour, stirring every 15 minutes.
7. Remove from oven, cool, and store in an airtight container.

I think one of the best parts of summer is the explosion of seasonal food: dinner parties with fresh tomato bruschetta, BBQs with cucumber salad, potlucks with cherry pie for dessert. I gave up meat when I was thirteen years old and summer is truly a fabulous time to be vegetarian. That said, sometimes I just want a burger. Not so much for the flavor of the meat, but for the burger experience: a thick patty covered with melted cheese, crisp lettuce, juicy tomato, slathered with ketchup and mustard. There are, of course, the ubiquitous “veggie burgers” that one can find in the frozen food section of the grocery store. I can’t say I’ve ever been terribly fond of the mass-market burgers. In my opinion, despite having ingredient lists a paragraph long, they try too hard to be meat (and fail miserably) – ending up tasting like nothing much at all. A couple of summers ago I set out on a mission to create the perfect homemade veggie burger. One of the recipes resulted in a tasty but crumbling mess of beans; another left us with what looked like a steaming pile of bean poo. None of them were fit to put in any cookbook. But after subjecting my family to one culinary disaster after another I finally came up with a bean and vegetable patty worthy of the name burger.

Ingredients:

• ½ of a medium onion

• 2 ribs celery

• 2 cloves garlic

• 1.5 cups kidney beans, canned or dried and then cooked

• 1 large egg

• ¾ cup rolled oats, uncooked

• ½ cup panko (Japanese breadcrumbs) Note: to make the burgers gluten-free use gluten-free breadcrumbs or crushed corn tortilla chips

• 1 tsp ground cumin

• 1 tsp dried oregano

• ¼ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp liquid smoke, (look for it in the grocery store near BBQ sauce)

Directions:

1.  Chop the onion, celery, and coarsely. I like to use a food processor for this.

2.  Add the egg, beans, oats, breadcrumbs, and spices and mash by hand or pulse in a food processor until the mixture is well moistened and comes together.

3.  Chill for at least 30 minutes or up to overnight.

4.  Preheat an oven to 350 degrees F. Note: you can also cook on the grill using a sheet of aluminum foil underneath the patties.

5.  Form the mixture into five equal sized balls.

6.  Press the balls into patties on a the baking sheet.

7.  Bake for approximately 20 minutes until golden brown on top and

cooked, but still moist, throughout.

I am a bit ashamed to admit that the first time I ever tasted winter squash, in a form other than pumpkin pie, was sometime in my early 20s.  My father doesn’t like winter squash, my mother never cooked it, and thus, it always seemed foreign to me.  I wish I remembered my first taste squashy goodness, but it is lost in a haze of all the “new “foods I explored in my early 20s.  Since that first encounter I’ve roasted many a butternut squash, pumpkin, and acorn squash and turned them into soups, filled pastas, and pies both savory and sweet.  In restaurants, I gravitate towards dishes made with winter squash.  Most people have a “type” of person that they are attracted to:  perhaps tall, dark, and handsome.  Winter squash is my type of vegetable:  big, orange-fleshed, and keeps forever.

This past summer I took my love affair to the next level and planted a crop of butternut and Burgess buttercup squash on our little farm.  Now, six months after harvesting the squash, we are still enjoying them.  I am particularly impressed with the butternut squash; those that have not yet met their delicious fate have been sitting on the bottom shelf of my pantry since August – perfectly content to wait for their turn at culinary fulfillment.  The Burgess buttercup squash were not apparently up to long-term storage in the ever changing temperature environment of my pantry and had to be cut up into chunks and frozen.  Freezing cubes of squash will result in mushy-textured squash when thawed, but that by no means dooms such squash to the compost pile.

This past Saturday night I made an improvised dish of sauteed squash and vegetables over cous cous.  It was quite good, but Thomas protested mightily.  Given my childhood avoidance of squash, I expected that it was the orange chunks he objected to.  But no, it was, in fact, the cous cous that he was initially turned off by.  He then went on to decry the copious amounts of vegetables.  I vowed to him that we would find a squash dish that he enjoyed.  Thinking of a recipe for  pureed butternut squash as a pasta sauce I had seen long ago I asked Thomas what his favorite cheese was.  He volunteered “cheddar!” and I told him that for our next dinner I would make him cheddar-squash mac & cheese.   The following day I pulled out 20 ounces of frozen Burgess buttercup squash from the freezer, steamed it, and took an immersion blender to it.  I used this recipe, substituting the ricotta cheese for marscapone cheese, omitting the bread crumbs, and topping the dish with Parmesan cheese and served it up for my most demanding critic.  I expected Thomas to like it, but I was bowled over by his reaction.  He took one bite of pasta and declared, “I love it!  This is the best dinner ever.  You will make it again, right?”  I don’t believe in “hiding” vegetables in kids’ food; rather I think that kids should be taught to recognize and love vegetables.  I pointed out how the sauce of the dish was tiny bits of squash mixed in with cheese and when I asked, “Where did this squash come from?” Thomas delighted in answering “Us!”  Theo showed his approval for the dish by plowing through a full bowl in about three minutes and then asking for more.  I can’t say that I ever remember such an enthusiastic dinner response from the kids before.  So thank you, to winter squash; not only is it my type of vegetable it’s great with kids too.

Our head chef instructor for the baking and pastry program I am studying does much more than teach us two nights a week; she is an accomplished food writer/author and, in addition, devotes time going out to Los Angeles (LAUSD) schools to teach healthy cooking.   A couple of weeks ago during class I had a free moment while I had one product baking in the oven and another in cooling in the fridge and I asked chef if she ever needed any volunteers to help her out during her (LAUSD) classes.  She said that she didn’t really need any volunteers, but that the program itself was always looking for chefs.  “Oh,” I said.  Then after a couple of moments, what chef had really meant dawned on me, “Oh,” I said dumbstruck, “I will be a chef.” While I am sure it seems as obvious as white chocolate against dark to everyone else, somehow the conclusion that I was in school to begin a new career, to advocate for sustainable, healthy food, to have fun had not all added up in my mind to the fact that I am going to be a chef.  Chef; as in, I will be qualified to have people pay me to cook food for them.  I somehow was stuck with the idea that I would be  still be an engineer/analyst that happens to be rather good at and enjoy baking rather than an engineer/analyst and a chef or perhaps even just a chef.  This realization has officially blown my mind…in the best of ways.  And to celebrate, I think I’ll just have to go bake something.