Potlikkery

jane snow cooks (and you can too!)

It's barely snowing this morning. The first we've had this season. Temperatures were way warm through October and November. I'm amazed when parents let their children wear shorts to the grocery store--or anywhere--on Thanksgiving Day. It's not like we live in California, Hawaii, or Florida, this is the Mountain South, people!

How appropriate then that I'm looking at Jane Snow Cooks: Spirited Recipes & Stories. The bulk of the recipes appeared in her column in the Akron Beacon Journal between 1982 and 2006. So what is a cookbook about recipes from Akron doing on a southern food blog? 

Simple. My husband is a first-generation southerner. His parents are from Canton, Ohio, but he was born here. We visit the Buckeye state once, sometimes twice a year, if we're lucky. I'm fond of his Cantonese family. Some of their ideas about food are strange, but they mean well. Basically, they like what they know. And that's about it.

What I like about Snow's approach to her column is that she made the recipes accessible to everyone. These aren't fancy schmancy dishes that take hours of prep or call for exotic ingredients that two-thirds of the US hasn't heard of. I wish there were more stories like the one that she shared in her introduction. She wrote:

Workers at a Northeast Ohio auto factory once staged a month-long protest when the couldn't get the Akron Beacon Journal's food section delivered at work. "A lot of us are bachelors, a protester told me by phone. We need your recipes! Other recipes are too complicated."

She kept that audience in mind with every recipe she developed and included in her column. Most are normal sorts of items you'd expect from a community cookbooks. But Red Velvet Cake in Akron? I swear. It's in the first chapter, "Local Favorites." Snow wrote that the cake origins is rumored to be in the South. Yet, many restaurants in Northeast Ohio feature the dessert on their menus. 

Who knew? Not I. I've never had RVC in Ohio. Heck, I introduced Ian's family to cannoli. They had no idea. And Canton is filled with descendants of Italian immigrants. Granted, his family--both sides in fact--are almost the same mix as mine, Irish and German. Maybe that explains it.

Every year there's a new deep-fried thing. Deep fried Twinkies, deep fried Oreos, deep fried Snickers. You get the idea. We encounter them at the Appalachian Fair. I admit that deep fried holds great appeal to me, generally. As a sauerkraut lover, you bet I'd try the sauerkraut balls featured on page 39. It's a mixture of sauerkraut and ground ham and flour that's thrown into a vat of oil and fried. Rather reminiscent of sausage balls except for the cheese and method of cooking.

I had to learn of this delicacy from a book. This is what I mean when I say that his family is strange about food. They have their favorite restaurants, and that's it. They're otherwise unadventurous, and usually gravitate toward the Amish fare popular with tourists, or old favorite diner-type joints that they recall from their childhood. That isn't bad, I love a good diner. But we always dine at the same place each trip north.

Sauerkraut balls are very popular. Snow wrote that they're on the menu of every joint in Akron, from the "ritziest to the humblest." In fact, the dish was voted the city's official food by Journal readers in 1996. 

The variety of recipes in Jane Snow Cooks is amazing. There are Mexican, Thai, Chinese, Persian, Vietnamese, Moroccan, Indonesian, French, Cuban, Indian, Cajun, and Italian dishes. This is probably the best all purpose cookbook I've encountered. No doubt about it, the book would make a perfect gift for just about anyone, but I'm thinking of all the bachelors and bachelorettes I know who would eat well from this book all year long.

succor in confections

Don't we all dream of escaping our soul-sucking jobs for what we were really meant to do? The numbers of people finding succor in the food industry grows each quarter, it seems. Everyone escapes cubicle nation for the kitchen. That is one of my dreams, too. The big one, the untenable one, is owning/running my own bookstore. How foolish is that given the advent of online book retailers?

And yet, my food dream revolves around opening a small restaurant that only sells desserts: pies, cakes, cheesecakes, tortes, etc. I stare longingly at vacant storefronts and imagine what the reality would be: That everyone in my small city names it their number one after-meal destination because no other restaurant's desserts could possibly compare to mine. Ah, dreams.

Gesine Bullock-Prado can tell you what the reality is. And her advice for those wanting to take similar flight is to start small and work in a kitchen to learn the ropes before taking on too much as the owner of a business. She quit her career in Hollywood with a production company and moved to Vermont to open a bakery and confectionery. After attending law school she entered the entertainment industry at the bequest of her sister, a famous actor. Dealing with the insincere, soulless people with whom she worked dragged her morale through the mud and left her wanting more satisfying work. 

Bullock-Prado lived a double life: Hollywood executive by day, baker by night. She spent more and more of her free time in her kitchen, cooking, as a means of channeling her creative talents into personal projects. When she "came out" as a baker, she drew a great amount of support from folks who loved her creations and that  reception caused her to consider a major life change.

Confections of  Closet Master Baker: A Memoir chronicles her days as the owner/baker of a successful bakery in Montpelier, Vermont. She gets up at 3:30 a.m. every day and tackles recipe after recipe. It sounds like sweet work though, squishing your hands in buttery croissant dough and inhaling the yummy sugary, yeasty aromas in the air.

There were so many things I liked about this book. First, it's so well-written. Her prose zips along the page. I gobbled up this book. Obviously, her skills in the kitchen are not her only talents. Her flair for writing is evident from the start. And her style/voice, is amazing, too. Describing it, well, really doesn't do her justice. Characterizing it as spunky or flirty might leave you with the wrong idea, like she's flip or irreverent. Perhaps it's that her whip smart wit and personality shines through on every page. 

The truth is that the book is a glowing testament to her mother's legacy. Bullock-Prado credits her mother's example as a master baker as propelling her toward a career as a baker. Likewise, the limits Bullock placed on the amount of sugar her daughters consumed made the confectionery an especially rebellious affair.  Her mother's death from cancer inspired  Bullock-Prado's change of focus. The strength of the mother-daughter relationship is revealed in the book's pages and will warm every reader's heart, because we all love our mothers and can relate so easily to the author's sentiments and her experiences as a daughter. 

There are three recipes I cannot wait to try: Golden Eggs, Carrot Cake, and Helga's Cake; named after her mother. Golden Eggs sound mouth-watering. Simply divine. Bullock-Prado describes them as originating from a "technique that made ordinary cake taste like donuts, without all the deep-frying." (13)

I'm always eager to try a new Carrot Cake recipe. The simple fact is that I've never made one and have never been gung ho about carrot cake. I've had scrumptious carrot cake a few times in my life, and that was when I lived, of all places, in Sitka, Alaska. The Backdoor Cafe had the best carrot cake, ever. Carol Rice Spurling promised to share her recipe when she finds it, but I shall make do with the one from Confections... until then.

Helga's Cake was originally called Orgasm Cake. Its a three-layer chocolate pecan torte iced with chocolate buttercream that her mother made. She was never a fan of it when she was a child. The first time she made it she described it as "a complicated piece of goodness," and essentially a sensual piece of cake. (217)

Another thing that I enjoyed about the memoir was the insight into life in Vermont. Bullock-Prado writes about her regulars. They are her dear friends. They are for whom she bakes. A criticism from one about her disappointment with a cherry pie causes our heroine to spend additional hours tweaking the recipe and learning how it went wrong. The problem, of course, was that she had not made it herself and one of her staff failed in one or two steps. Her customer raved with the next cherry pie and declared it the best ever. 

Learning about a baker who delights in the delight of her customers just made my day and made me wish that there were more craftspeople so dedicated to producing outstanding items. Bullock-Prado inspires the service industry to do better at serving our public and creating long-term relationships with them that inspire protracted conversations.

Cupcakes. There were no cupcakes. I suppose that was the only glaring ommission. But not everybody must make cupcakes. 

And I almost forgot this: Bullock-Prado is a tease. That's right. She launches into what I think is going to be a Vivian Ward moment. You know, Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman? When she enters the fancy shops and the women won't help her? Bullock-Prado sets up a similar situation. After living in Vermont for a while, she returns to Rodeo Drive with a gift certificate for a fancy-schmancy shop in hand. "The beautiful shopgirls weren't very nice the first time, and their replacements were exactly the bony prestige-handbag creatures I'd loathed when I lived there." (30) But then, once her friend introduced her as the one who made the macaroons he gave the shopgirls at Christmas, they were lovely and helpful.

Macaroons.

I expected a recipe for macaroons. I love macaroons. Bullock-Prado strung me along about forty more pages and that's when I learned that the macaroons are her lifeblood. It is one recipe that she doesn't share. Once those macaroons were profiled in InStyle magazine, Bullock-Prado was inundated with orders. She hires legions of high school students to help with each order. 

So the lack of macaroon recipe is the one glaring limitation of the book. But we all have to keep some secrets.

nothing says fall like gingerbread

The first thing that popped into my mind when I sat down with Jennifer Lidner McGlinn's new book Gingerbread were memories of my grandmother. She was the only person who made gingerbread. She used an 8 X 8 pan and her recipe from a church cookbook published in 1951 by the Woman's Auxiliary First Free Will Baptist Church, Erwin, Tennessee. Its ingredients are much the same as the first recipe in Gingerbread, except for the allspice, cloves, and vanilla extract that McGlinn added.

Reading McGlinn's reminiscences of her grandmother's gingerbread was kind of freaky, but in a pleasant way. Does everyone's memories of gingerbread revolve around their grandmothers? It was that gingerbread--her's came from a 1950 Betty Crocker cookbook--that inspired the collection of recipes in Gingerbread. 

Feeling all sorts of gingerbread kismet with McGlinn, I decided right away to try the recipe based on her grandmother's recipe. 

That's what is so great about this book: It is inspirational. I cannot remember the last time I baked. It was over a year ago. I cook rarely anymore. Baking is not an option for me as the mother of an eleven month old. But I whipped out the batter while Elsa napped and then brought her into the kitchen to watch me scrape the mixing bowl into my cake pan, and put it in the oven.

Besides being inspirational, it's aesthetically the bomb. I love the avocado shade used throughout its pages. The fonts are soothing yet authoritative. The photos are lovely and the food styling is simple yet elegant and giving off just a hint of nostalgia. It's obviously published by Chronicle. Chronicle books are dreamy, divine. 

Reading the book is a dream, too. McGlinn's writing is precise and informative. Her introduction educates the reader on the history of gingerbread. Her information is authoritative by virtue of her training as an historian. 

As a pastry chef, McGlinn has the background and skill for recipe development. Above the title of many of the recipes, she writes about ingredient pairings, the history of 18th and 19th century cookery books, anecdotes about her family, her gingerbread wedding cake, and even Moon Pies.

She created a gingerbread-maple moon pie. I like an occasional Moon Pie, but I this is one recipe I probably won't make just because maple flavoring is icky.

What else? After carefully reading through each recipe I shared the book with Ian. He was interested in several recipes: Gingerbread Pancakes, Gingerbread Doughnuts, Gingerbread Rum Cake,  and Gingerbread-Pumpkin Ice Cream Sandwiches. He doesn't get enough rum cake. I can't stand rum flavoring, either. It's too cloying. So if he wants a rum cake, he bakes it himself.

The verdict on McGlinn's gingerbread: Was okay. Ian liked it, but he described it as bitter. Not that bitter is a bad thing. It's just that it wasn't sweet. I think he's used to really sweet gingerbread. I thought the texture was amazing. She calls for cake flour rather than regular flour and surely that made all the difference. I didn't have any ground allspice or cloves, so I left those spices out. The cake didn't rise much, but I suspect it isn't supposed to. Elsa enjoyed the few bites she had and I didn't hesitate to give her any since it had very little sugar.

The two recipes that I cannot wait to try were the Gingerbread Pound cake and the Gingerbread Bread Pudding. Pound cake is simply the best. If, and only if, it's done right. Basically, I like my pound cake. I got the recipe from my mother years ago and I've tweaked it. Mom had a pound cake last week that Ian and I nibbled whenever we went to pick up Elsa after work. Mom's pound cake, I hate to say, just isn't as good as mine. But hush. You didn't hear me admit that. Ian concurred.

Simply love bread pudding. And wait, there was a third recipe I want to try, too: Pain d'Epices. It's a local favorite bread of Burgundy, France. It looks like a sweet, spicy bread from its ingredients. McGlinn ate it smeared with butter and jam every morning. What a way to start a day in the USA. Or France.

If you love gingerbread, then this is the book for you. If you don't, well, there's something wrong with you. The only other gingerbread specific book you might find was published in 2006. It's out of print. No reviews to be found.

shall i compare thee to a dense wheel of cheese?

All sorts of cheesy sayings came to mind as I read The Cheese Chronicles. Oh, "The cheese stands alone," and "Big cheese," and maybe another one, "Say cheese!"

The book is intensely cheesy. In the best way. It shamed me, really. I thought I loved cheese. Never said I knew anything about it, but whoa. I'm just blown away.

Liz Thorpe overwhelms the reader with everything you ever wanted to know about cheese, and then some. I know what I like: feta, chevre, bleu, brie, gorgonzola, etc. But other than knowing that I like almost everything except for "factory cheeses," as Thorpe calls them, I knew nothing.

Thorpe is one of the growing legion of corporate refugees who traded in their dress for success duds for a chance to pursue their passions. I'm thinking of Dalia Jurgenson and Kathleen Flinn. She went into cheese because she thought it would be cool, that knowing about cheese would make her cool. Everybody likes cheese, ergo she's the most popular person at the party. Not a bad strategy. She cut her chops at Murray's, "New York's oldest and best shop for cheese since 1940."

She grounds the reader in the aspects of cheese making early on. She highlights differences between cow, sheep, and goat milk and what that means for cheese, exactly. There's pressed cheese, unpressed cheese, raw milk cheese. You get the point. This provides context for later on, when she expands her research to individual farms.

Besides chronicling her path from office drone to cheese expert, she chronicles the diverse industry of cheese making across the country. That might be overstating it a bit. What makes the industry diverse are several things: ingredients, techniques, and personality. Otherwise, you have a few select regions where cheese is produced. Vermont. Wisconsin. New York.

Around page eight-eight my eyes glazed over because this is a dense topic. I love the book. Thorpe's writing is irreverent, witty, intelligent. She's thorough. She knows her cheese.

The problem, for me, is that my palate is so limited, I can only imagine the deliciousness of the cheeses she describes. My mouth watered. I yearned for cheese. One thing that would improve the book is if samples accompanied it, so that as you read about Willow Hill's Autumn Oak, you could taste it, too. Reading her tasting notes was an exercise in frustration because my cheese quotient is low.

But then she visited the Amish. That was interesting, different. Her theory was that, perhaps, the origins of cheese making in America were based in Pennsylvania/Ohio Amish country. Then she discovered something else entirely.

There are easily two or three dozen sidebars throughout the chapters explaining answers to questions like "What's a washed curd," "How do you define good milk?" and "Why is goat cheese white?" Each chapter tackles a different kind of cheese: Sheep cheese, American cheddar, Factory cheeses, Grass-fed cheeses.

By this point, again, I'm saturated with cheese and tired of hearing about Vermont. Wisconsin. New York. Finally, about the third chapter from the end, there is it: "Down South: Grass and the business of milking."

Yay Galax, yay Climax, yay Thomasville. There are cheese makers in the Southeast. And the best thing about that is that grass fed cheeses are fabulous, according to Thorpe. You can taste the earth and grass in each morsel. Apparently cheese makers in the southeast are doing something right. Land is cheap and each cow requires about an acre of grass to produce milk regularly. The southeast's mild climate is fabulous for cheese making as well; there's no need to stable the cows, or feed them grain, or shovel manure out of your barns. The model is sustainable, which is great.

So besides the cheese samples to nibble as I read,  another improvement I'd make is to add a tear-away appendix listing all the cheeses she features. Or, maybe just the farms. Because how can I remember which ones to look for at the grocery?

That brings up another problem that I have personally: My location. You read about how democratized the grocery is anymore. That all parts of the USA have access to fruits and vegetables that were never seen in stores 10, 20, 30 years ago. But the chains that serve my area mostly stock factory cheeses.

Factory cheeses: rubbery, tasteless, mass produced products. Kraft, for example. 

I haven't had a chance to check out Earthfare's cheese selection, to compare it what Thorpe says is worthwhile. But I'm betting, that even Earthfare won't have the bulk of the cheeses Thorpe raved about.

Anyways, I'll also concede, that there are cheese makers in states other than those three I mentioned: Washington, Oregon, and Indiana, even.

Again, this is a fabulous book. Thorpe provides a wealth of information about cheese making today. Her stories about traveling to different regions of the USA in search of cheese are filled with depictions of lush scenery, quirky structures, and her interactions with the "locals."

And boy, she sure looks pretty on the cover posing with goats and a cheese wheel. Who else could pull that off successfully?

meal ready to eat

There I go and call myself a liar. I lamented how my food blog was devoid of food, then I went and ate a meal at home. 

It was more a meal ready to eat--not the military sort--but the picked up at the store sort.  Earthfare is my savior anymore. Their deli case is better than the average bear. Last week I noshed on their shrimp salad for a few days. I wrapped it in naan. And had tabouli as an accompaniment. I usually buy a loaf of their bread. It's not anything made there, heaven forbid. It's just there. And decent.

I was in the mood for cheese. I sampled a bite of Havarti with caraway seeds. It was tasty. I bought. I'm a sucker.  It's Denmark's Finest. Not sure that I've eaten the brand prior to this.  What do I know from cheese? Just what I like and what I don't like.

For example, Wendy's cheese on their burgers? Smells. Like. Vomit. Kind of tastes that way, too. But the thing with cheese is that you tell yourself, "It's just cheese, no matter that it smells like upchuck that's baked in an open refuse container in Miami for a few days." No more. Really. I refuse to eat that kind of cheese any longer.

The havarti set the mood for my shopping. I bought a bit of smoked, cold-processed salmon. Lox, if you will. And the bread. And the tabouli. 

I slathered it all on Sunshine Krispy saltines. Yeah, they're pretty plebian. There I got all up in B. Smith's business about how schizophrenic her southern cookbook was, and then instead of buying $10 crackers, I ate from the batch of Krispy we have at home. And I also admitted in the same post that I like that powdered cheese in the Kraft mac n cheese box meal. 

The Krispy story is interesting. When we talked to Elsa's pediatrician about how to prevent childhood obesity, he gave us one piece of advice: Avoid high fructose corn syrup (hfcs). He had just returned from a pediatrics conference and learned that nugget, among others, I'm sure. I've avoided hfcs since reading Fatland: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World six years ago. But the stuff is ubiquitious. It's the main ingredient in those 100-calorie snack packs that you think are supposed to be good for you. And it's in items, like saltines, that you would never expect, because they aren't "sweet."

Another thing he told us was this: Buy the low-dollar brand cereals, the generic brands in the bulk food bags. Usually they don't contain hfcs. And it's the truth. We cannot tell the difference between the Malt-O-Meal generic for sugar smacks and the real thing. Gosh, I can't remember if I ever mentioned how much in love I am with Malt-O-Meal. Their original hot cereal is my breakfast of choice. This is starting to sound like an ad. I swear by the hair on my chinny chin chin that I'm not getting kickbacks or incentives from any brand mentioned in this post. Or on the blog, for that matter.

So Elsa got on a saltine kick on our drive home from Florida this September. I found a great local brand in SC or GA, can't recall the name of it now, but I bought it because there was no hfcs. When we got home from vacation, Ian shopped around for saltines without hfcs and Krispy was the only brand he found at our local grocery stores.

Dinner was simple. Dinner was fabulous. A few bites of tabouli. Six saltines slathered with Havarti-caraway and lox. Sigh.

This was meant to post last week, or earlier this week, but recent changes to typepad muddled my understanding of the basics of publishing new posts.