Book Give-Away Winners!

Does this look the very model of a modern major general? I know. And yet. Pirates of Penzance this week--with our freckle-sprinkled Ben as the patter-singing general himself! We are so excited. After that there will be more recipes, step-by-step sour dough, and fun, fun, fun!

But I will say, I've been making this donut cake a lot recently, with a cup of spelt flour swapped in for a cup of white, and with almost double the amount of nutmeg. Fabulous. My favorite plain cake ever.

Also making lots of this tamale pie, but, thanks to our little vegetarian friend, with tofu chorizo swapped in for the ground beef. Also fabulous. I follow the tofu chorizo recipe from Deborah Madison's book This Can't Be Tofu! which, despite having a kind of retro I-can't-believe-it's-not-butter name, is actually full of great recipes. You can also buy various soy products, of course, or make it with ground beef, which is how it's best.

Meanwhile, Snow Child. I think I made it sound like a kids' book, and it does sound like one, but it's not. Just to be clear. There are teens who would really love it, but there's a miscarriage at its heart (that's not a spoiler, don't worry) and it's very grown-uppy. Just before you sit down to a nice big gynastrophic read-aloud with your little ones.

I also forgot to mention that Little, Brown will ship neither to a P.O. box nor to another country. If you have won, and live in Uruguay without a street address, let's see what we can figure out together. Also, please email me your address and info, winners, please. Chosen randomly (although I was tempted to pick only people who praised me and/or promised to roast their own coffee), and Susan and jen, please note the time and date stamps and look up your comments, since there were multiple Susans and jens:

Susan Mar 23, 2012 08:03 AM

jen Mar 23, 2012 01:12 PM

Library Lauren Mar 25, 2012 06:36 PM

Congratulations! And everyone else, thank you so much for entering, and please hang in there on your library wait list. It comes eventually. It does.

xo

Snow-Child Give-Away / Roast Your Own Coffee

I know that what happens sometimes is this: you’re following along gamely, trusting me, opening your mind to tofu and English muffin rings, meatless Mondays, boys wearing pink, whatever, and then suddenly I’m like, “Our composting toilet. . .” or “. . . the fact that our house is made out of spelt husks,” and you realize that I’m actually completely insane. (NB: we have neither a composting toilet nor a spelt-husk house.)

And I mention my fringy freakyness now because I’m about to suggest that you start roasting your own coffee.

If you don’t love coffee and/or money is no object in your household, then go ahead and skip to the end of this post and enter the Snow-Child give-away (Unless money is no object, and then you should buy it! And buy me a copy too, please, since I had to return mine the library. Thanks.) But if you love coffee and/or are pinching your hard-won pennies, then consider this: if you buy your green coffee in 5-pound bags from Sweet Maria’s, you end up with the very best, freshest, fair-trade coffee you ever had in your life, for around 6 or 7 dollars a pound (unless you need to buy the Kona, which is $19.10 a pound. . . but then again, you could buy the “Panama Dry Process Experiment Gone Awry” for $2.80 a pound!). You don’t need me to tell you that, with savings like that, you’ll be a millionaire in 5 years. Plus, there’s the Little-House-on-the-Prairie thrill of roasting your own. Even though they doubtless had a hard time finding anywhere to plug in their hot-air poppers.

Yes, a designated coffee-only hot-air popcorn-popper is all you need! Like this one. Or a thrifted one, or one you already have and aren't using would be perfect, of course! That's all you need--that and the green coffee itself, which you should buy from the fantastic Sweet Maria’s, who have no coupon code to offer us, and with whom I have no business arrangement, but who are eponymously sweet, and thrilled that you might be buying coffee from them. Their site has all the information you need on roasting coffee (definitely start here) but I’ll just recap the basics so that you see how easy it is. Also, you should know before you start that the roasting smell will penetrate somewhat such that everywhere you go on roasting days, people will sniff the air curiously and say, “Do you smell that? Like burning toast?” and you will have to say, “I’m sorry. It’s actually my hair.”

First you'll get your beans, which will be small and greyish-green and smell like old dirt. I am not so much of a coffee snob that I have the faintest idea about what beans I would choose or why, and so I kind of pick them randomly from the cheaper side. I have liked everything. A sampler is a fun and inexpensive way to start.

Next you will measure 1/2 cup of beans (or whatever maximum your popper identifies) into the popper and you'll turn it on. You should have a large metal colander or bowl ready. And you should do this outside, if you've got an outlet (I roast outside, in the snow even, crouched in my coat over the popper). Otherwise, do it near your stove and turn the fan on high. It will make a lot of smoke and roasty odor, which dissipates in about a day or so. Tip the popper backwards by wedging a folded-up dish towel under its front side: this will keep the coffee beans from flying out before they're roasted.

Now you should consult that Sweet Maria's link above on what exactly you're looking and listening for. But I'll tell you this: first some beans will fly out, and you'll readjust the dish towel. Next nothing will happen for a minute or so. Then the husks will start flying out. (You can catch them in the colander but, honestly, whenever I do that I end up panicking when I need to dump the beans in, and then I end up dumping the husks out of the colander onto the floor, so it's kind of pointless. Just commit to cleaning them up later, which is easy.) After around 3 minutes, the coffee will hit the stage called "first crack," which means you hear them popping, like popcorn. This is when you need to pay close attention. First crack will taper off and then, around a minute later, "second crack" will start, which is a series of very-close-together cracking sounds + smoke. I usually let it go into second crack for about 15 to 30 seconds, and then I panic and dump the beans into the colander and they're usually perfectly roasted. Sweet Maria's has advice on what to look, listen, and smell for, and they have very exact timings for different roasts, but I can never see anything, and have to go on sound and adrenaline alone. 

Once the beans are in the colander, you shake them around to cool them off and then, if you're me, you roast another batch right away. 1 cup of green beans makes 2 cups roasted, which fills my mason jar without overheating my popper.

Now clean up your mess.

Once the beans are cool in the colander, put them in a jar, cap them, and leave them to cure overnight. In the morning, they will smell not like old dirt anymore, but like the most amazing coffee ever.

And then you can make coffee. If it's 80 degrees in March, you can even make iced coffee!

(That's from this post.)

But are you here for the give-away? Little, Brown, the wonderful publishers of The Snow Child, are going to give away three copies of it! Right here, on this blog. Just enter a comment here, along with your desire to win, and you will be automatically entered. I'll end the contest on Monday at midnight and announce the winners on Tuesday. Good luck! (And don't be shy to write in about the coffee instead--I won't enter you unless you ask to be entered.)

Uglie Smoothie

I am not Lagunitas beer (alas). I am an uglie smoothie.

Before I even tell you about the uglie smoothie, I have to tell you about this:

The Snow Child. I just finished it, and it was magical. It's set in Alaska in the 1920s, and it reads like Little House in the Big Woods crossed with A Fairy Went A-Marketing. Crossed with Out Stealing Horses. Crossed with Ovid's Metamorphoses. Got a clear picture of it? No? All I can say is that it was such an incredible fairy tale that every morning I woke up and told Ben and Birdy about whatever part I'd read the night before and they were enchanted. I left out some of the gloomier twilit bits, but wow. What a wild and beautiful ride. I can't recommend it enough. So long as a childless homesteading couple making a girl out of snow who either does or doesn't come to life sounds like your kind of book. Plus: isn't that the loveliest cover? Sigh. Michael just said, "You're not reading it again, are you?" And I had to say, "I'm just looking at it. Sheesh." But I might read it again, just a little bit.

(And now I'm noticing that the book is based partly on an Arthur Ransome translation of a Russian folktale called "Little Daughter of the Snow." Arthur Ransome, who wrote Swallows and Amazons, which is only one of the best books ever! O, perfect world. While I'm sort of subtly recommending children's books: we're listening to The Railway Children on tape, and it is utterly wonderful. It is so fresh and fizzing, I can hardly believe it was written over a hundred years ago. I am also planning still to respond to all your fantastic book recommendations. I have checked dozens out of the library based on them. More soon.)

The ingredients themselves are quite attractive. But then, thanks to the laws of color mixing, this happens.

Okay. The uglie smoothie. I should tell you, first of all, that while I'm interested in juicers, I cannot stand the thought of wasting all that fiber and pulp. I just know that if I got into juicing I would spend my life trying to form the leavings into crackers and casseroles, paper and pinatas and lawn sculptures. So for now, I stick with smoothies. And this is pretty much a perfect one: hideously ugly, wildly nutritious, and lip-smackingly delicious. You get loads of protein from the milk and almonds, and then a good, deep green feeling from the spinach. The date and vanilla make it taste kind of milk-shakey, and the strawberries are the crucial aromatic ingredient that also adds a bit of welcome tang. Plus, if you need to be perfectly camouflaged while lounging atop a military vehicle, this is the smoothie for you!

Uglie Smoothie

Makes enough for 1 game grown-up or 2 uncertain children who will nonetheless love it.

If you plan ahead, you can soak the almonds in hot water for half an hour; this will make a creamier smoothie, although I like it both ways. You could also substitute half a banana for the date, but I do recommend using one or the other for sweetness.

Large handful baby spinach (kale is good too)

3 ice cubes

¾ cup low-fat milk

Small handful raw almonds (scant ¼ cup)

5 strawberries

1 pitted date (or half a banana)

½ teaspoon vanilla

Whir all the ingredients in a blender until smooth. Drink. Feel profoundly nourished.

Maple-Lemon Tofu

This could also be called “Maple-Lemon Tofu with a little side of funky.” Or MORE Tofu, as in “I wish there were more tofu.” It is our new favorite tofu recipe, which is saying a lot, since we have a number of excellent tofu recipes up our sleeves around here.

Those are the first spring chives from our garden! They were one inch long, and I picked two of them.

Tofu is one of the few things we all love equally. I know that’s a weird thing to say from just about every angle: first of all, loving tofu is kind of like loving a sea sponge or loving Styrofoam. And second of all: Really? Doesn’t our whole family eat just about everything? And the short answer to that is no. In fact, we are in an odd phase of becoming more, rather than less, difficult to feed. Birdy has become a serious vegetarian, and by “serious” I mean that she won’t even eat bacon anymore, which is the dietary equivalent of wearing a soy yarmulke. Luckily, however, she would still prefer bread and cheese to just about any complicated something you might think to serve her, so she is not a difficult person to feed. Even though she claims to not like soup. (WTF?)

Birdy, waiting for her friends to arrive. Sigh. Stay gold, Ponyboy.

Meanwhile, Ben, who has always passionately loathed watermelon and raw tomatoes, has started also to dislike shrimp, arugula, beets, sesame seeds, and all egg dishes, such as quiche, that are not simply the eggs themselves. Unless the eggs are hardboiled, in which case he would sooner gulp from a pool of stagnating muck than eat them. Then there’s Michael, who won’t eat goat cheese, cottage cheese, polenta, winter squash, avocado, tropical fruits, walnuts, olives or anything that smells like it ever thought about olives. Me, I won’t eat overripe bananas or undercooked eggplant, and I don’t love white pepper.

On the one hand, that is, cumulatively, a lot of different foods to avoid. On the other hand, everybody in the family has a positive outlook about food, and so I don’t get a claustrophobic feeling trying to squeeze dinner into everyone. Picky eating is, I think, a state of mind. If you have a good attitude and an adventurous spirit, I don’t really care what you do and don’t eat. Especially since we all love beans and rice, and bread and cheese, and salad, and most fruits and veggies—and those are our main food groups. Along with tofu, which is where I’ve been headed all along here.

Tofu has the added advantage of being nice and cheap.

This recipe makes tofu with a custardy inside and a golden, crusty outside that’s thickly glazed with sweet-and-sour saltiness. Do you know Bragg’s Liquid Aminos? I know. It just gives you a vague ninth-grade biology feeling, the word “aminos.” I don’t understand what the point of them is, and I don’t know if they’re made by the Dr. Bronner soap people, and that’s why the bottle is covered in crazy talking. But it tastes funkily delicious: like vegemite crossed with soy sauce and distilled through the umami machine. It appears to contain both essential and NON-essential amino acids (look out!) and, let’s be frank, is mostly salt. It makes everything taste like the dry-sautéed string beans you might get at a Chinese restaurant, in a good way. 

It looks like we were doing shots.

For scale.

Meanwhile, you already know about maple syrup, which is sweet, and lemon, which is sour, and garlic, which is garlicky. Altogether, it’s one of the stickiest, crunchiest, yummiest tofu dishes you’ll ever have the pleasure of eating. Report back, okay?

Maple-Lemon Tofu

Serves 4 (but double the recipe if you want to forestall complaining)

A version of this recipe circulates online as Matthew’s Delicious Tofu, and it has ginger in it and less lemon. I like it better the way I make it. It is one of the very few dishes in which I use lemon juice but not the zest. I’m not really going for the lemon flavor as much as the tartness—in fact, you could use rice vinegar instead, if it’s what you’ve got.

1 block firm or extra-firm tofu

2 tablespoon vegetable oil

2 cloves garlic, very finely minced or put through a garlic press

1/8 cup maple syrup

1/8 cup Bragg liquid aminos (or soy sauce)

1 tablespoon lemon juice

Finely snipped chives or scallions, for garnish

If you have time, wrap the tofu in a clean dish towel and put something heavy on it, such as a large can, then leave it to drain for a half an hour or an hour or so (I did this while the rice was cooking.)

Slice the tofu into 12 skinny slices, then cut those in half so that you end up with 24 skinny half slices. Now multiply that by the square root of kill me and you’ll have exactly π.

Heat the oil in a large nonstick frying pan over medium-high heat. Lay the tofu in the pan in a single layer and leave it undisturbed for 5 or 6 or even 7 minutes. By this point it should be golden and crisp on the bottom (it won’t get very dark, but it will look nice and appetizing). Flip all the pieces and cook for another 4 or 5 minutes, then lower the heat to medium-low, add the garlic, and move it around with a spatula for a minute. You’ll have to kind of fry the garlic in the spaces between the tofu.

Now add the maple syrup, Braggs, and lemon juice to the pan, and shake the pan to make sure that all the tofu gets coated with the sauce. Cook for a minute or so, then flip all the pieces and cook for another minute or so, until the sauce is reduced to a syrupy glaze and all the tofu looks nicely coated. Arrange the tofu on a platter, top with the chives or scallions, and serve.

Weighting the tofu.

Cutting the tofu.

Frying the tofu.

Admiring the tofu.

We ate it with brown rice and a spinach salad. Yum.

Birdy likes to eat with a single stubby chopstick that she carved herself. She uses it like a cross between a fork and a harpoon.

A Pair of Winter Soups

Roasted Cauliflower Soup

You know what I say about soups like this: I am crying joyfully into my hankie, adjusting my veil at the altar, while the children are pecking the soup on the cheek, thanking it politely for a lovely evening. No matter. It is winter (finally) and so soup must be made. Also it is winter (still) and so assorted root vegetables must be used up. The first soup is a favorite of mine, and one I actually put up on family.com last year, but it was a little buried on the site, and you may not have seen it. (This may not seem very important, I know. But it is! So I’m bothering telling you so.) The second is one I just recently made out of utter Root Vegetable Desperation, in a frantic effort to forestall the pending Root Vegetable Apocalypse (which arrives in the rapturous form of a guilty April trip to the compost with moldy armfuls), and it was absolutely and utterly simple and delicious. The kids even had seconds, and Ben considered taking the leftovers for school lunch. Sure, he took cheese and crackers in the end, but he considered taking the soup.

The soup is named Hotlips not just after the M*A*S*H character, and not just because the harissa in it will make your mouth tingle, but also because I grated a beet into it, mostly for color, and it turned the exact shade of Ben’s bedroom. Which is actually the Benjamin Moore color “Hot Spice.”

soup

harissa

Benjamin Moore, Hot Spice

But I thought if I called the soup “Hot Spice,” you’d think it was really spicy, which it isn’t. Use an assortment of root vegetables, or all one kind, as you have need and inclination. But do try to use the carrots and beet because the resulting color is so lovely. As you know, I serve soup with bread, biscuits, popovers, or, er, waffles.

Roasted Cauliflower Soup

serves 4-6

Active time: 15 minutes; total time: 1 hour

As you know, roasting brings out the nutty sweetness of cauliflower in a kind of insane way. Call this "Caramelized Cauliflower Bisque" and see if the kids like the sound of it.

2 medium-sized heads of cauliflower

3 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled

1 yellow onion, peeled and sliced

2 tablespoons olive oil

Kosher salt

1 quart chicken broth

1 cup water

1 cup half and half (or whole milk)

Freshly ground black pepper

Snipped chives (optional)

Heat the oven to 450. Cut the cauliflower into small florets and, on a large foil-lined rimmed baking sheet, toss them with the garlic, onion, oil, and 1 teaspoon of salt. Roast 25-30 minutes, flipping the florets halfway through, until they are golden and starting to brown.

Reserve a few small florets for garnish, if you like, then add the rest of the cauliflower along with the onions and garlic to a large pot with the broth and water and bring to a boil over high heat. Lower the heat, then simmer the soup, partially covered, for 30 minutes, or until the cauliflower is very tender. In a blender in batches, or with a hand blender, puree the soup until smooth. Stir in the half and half, add black pepper and more salt to taste, and serve, garnished with the reserved florets and snipped chives.

Hotlips Soup

(aka the soup of many roots and some harissa)

Serves 4-6

Active time: 30 minutes; total time: 11/2 hours

“Where do you get harissa?” someone asked me the other day, and I pointed to our friend Khalid who was standing right there. “Him.” He brings it back for us from Morocco and it is wildly beautiful and fragrant, smelling puckeringly of preserved lemons and tinglingly of chiles. A little stirred into a bowl of lentil soup is the difference between {yawn} and “YOWZA!” That said, if you don’t have a Morocco-going friend, you can buy some harissa at a market or make it yourself, or you can make the soup with Thai red chili paste, and it will be fantastic. If you do, though, swap in coconut milk for the cream and lime for the lemon, and garnish with cilantro if you have it.

1 tablespoon each butter and olive oil

1 large onion, any color, sliced (mine was red)

1 stalk celery, sliced

Kosher salt

6 or so cups of diced root vegetables (I used 1 small celery root, 1 turnip, 2 large carrots, 2 parsnips, and 1 potato)

1 small beet, peeled and grated

½-1 teaspoon harissa (or else use thai red chili paste and coconut milk)

1 quart chicken broth

Lemon or lime juice to taste (I used the juice from ¼ lemon)

½ cup heavy cream (or coconut milk)

Heat the butter and olive oil in a soup pot over medium-low heat, then sauté the onion and celery with around ½ teaspoon of kosher salt (or etc.) until softened and fragrant, around 5 to 10 minutes.

Add the root vegetables. In truth, I do this as they’re prepped, in stages. Just keep sautéing and stirring every now and then until everybody’s in the pot. Then stir in the harissa or red chile paste. Add the broth, turn the heat to high, and bring the pot to a boil. Now cover it, turn the heat to low, and simmer gently until all the veggies are falling apart, 45 minutes to an hour.

Puree the soup with a stick blender or, in batches, in a blender. Add the cream and lemon juice and salt to taste. Salt is your friend, now and always. For ultimate smoothness, put the soup through a food mill (I didn’t bother, and there was the odd stringy something as a result). Garnish with harissa and attractive blobs of cream.

Luau on Castro Street

for those of you who remember Ben's famous Pool Party on Castro Street cake

I bring you Birdy's follow-up:

Cake concept from our favorite cake book. Which I see you can buy used for $3!

Fantastic almond cake recipe here. (Warning: uses weird canned product.) I made it in a sheet pan and baked it for less time.

World's best frosting here. I added 1/2 teaspoon almond extract. Perfect.

Okay, a real recipe is coming soon. Also, is anyone interested in a step-by-step real-time recipe for/instruction in sourdough? I've become a little obsessed, and wanted to gauge your interest in such a topic. 

Blog Search Keywords

"falling down stairs skirt over head"

Now, I have done many foolish and embarrassing things. But that does happen not to be one of them. Maybe were you looking for the post about how I walked to a meeting with my skirt tucked into my underwear? That gets lots and lots of traffic thanks to the delightful search phrase "skirt tucked into underwear." I am sorry only that the post must be so disappointing in its lack of pornographicness.

For some reason this reminds me of this thing that happened last year, where I got an email from AOL that was addressed "to all freelancers," and that reassured me that, despite whatever rumors I may have heard, I was not going to be laid off. "Do I work for AOL?" I asked Michael, and he shrugged. I could not remember writing for them, but maybe I had? No matter, because the next day I got an email explaining that I was, in fact being terminated after all. This was about a week after Disney had laid off all its online people, me included, and it was really an insult-to-injury kind of moment. I may be the only person in the world to be fired from a job I never even had. And to be found because of falling down the stairs with my skirt over my head, which I never even did. Did I?

Compensatory cat photograph due to random nature of blog posting.

book review: Wildwood

There is nothing that more convinces the kids of my success than our getting of random shit in the mail. And don't get me wrong: I love free stuff. Sometimes it is simply excellent. Pomegranate juice, hummus, cookbooks, beautiful soap. Hooray for loot! And sometimes it isn't. "Consider sharing this full-sized bottle of Scrubb-o Shower Tile and Vagina Disinfectant with your readers!" Sometimes folks email first: "We'll send you 1 free sample-sized bottle of Kidz Kloroform after you tell your readers that Kidz Kloroform is how you get your own kids to sleep!!!" And sometimes the random shit shows up randomly to the exalted joy of the random-shit-loving children. 

But every now and then something truly wonderful arrives. Like an email from the lovely HarperCollins children's book publicist. Who was just wondering if we, you know, wanted any books. Which we did.

One of the books she sent us was Wildwood, which Birdy absolutely loved, in the way kids love books where every time you look at them, you see just the top of their rapt head peeking over the cover. I haven't read it myself, but it's a beautiful object: gorgeous cover, lovely paper, great heft. And I transcribed Birdy's review of it, in case there's anyone book-loving at your house. For reference, a few of the many other books Birdy has loved include The Little House series, Harry Potter, The Penderwicks series, and The Birchbark House.

Wildwood

by Colin Meloy

illustrated by Carson Ellis
reviewed by Birdy Newman, age 9 (on Saturday)

I thought it was a really, really good book. There was a lot of excitement. I like it because it doesn’t really keep the same. Unexpected things happen that you really wouldn’t have guessed. It’s about this girl who gets followed into some woods that she’s not really supposed to go into. She goes to get her baby brother because the crows take her baby brother into the forest. And then a classmate follows her. Most of the book happens in the forest, which is called Wildwood. It’s magical. The main character is a good person. She’s really brave and cares a lot about her brother.

It has a map, which is really fun to look at! And I like that there’s sort of a lot of different groups working together. The groups are sort of against each other, but then two pool together who weren’t really together before. Or maybe that gives too much away… Don't tell your kids that part. It’s really suspenseful, and so it’s hard to put it down. I think everyone should read it.

*

What are your kids reading and loving right now? What about you? I just finished and liked Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall. You are noting correctly that I didn't love, love, love it. But I liked it a lot. And there's just nobody who excavates a character's interiority quite like him. Also, dialogue to die for.

Blog Search Keywords

"decorative rocks that look like dog poop"


Now you're just messing with me.

Warm Sweet Potato Salad with Black Beans, Feta, and Lime

I am not poutine! I am a healthy salad!

Travel always leaves me craving healthy food when we return home. I love clam shacks and road houses, diners and street food and sausages and all those outrageous local specialties that emerge piping hot from various deep fryers and must be doused in maple syrup and/or hot sauce. Eating well (and badly) is, for me, more than half the fun of travel. It’s actually, like, 9/10ths of the fun of travel. But then we sit down to our first post-trip meal, and somebody always says, “Ah, it’s Mama’s classic first dinner home.” And it is. Tofu, brown rice, and a salad. It feels almost like a physical relief to eat it.

And the Ottawa trip did seem to involve a nearly excessive amount of French fries, gravy, cheese, and fried dough. Plus, there was the added fragility factor, after first Ben and then Birdy contracted a nasty virus. Michael had had the bug first and described it as “bowling ball stomach,” but for the kids it seemed more to be a kind of “bile geyser stomach.” (I, like all good mothers everywhere, stayed healthy so as to wallow around in the muck in a cleaning-up fashion.)

Oops. There goes my 2012 resolution not to talk about barf in a recipe column. Doh!

Anyhoo. The one super-healthy meal just didn’t cut through all the grease. So I had to make this one too. And I found it on my new favorite food blog. Such a good and beautiful place. I really love it.

Ugh. Bad flash is making this look like a greasy porn shot. Sorry! It was gorgeous, I swear.

Warm Sweet Potato Salad with Black Beans, Feta, and Lime

Adapted from Remedial Eating, where Molly Hays claims to have adapted it from Mark Bittman, though I bet her version is much yummier. Molly suggests that this is a versatile salad, and indeed it is. I made this again last night, with giant black beans instead of regular ones, roasted winter squash instead of sweet potatoes, toasted almonds instead of pumpkin seeds, a handful of dried cherries, and heaps of leftover cooked quinoa. It was delicious. It follows all my own basic principles of a good bowl of food: something tart, something crunchy, something rich, something salty, something sweet, something green-tasting, something spicy. It's zippy and tender, fragrant and pungent and gorgeous. You really can’t go wrong.

2 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into ½-inch cubes


6 tablespoons olive oil, divided


Kosher salt

2 limes, 1 zested, both juiced


½ teaspoon chipotle puree
*

1 teaspoon sugar

1/2 cup green pumpkin seeds

1 can of black beans, drained and rinsed and drained (or 2 cups cooked black beans)

A
few handfuls of greens (I’m using arugula)


½-1 cup crumbled feta

*A note about the chipotle: I buy a small tin of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (if there's a Mexican section of your supermarket, you'll be able to find it there), puree it in the blender, and store it in a clean glass jar in the fridge, where it keeps almost forever as long as you don't stick a dirty spoon (or finger) in it. I find this incredibly handy to have around for those times you want to stir a bit of smoky heat into something.

Preheat the oven to 450, and place a rack on the bottom level.  

Toss the cubed sweet potatoes with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil and 1 teaspoon salt and arrange them on a large non-stick baking sheet, ideally one with a rim. Roast for about 20 minutes, or until fragrant and caramelizing on bottoms.  Toss gently with a flat metal spatula, turning most of them over without making yourself crazy.  Return to oven to roast another 10-15 minutes, or until gorgeous brown and tender. 

Meanwhile make the dressing and toast the pumpkin seeds. Combine the lime juice and zest, the rest of the olive oil, the sugar, chipotle, and ½ teaspoon of salt in a jar and shake well. Toast the pumpkin seeds in a teaspoon of oil in a tiny frying pan over medium-low heat until they are browning and fragrant.

When the potatoes are done, put them in a bowl with the beans, pour about half the dressing over it, and stir gently (hands are best for this) and taste. Add more dressing or more salt, if you think it needs it.

Arrange the greens on a wide platter, and top with the sweet-potato mixture and then the feta and pumpkin seeds. Serve straight away.

My CSA sweet potatoes were so dirty and filled with dirt-filled holes that I thought I'd have peeled them to nothing before I got a sheetful of cubes out of them. It was a strangely tedious experience.

They came out lovely and caramelized.

The rest of the ingredients (the limes are dinged-up and ugly, hiding beneath the arugula bag), plus Ben studying his lines for Pirates of Penzance. Is he not the very model of a modern major general? I know.

I typically cook my beans from scratch, but this tin called out to me. At some point we should talk about canned foods and Bisphenol-A. 

pumpkin seeds!

I love a big bowlful of healthy food that I can call dinner. And so does the major general.

And the Birdy general.

Greeting from the Super-Cheerful Mom!!!!!

Hello, friends, how has your week been?

Ours has been fantastic, even though Birdy barfed all over our hotel room (well, not all over, since the trash can I gave her did remain clean) and the Rideau Canal was actually closed to skaters. But Ottawa was delightful nonetheless: we ate beaver tails (in Canada, that does not seem like a lewd thing to say), visited the stray cats in their miniature parliament buildings on Parliament Hill, ate poutine (fries, gravy, cheese curds, don't get me started), and slid down enormous slides carved from ice and snow. Plus, in Canada, hotel staff is much more "Oh gosh, I'm sawry your daughter's sick!" than "We have to ask you to leave now, and we'll forward your bill for the drapes and carpeting."

And now we are back.

I will be posting a new recipe in the next day or so, but in the meantime, I do have a couple pieces on the news stand: in Ladies' Home Journal, for one, where the subheading of my essay is, I just noticed, "Go ahead, call me a Pollyanna. I'm one of those super-cheerful moms who always sees the silver lining -- and I'm secretly happy my kids have inherited the sunny gene." (Not only am I a Pollyanna mom, it seems, but I've also been abducted by crazy ventriloquizing aliens!!!) Also in Whole Living, where I write about my lack of a mud room for, like, the bazillionth time. And in Brain, Child, too, which I may have already mentioned.


And now a photo. You know I make blankets, right? From Salvation Army wool sweaters that I wash and dry and shrink and felt, and then cut up into squares and sew back together. Here's the one I just finished for Ben. I collected pink sweaters for months, and the blanket is so gorgeous that I can't even believe it (Go ahead, call me a Pollyanna). I am happy that it wasn't a gift for somebody outside the house!

Oh, I love blogging on my own so much! I was just daydreaming, as I pasted in the photo, that someone could write, "What's up with your gay son and his gay loving of the gay color pink?" the way they used to, those stupid jerkholes. But instead of being all silent about it, I could just write, "Go fuck yourself!" Maybe that actually is kind of super-cheerful, in its own twisted way. 


xo

Anniversary

Today is our 22nd "wedding" anniversary. And by "wedding" I mean, you know, becoming partners. If you get what I'm saying.

1991

I wrote Michael a poem:

Legs

Remember how my calves ached?

I stood on tiptoe while we kissed and kissed,

and missed anthro, dinner, nightfall, nothing.

We had the skin of peaches then:

smooth and taut, soft in all the right ways.

And I am only thinking of it now

because my calves ache again.

I stood on tiptoe while we smiled and smiled

at our smiling faces in the mirror

where I was leaning up and in

to pluck my chin hairs.

* * *

We are off to Ottawa to skate the famous Rideau Canal. If you can't (afford to) beat the winter--join it! Head north! That's my special secret February vacation tip.

Have a great weekend!

xo

PBJ Valentine Cookies

I wanted to make Valentine's Day cookies, but without rolling and cutting the dough, because I am lazy and also because I don't like to clean up the counter afterwards, which, come to think of it, is related to the aforementioned laziness. So I used my trusty peanut butter cookie recipe, but made them into thumbprint cookies, with little heart-shaped jam-filled wells in them. They came out so great that I'm sharing the recipe. First for the cookies themselves, which are a total go-to lunchbox standard around here. 

And then for the festive variation. 

Of course, if you don't feel like going that far, you can do what we've been doing since the kids were babies: arrange raspberries in a heart shape over a pool of yogurt. Like this.

That little fatty-face just filled my heart with such a terrible aching. Oh, I miss the babies sometimes.

Happy Valentine's Day, dear friends.

Amazing Peanut Butter Cookies

Total time: 30 minutes

Makes: 3 dozen
These cookies have no flour and no butter. They're so fragrant and crumbly and peanut-buttery, you'll be amazed.

Ingredients
1 cup peanut butter (creamy or chunky--not natural-style)
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt -- more salt if your peanut butter is unsalted)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 large egg
1 teaspoon baking soda

1. Heat the oven to 350, and grease 2 baking sheets or cover them in parchment paper.
2. With an electric mixer, beat together the peanut butter, sugars, and salt until combined well.
3. In a small bowl lightly beat the egg and vanilla, then beat it into the peanut butter mixture with the baking soda until combined well.
4. Roll teaspoons of dough into balls and arrange them about 1 inch apart on baking sheets; the mixture may seem oily and crumbly, and this is okay. Flatten the balls with the tines of a fork, making a crosshatch pattern.
5. Bake the cookies one sheet at a time in the middle of the oven until they're puffed and golden, about 7 or 8 minutes. Cool the cookies on the baking sheet for 5 minutes, then transfer them to racks to cool completely.

These come together very quickly.

And they shape up and bake up very quickly. You'll love them.

PBJ Valentine Variation
Make bigger balls of dough--use either a tablespoon or a scoop--then flatten them gently. Now use your best finger (Trial and error will determine which is the best finger for the job! Mine is my ring finger, even though it is strangely weak. I can tell you that it is not my thumb, unless the symbol for Valentine's Day changes from hearts to canyons.) to press two adjoining ovals deeply into the surface of the cookie to make a heart shape. Spoon jam or jelly into each indentation (stir it vigorously first or microwave it for 15 seconds so that it will be easier to spoon in). Bake the cookies as above, for 7-9 minutes.

My beloved scoop!

Heart-shaped indentations. Make them nice and deep.

Ready to bake.

Some of them were a little, er, heart-broken. Use plenty of jelly!