Mendolonium » Someone’s in the Kitchen with Mama

Change of the Week: Make Do with What You Have

Gina — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 06:38:20 +0000

I’ve got plenty of food stored in the house to sustain us (and my sister*) through an earthquake, zombie siege, or comet strike – whatever apocalypse du jour may come, but there are some products that you just can’t store – like cream. When I went to make some much desired yellow cupcakes with chocolate frosting this afternoon I realized that the cream (called for in my frosting recipe) in my fridge was far, far beyond cream at this point. I contemplated going out to the store, however, organic cream is at a minimum a 1 mile walk + train ride and then back again or a car trip away. I thought about going without frosting as well, but that just wasn’t going to satisfy my craving. I didn’t want to waste the time and energy going to the store and I didn’t want to go without. So I did what we’ll probably all have to do more of in the future – I made do. Thomas and I got together and came up with a fabulous, creamless recipe. Should you ever find yourself without cream, but with a hankering for some chocolate frosting here’s what you can make do:

Ingredients:

6 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips
8 Tablespoons (1 stick) butter, cold
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
2 Tablespoons milk

Directions:

Melt the chocolate using either a microwave set to 50% power (stirring every minute) or a double boiler. Stir until smooth and then set aside.
Mix the butter, sugar, and milk together until light and fluffy. An electric mixer on a moderate to high speed works best.
Slowly pour in the chocolate (while mixing) and mix until frosting is smooth and homogeneous.

Yield: Enough to spread a thick layer on 16 cupcakes. If I was going to pipe the frosting on I would likely make a double batch.

Today’s lesson is that in a world of constrained energy and resources I need to remember to make do with what we have more often. And the bonus is that I came up with a fabulous frosting recipe that I never would have made otherwise. Sometimes making do is making it better.

*I assume Sara Ann would definitely want to hang out here during the end of days, and besides, we’ll need someone to nanny for the kids while we rebuild a new utopian world.

Someone’s Always in the Kitchen with Mama

Gina — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:13:24 +0000

I aspire to be great.

It’s a rather pretentious thing to say; it is, nonetheless, true. I am searching for great and meaningful work to do in the world. I think every day about what it means to be a great mother. I would like to be a great chef. Not Alton Brown, Christopher Kimball, TV-star great, but someone who makes consistently delicious, creative, and ethical food. My problem, of late, is someone is always in the kitchen with Mama. I feel quite competent in the art of basic cooking with children; I’ve memorized my favorite recipes to avoid having to waste precious time looking them up, I can do almost anything other than dice one-handed, and I have indoctrinated my three-year-old with a love of cooking so fierce he will turn down time outside/Legos/TV in favor of baking a pie. Following recipes is not enough for me though. Quite frankly, I couldn’t follow a recipe properly if I tried. Jeff has shrewdly observed that I use recipes like a compass; simply to point me in the right direction. So without even thinking I develop new dishes. I would love nothing more than to spend hours upon hours in the kitchen, perfecting a recipe, feeding batch after batch to a willing army of taste testers, until I got it just right. These days I am lucky if I get an hour or two a week to myself in the kitchen. It turns out it is quite challenging to do anything great in an hour. Even when the kids are asleep there is someone in the kitchen tormenting me, the incessant noise of the baby monitor, flooding the space with it’s staticy white noise until inevitably a baby cries out and I have to go soothe him back to sleep.

It’s a small microcosm of the greater challenge of mothering: balancing one’s own dreams against one’s needs and desires to be with one’s children. Right now that balance not in favor of greatness in anything other than mothering. I tell myself that they’ll be older won’t need me nearly as much in only a few short years. The baby will sleep soundly through the night just as his brother now does. I try to to convince myself that living in these joyous sleep-deprived moments is enough for me. It is true that my world won’t end if my butternut squash soup isn’t quite right. It is equally true that I stay up late at night smelling the ghosts of flavors melding together, adding and subtracting ingredients in my head in search of the perfect chocolate chip recipe. I think about the implications of proposed health care legislation for women or carbon emissions reduction as often as I think of creative ways to engage my sons. Mothering is great; but it isn’t enough for me now nor ever. I need to find my way back to a path that will lead to more great things.

Today that means I am going to concentrate on one recipe at a time; taking as many one hour chunks of time as I need to get it right. It means we might eat butternut squash soup once a week for the next two months, but in the end what a great soup it will be.

Memories

Gina — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 07:30:05 +0000

My first memory isn’t particularly sentimental. In fact, it involves road kill. Given the story of my childhood, it does, unsurprisingly, involve moving as well. I was just over two years old. We were moving from Wisconsin to California and driving along somewhere between the old and the new: Mom, Dad, our cankerous cat, Calico, and me. We passed a skunk that had met it’s unfortunate end on the highway. I remember playing in the gun metal grey station wagon that was our family car from the time I was a baby until I was six years old. Although it is unthinkable now in the age of mandatory child restraint systems, I was loose in the very back of the station wagon, happily engaged in playing with one of my favorite dolls, Karen, while my parents talked away the long hours up front. We were driving through what seemed to me to be a forest of pine trees, when I smelled it, the putrid, lingering stench of a skunk. I had never smelled such a thing before and called out to my mother to ask what the offensive scent was. She explained about the skunk and there my memory fades into oblivion. I can’t remember anything of that trip before or after the skunk but I think something in the overpowering smell must have imprinted the memory forever on my brain.

Thomas is almost three and I wonder what his first memory is or will be. Will it be something amazing and dramatic like watching his brother slip into the world or will it be something sweet but mundane such as playing outside in our yard? There is a strong possibility that we will be leaving this house in the next year or so and I wonder, will he remember this little green house as his first home; give a smile at the thought of the wooden alphabet carefully arranged on his walls or laugh at the memory of himself streaking through the living room, hall, dining room, and back again, naked as a jaybird, while we chanted “Go Thomas go”? Although the incidents of yelling in this house are few and far between (and generally well-earned on Thomas’ part), I sincerely hope his first memory won’t be the time I yanked him across the room and yelled at him for laughing as his brother fell out of the sling (and was, thankfully, caught just in the nick of time with no harm done save to have been unpleasantly startled).

Bedtime has been rough lately. Henry seems to be transitioning from three naps to two with the result that some days he seems to think that bedtime is actually “third nap” with his body insisting on being awake for another two hours, while his mind protests. The little bub is also cutting his first tooth and his swollen gums and sporadic episodes of collapsing into tears attest to the pain it is causing him. Jeff is mired in grading reams of paperwork and writing a never ending parade of lectures while I am exhausted from my return to work. We simply don’t have the ability to devote ourselves to Thomas’ lengthy bedtime needs and as such he has had the privilege of an increasingly late bedtime. I don’t actually mind too much; I miss Thomas fiercely since I’ve gone back to work and he get’s his night owl tendencies from me so we just stay up until it is clear that he will fall asleep easily. This past week I knew it was going to be a particularly long night so I proposed a late night bake-a-thon to Thomas. We agreed on an apple pie and “pie cookies” (shapes cut out from the leftover pie dough and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar to make a sort of cookie) and set to work. I haven’t made an apple pie since before Henry was born; tart, firm apples haven’t been available locally and the thought just hadn’t occurred to me. The store is full of California grown Granny Smiths now and I set Thomas to work prepping apples with our wonderfully low-tech apple peeler. I was surprised at how capable he was in making an apple pie at almost age three as compared to last year at age two. He can turn the peeler himself, he helpfully pointed out the small spots of peel that the machine missed, and then began to question me as to how the peeler was constructed (“Is that a Phillips screw, Mama?”). When it came time to make the filling Thomas was able to name most of the ingredients without prompting (he is forgiven for forgetting the cornstarch) and questioned why I wasn’t adding vanilla (answer: because we were using sugar already flavored with vanilla beans). Henry, awake from “third nap” and ferociously gnawing on his fingers thoroughly loved mouthing the apple cores and sucking all the juice from them. Thomas was able to roll out the dough with me; admonishing me when the flattening crust deviated from a perfect circle. He choose an assortment of animal shapes for the cookies (among them a giraffe and turtle, of course) and was allowed to stay up until they were done so he could sample one before bed. It was a wonderful evening and I found myself wishing that he would remember it, not just for next week, but for forever. There was, thankfully, no skunk involved but I hope that the smell of the pie, and perhaps the taste of it for breakfast the next morning, will seal the memory in his mind; a perfect little slice of life in a warm kitchen, cooking with his Mama and giggling with his brother.

Impress Your Friends and Neighbors Bread

Gina — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 03:30:03 +0000

If you want an easy European style boule bread or want to bake a gift to impress your friends and neighbors I have a bread recipe for you. I bake basically all of our bread and buns now using a rotation of three bread recipes – of which this is my favorite. I got this recipe from a friend who I believe told me it originally appeared in the NY Times. Wherever it came from, I’ve tweaked it and converted the water and flour measurements to mass (rather than volume)*.

Slow Rise Bread

*I have started to convert all of my baking recipes to mass rather than volume. It is so much quicker, accurate, and cleaner (no measuring cups to wash) than baking by volume. It allows you to bake with consistent results every time regardless of the amount of “help” your toddler gives you with measuring and pouring in the ingredients. I use this scale and it is one of my most useful kitchen tools.