Potlikkery

what refracts light & wobbles?

Admittedly my knowledge and experience of jellies and their moulds, or jello/gelatin is limited to the economical, trouble-free and efficient kind described by Peter Brears in the opening paragraph of his introduction to Jellies & Their Moulds, a compact, sexy book that fits well in the hand, was published in 2010 by Prospect Books of Devon and is distributed by The David Brown Book Co.

Miss Spurling, my beloved kindergarten teacher at Columbus Powell Elementary, introduced me the delights of jello, and I've had a fondness for it ever since, though in recent years it failed to excite me much. In fact, it repulsed me after I foundered on too much jello pie made by my step-mother.

She, the step-mother, was never evil. Sometimes a bit difficult to deal with the year I lived with her at age fifteen, but that's fodder for a different kind of blog. The jello pie filling was a mixture of lime jello and cool whip topping combined at some setting point, I've since forgotten which.

In my studies of food history and cookbooks I've seen this dish--not the jello pie--called aspic.

Aspic makes me shudder.

Watching the stars of Julie & Julia struggle as they suspend fish in gelatin gladdened me that I was born a half or quarter-century too late to add the aspic and gelatin skill set to my cooking repertoire.

But Brears changed my thinking about gelatin. Isn't that the most powerful goal an author hopes for?

In 1995 he was tapped, or maybe quivered is a better word, for a Jelly Festival in which he recreated jellies of medieval and Tudor England and so that is the origin of this book. Within its pages, you'll find historic recipes from 1390-1930 arranged chronologically, as are the very moulds they would be set into and set free from.

Reproduction pages from mould manufacturers' catalogs round out this book and may well excite those hobbyists who collect moulds.

If you didn't realize it, the basis of gelatin is animal collagen, so it would seem that one could, in fact, make human jello. Yech. There are vegetarian alternatives such as jellies moulded from hominy, rice, oatmeal, and semolina. Actually those are most appealing to me anyway. The semolina, rice, and cornflour are more moulded sweets of working class households and not so much categorized as jellies for obvious reasons. Eggs were too costly for cake baking and if working class households wanted pudding, or dessert as we call it in America, then they went for the sweet mould. But, in the 1830s these bland moulds were appropriate for middle and upperclass patients in the sickroom.

During WW II Britain lost a great deal of its gorgeous jellie moulds to... you guessed it, tin recycling! 

There were lots of interesting jewels in Brears' book such as the packet jellies, such as the ones sold in most American grocery stores, won't stand up to real jellie mould recipes because they're weaker. And the plastic moulds used today don't release jellies as well because the jellies stick. Bears also provides excellent tips for release jellies from moulds alongside all the fascinating recipes within the book.

Really, what else can be said about a food that refracts light and wobbles? What's not to love?

Bibliography, general index, and a recipe index conclude the book.

This dear little book is a gem. I love running my hands over it. Its illustrations of moulds are black and white reproductions from period periodicals, by the way.

Copious notes appearing in the pages margins tickle fastidious readers such as myself. 

the provenance of a fish & the big bad cupcake

If you're a parent, Babble is a great resource. I forget to eat properly in the mad dash that is my life these days. I think I have the work-life balance monster whipped, because I adamantly leave work at work and leave no room for blurred boundaries, no chance of work coming home with me because my home life is too important for work to intrude. 

Somehow I missed an article way back in December about 10 brain foods for moms that should help improve brain functioning, not just for moms, but for all whom are cognitively impaired. The best thing is that most of the foods listed are my favorites, like avocado, blueberries, and salmon, except that the salmon must be wild salmon and that, of course is fraught with all manner of politics. 

I tend not to eat salmon anymore because our waters are so over-fished and unless you catch a fish personally... well, I'm always a doubter, and I do not always believe what I am told about the provenance of a fish. When in doubt, cut it out. So I don't eat salmon anymore even though I love fish. 

Speaking of overfishing and our waters, I read a beautifully written and marvelous book, A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons earlier this week in which its author mentioned how unsafe rivers, lakes, and streams were to swim in. If they're unsafe to swim in, I wouldn't eat anything caught from their waters, either. What a sad time in which we live.

Anyway, despite the fact that I don't like chocolate, and that Elsa does not either, I might try this chocolate avocado cupcake recipe connected to the Babble avocado page on the brain food story. When I make out my grocery list each week I give Elsa pencil and paper and she makes out her list as well. I ask what she writes on her list. It's always the same thing:

Cookies. Cupcakes.

She likes some cookies. She doesn't really like cupcakes, though she sometimes licks a bite of icing. And she doesn't like chocolate.

Even though there is a cupcake category on this blog and Elsa has a t-shirt or two bearing cupcakes we might eat them at birthday parties or special occasions. So they truly are rare events in the scheme of things. A few weeks ago on our drive home from Grammys I was happily stunned when she told me she is a Big Bad Cupcake.

Fruit of my loins is a Big Bad Cupcake. She makes me so happy. That and eskimo kisses. And every little things she does is magic. Children are delicious, delightful. I could go on and on, but this is a food blog. I keep reminding myself.

community garden blues

Last week I responded to a call to participate in a community garden for a variety of reasons. First, I thought it might jolt me out of my routine. I try to do something different each week to help boost me out of the complacency that winter has seemingly dumped me into.

Okay, semi-weird digression here: Did you see The Adjustment Bureau? Consider how spilling one's coffee can alter your plan, put you on a new path, or keep you on the same one. It may be far-fetched, or only the purview of the scifi-fan, but please, some of us need a little abuse bouche for the brain now and again.

Then, I thought it might provide Elsa and I with new friends. Oh, I'm somewhat active in my community and serve it as an election official, but as a mother of a toddler I feel too tied to home and not involved enough in the outside world, as though I don't have ties to folks. So, Elsa and I attended a meeting and looked into signing up for a plot for the spring, summer, and fall. It had its benefits: free seedlings, use of community tools, regular interaction with other people, etc. 

Admittedly, rising gas and food prices makes the idea of keeping a garden this spring and summer quite becoming. 

There were other gardeners with whom we might make friends, and there certainly were other families participating with children with whom Elsa might play. That was the major consideration.

Another consideration, and the main one, in my mind, was that the garden's location at an historically Black community center in my city was desirable. But, all the people who showed up, including myself, were white. Bother. And so the extreme whiteness of the community garden really kind of killed the promise of diversity for me.

We left the meeting early without paying for a plot, without signing our name to a plot because the meeting dragged on so. It was almost 7:30. Elsa needed dinner and her bath and to be in bed by 8:00. And sometimes it seems that people who either don't have children, or maybe whose children are long past that age have forgotten what it's like with small children, cannot wrap meetings up quickly. It seems though, that is is for the best that we'll have our garden at home. It means less driving--though the community center is less than two miles from our home--less time in and out of the car, less wasting of gasoline and money. I hope.

Is that so terrible? Obviously, we can return to the community center which boasts a marvelous playground where Elsa can play. And if we had our plot there she might play with children on the playground, too, but it's not the same, somehow, because the communities are still segregated in my mind.

Elsa loves playing outside. She adores digging in the dirt. She is a natural gardener. Engaging her interest in plating, weeding, and harvesting our garden is another prong of this interest.

The other option is going with the original plan of the home garden alongside the south-facing wall of our home and plating various vegetables. I quizzed Elsa on which vegetables she might eat. Tomatoes, no. Cucumbers, no. Squash, no. Sheesh. She's a hard customer. I fear we misnamed her. We should have called her Mary. She is so contrary.

She likes couscous though. Too bad it does not grow in garden.

All I know is that if I want to plant potatoes, now is the time to do it. In these parts, you plant them around St. Patrick's Day.

a blow to Japanese farmland

There's a saying that goes something about don't shit where you live/eat and I find it particularly apt in light of recent events involving an earthquake, Japan, and nuclear reactors.

This morning while driving Elsa to her Grammy's house I listened to a Morning Edition story called Chernobyl's Hot Zone. Linda Wertheimer interviewed Robert Baker, a Texas Tech biologist whose studies of mammals at Chernobyl  hasn't found long-term mutations or shortened life-expectancy.  

That was news to me.

Baker sounds a tad like Tommy Lee Jones. That's no surprise since TLJ is a Texas native and Baker lives and works in Lubbock--I wish there were more daily opportunities say Lubbock--and might possibly be one too. You may not know it, since this is a food blog and not a celebrity blog, but I got me a serious Tommy Lee Jones Jones, so the news story was a perfect start to my day with a bit of Texas twang. I digress. 

But, back to the business of shitting where you eat: One of Baker's concluding statements struck me. Wertheimer asked Baker about the present situation--about the giant set of reactors burning and melting down deep in the heart of Japan's rich farmland. She asked Baker, "Will things recover?"

Yes, he replied. Given time, they will. The mammals will return. But for growing food that we want to feed our children, that fertile Japanese farmland is basically ruined, untillable for several generations. It's out of service for 100 to 300 years.

Wow. 

How will this affect Japanese food security in the coming centuries when their produce prices are astronomical already? Will the World Health Organization step in? I'm curious to see the repercussions. I'm filled with concern for the Japanese people on many levels, but especially for their food security, as the ability to feed a nation is such an elemental objective.