Queen for a Day

I wrote about Purim a couple of weeks ago in a post in which I announced that Kosher.com was giving away a tin of hamantaschen to a lucky reader of this blog. (I hope it has arrived on her snowy doorstep!)

I noted then that Purim is probably the most festive day in the Jewish calendar. Like most Jewish holidays it has a dark side: Queen Esther’s victory over the nasty Haman and her salvation of the Jewish people came only after long persecution.

We wouldn’t appreciate the happy days without the sad ones, however, so I still love to celebrate it. I enjoy being Queen Esther for the day. I just don’t get to wear a crown often enough!

Here’s a recipe for hamantaschen so that those of you who didn’t win them (or order them) from Kosher.com can still join in the festivities. Purim will fall this Sunday, February 28, so you still have a day or so to stock up on ingredients.

My mother and I made a batch yesterday as the snow fell outside. I was a little nervous about the dietary consequences of being snowed in with a batch of cookies, but fortunately the boys next door had friends visiting so we managed to give away quite a few of the hamantaschen.


This recipe is basically a sugar-cookie dough with fruit filling. If you like your dough a little less sweet, try this recipe from Kosher.com. If you keep kosher or want to avoid dairy products, you may use margarine in your cookies, but the butter is a lot more flavorful.

Next year, I’m going to try making savory hamantaschen filled with cheese—mmm. Meanwhile, these are pretty darn good.

Pedants among you may be wondering about the singular of the word “hamantaschen.” One of these cookies is called a “hamantasch.” Most people bake more than one, however, so you won’t need to use the word “hamantasch” frequently.

Dress up, sing songs, drink a few goblets of your favorite tipple (mine is diet soda), and enjoy these traditional triangular cookies. Happy Purim!


Hamantaschen

Ingredients:

3/4 cup (1-1/2 sticks) sweet butter at room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tablespoon orange juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups flour plus a little more for patting out the cookies
jam as needed for filling (between 1/2 and 1 cup); we tried both apricot and raspberry

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a bowl cream together the butter and the sugar. Beat in the egg and mix well.

Beat in the orange juice and vanilla, followed by the baking powder and the salt.

Stir in the flour and continue to mix gently until all of the ingredients are blended.

On a floured board pat about a third of the dough down to a thickness of 1/4 inch. Use a biscuit cutter, glass, or clean can to cut the dough into circles. Repeat with the remaining dough.

Place the circles at least a couple of inches apart on parchment-lined baking sheets. Place a tiny bit (about 1/2 teaspoon or maybe just a LITTLE more) of jam in the middle of each circle. (Too much jam will overwhelm your cookies during the baking process.)

Carefully fold the circles into triangles around the jam. This is a little tricky: If your triangles aren’t high-sided enough the cookies will flatten out in the oven. (They’ll taste good anyway, but they ARE supposed to look like a triangular hat.)


Seal the seams of the triangles with cold water.

Bake the cookies until they just begin to brown about the edges, 14 to 18 minutes. You will have between 15 and 20 hamantaschen, depending on the size of your cutting instrument.

Why I Cook

Author and chef Michael Ruhlman recently wrote a post explaining why he cooks. He went on to challenge other food bloggers to do the same. Never one to be shy about expressing myself, I’m joining the fray.

Most of these points have been made individually as I’ve cooked and written here In Our Grandmothers’ Kitchens. I thought I’d summarize them today.

First, I cook (and write about food) because it gives me an integrated life. It merges the private and the public. Nothing could be more personal than feeding ourselves and our families. Yet cooking is at its best a social enterprise. It also holistically touches simultaneously on the intellectual, the physical, and the emotional.

Second, I cook because I was brought up to do so. My family generally prepared meals instead of buying them precooked. And when my mother wanted to get to know someone new, or to maintain a friendship she cherished, she hosted a dinner party. In my childhood home food symbolized family, friendship, and love. It symbolizes them for me today.

That tradition leads me to my paramount reason for cooking. I cook because cooking helps me reach out to other people.

Cooking is a wonderful shared endeavor, one that spans the generations. My nephew Michael is an excellent mixer and egg breaker. At 91 my mother can no longer read very well and is a lot less mobile than she used to be, but she still loves to sift or stir or just set the table. Cooking with me makes her feel useful and alive in a way that few activities can at this point in her life. And it brings us closer together.

Cooking obviously touches those whom I feed as well as those with whom I cook. It also helps me to touch those whose recipes and cooking styles I use, in the past or in the present.

With a wooden spoon in one hand and a pot in the other, I can stand beside my grandmother, a neighbor, a school friend from India, or an author whose works I admire.

Finally, I cook because I am interested in many different fields of study. I know it sometimes seems like a stretch to my readers when I link a recipe to film or literature or television or American history. I thank you for your patience and warn you that I’m going to keep on stretching. I love the way in which cooking and writing about food can be tied to just about anything.

Cooking thus becomes a way for me to stay sane, to keep in touch with the people I love and want to know better, and to learn about topics that stir my passions.

It nourishes me in many ways—and it helps me make friends and learn new things every day.

From the Theoretical to the Mundane: Taylor Pork Roll

Mentioning learning new things leads me to today’s recipe.

I’m still figuring out Twitter; I haven’t completely bonded with it yet. Nevertheless, I try to look at people’s tweets once or twice a day. A couple of days ago Lynne Oliver of The Food Timeline posted a message that read as follows:

If you’re from New Jersey, you know all about Taylor Pork Roll! http://tinyurl.com/yjjucme.

Now I was born in New Jersey, and I spend a lot of time visiting my mother’s house there. And I had never heard of this stuff before I saw Olver’s tweet.

According to Olver’s post, Taylor Pork Roll is a processed pork product—a cross between spam and summer sausage—first made in the early 20th century by a company founded by John Taylor of Trenton, New Jersey.

(She notes that some sources trace Pork Roll to the mid-1850s and even in some form to the American Revolution but adds that she can find no evidence that it was made that early.)

I did a quick internet search, and it turns out that many folks from New Jersey are indeed completely gaga about this product. One company makes a living sending the Pork Roll and similar products to members of the Jersey diaspora in other states; grateful customers have written to its web site sharing their fond memories of Taylor Pork Roll.

This comment from a Texas resident sums up the sentiment: “Even know [sic] the thought of it makes my mouth water and makes me feel like a kid again.”

The Pork Roll is also known in some circles as Taylor Ham. The Taylor Ham fan page on Facebook, which has more than 15,000 members, maintains that it was founded for “fans of what may possibly be New Jersey’s greatest contribution to the world.”

As a major admirer of both Frank Sinatra and Jon Stewart I was eager to try a product that might nose them out in the New Jersey hierarchy. Some writers have called Taylor Pork Roll “the heroin of pork.”

I ventured to the ShopRite Supermarket near my mother’s home in Millburn and looked in the meat case. Sure enough, right near the bacon I found a packet of sliced Taylor Pork Roll. (It is apparently also marketed in rolls like salami, but I wanted only a little bit so the slices suited me just fine.)

I peered into the packet, and one of the store employees asked me what I was looking for. When I informed him that I had never seen Taylor Pork Roll before he widened his eyes. “Where are YOU from?” he asked. Obviously, I will have to ask another state to issue me a birth certificate.

The most popular use for Taylor Pork Roll is apparently the “Jersey Sandwich” a.k.a. the “Jersey Breakfast Sandwich” a.k.a. the “Triple Bypass.” This is a sandwich made of warmed Taylor Pork Roll, a fried egg, and melted cheese on a bun.

I’m pretty sure the roll should be a Kaiser, but I had only ciabatta rolls in the house. And the cheese should definitely be American, but I substituted cheddar.

Next time, I think I would use thinner bread and perhaps leave out one ingredient—combine the Pork Roll with eggs, or make a grilled cheese sandwich with pork roll.

Both my mother and I found the sandwich tasty (who could resist all that fat?), but it was too heavy to finish. Truffle was happy to help eat some of the leftovers, of course.

The Jersey Sandwich

Ingredients:

1 hard roll
a small amount of butter as needed
2 pieces Taylor Pork Roll (I bought the 6 ounce package with 8 slices so 2 slices weighed 1.5 ounces; a higher proportion of Pork Roll might appeal to some)
1 egg
1 ounce cheese, thinly sliced (American or cheddar)

Instructions:

Preheat the broiler. Place aluminum foil on a flat, ovenproof pan.

Split the roll in two and butter both inside pieces lightly. Place the slices on the foil-covered pan.

Cut four notches in each piece of Pork Roll so that it will not curl up as it cooks; the notches should come in about three quarters of an inch from the edge. (See photo.)

In a frying pan over medium heat cook the pork pieces until they are warm and lightly browned on both sides. Remove them and set them aside.

If there is not enough fat in the pan to fry your eggs melt a little more butter in the pan. Quickly fry your eggs. (They won’t need salt and pepper because the Pork Roll contains a ton of sodium and spices.)

Place the slices of Pork Roll on the bottom piece of the roll. Place the egg on top, and cover it with the cheese. Pop the roll under the broiler and cook until the cheese has just melted.

Cover the sandwich and serve immediately. Makes 1 very filling sandwich.

Truffle is still hoping for more Taylor Pork Roll!

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I Cannot Tell a Lie: I Made Cherry Pudding

Happy Washington’s Birthday.

I appreciate the spirit behind the relatively new (1971) holiday of Presidents’ Day, which generously embraces all presidents, even the incompetent ones like James Buchanon and the downright dishonest ones like Richard Nixon.

I rejoice for my friends who work in offices; they now enjoy a three-day holiday weekend on the Monday before Washington’s birthday instead of celebrating his birthday as a single holiday whenever it occurs (sometimes on a weekend).

Nevertheless, I prefer to celebrate Washington’s birth on the day on which it occurred, February 22.

Pedants might point out that he wasn’t actually born on February 22, 1732, but rather on February 11 as marked on the calendar in use then, the Julian calendar.

The Gregorian calendar was adopted in Britain and its colonies in 1752, and dates were shifted 11 days to allow the calendar to catch up with the solar year.

Washington himself counted the 22nd as his birthday, however, and I think he’s an excellent source on this subject.

It’s traditional to make something with cherries on Washington’s Birthday, and I’m not a girl to mess with tradition.

John C. McRae, "Father, I cannot tell a lie: I cut the tree." (Library of Congress)

Most Americans now know that the story about his chopping down a cherry tree and confessing the deed to his father was made up by Washington’s enterprising biographer, Parson Weems.

Nevertheless, we still associate Washington with cherries. The gift shop at Mount Vernon even sells souvenirs with cherries on them.

The cherry-tree legend is appealing and apt in its way. Washington was known for his honesty and indeed maintained that “the character of an honest man” was “the most envied of all titles.”
The cherry-tree story can thus be viewed as a metaphor for Washington’s overall character.

Besides, I like cherries!

While your cherry pudding is in the oven, you might want to take this little presidential food quiz, courtesy of the Food Museum Online.

Cherry Pudding

I adapted this recipe from one entered in the Pudding Hollow Pudding Contest by Jane Montgomery of Newton, Massachusetts. It’s one of those lovely comforting pudding cakes that are easy to throw together and satisfying to eat. It uses canned cherries because even in Virginia one can’t get fresh local cherries in February.

Ingredients:

1 can (14.5 ounces) tart cherries (NOT cherry pie filling)
the juice of 1/2 lemon
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) sweet butter at room temperature
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup milk
3/4 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
whipped cream as needed
toasted almonds or pecans (or even candied ones) as needed (optional)

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Drain the cherries, reserving their liquid. Combine the drained cherries and the lemon juice, and spread this mixture into a well buttered, 8-inch-square pan or a 1-quart casserole dish.

Cream the sugar with the butter. Sift together the flour, the baking powder, the salt, and the cinnamon, and add them to the butter mixture, alternating with the milk; be sure to begin and end with the flour mixture. Use a spatula to spread the batter over the cherries as well as you can. Sprinkle the brown sugar over all. Pour the cherry juice over the top of the batter. Do not stir it in.

At this point your dish will look pretty messy, and you will begin to doubt yourself. Never fear: the magic of baking (or perhaps the inspiration of George Washington) will rescue your pudding. The cake batter will rise to the top and solidify, although there will be sauce at the bottom and the edges of the pan.



Bake the pudding until a toothpick inserted into the middle of the cake part comes out clean, 45 minutes to an hour. Be careful not to insert the toothpick too far, or it will hit the sauce.

When the pudding is done, dish it onto serving plates, making sure each serving has cake, cherries, and juice. Dollop whipped cream on the top, and put a few nuts on the cream if you like. Serves 8.



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For the Love of Film: Heroes, Orphans, and Peach Jam

I know I went on and on and on about the fascinating Iris Barry in my last post. This post will also participate in the For the Love of Film blogathon—but in a less long-winded way.

Thinking about Iris Barry’s passion for film reminded me that I have been lucky enough to know several people who have put their passion to work in preservation. I thought I’d mention three of them (briefly, I promise!). One of them has an event coming up that should appeal to the film folk reading this. (I'm sure many of you know about it already.)

1. My late honorary godmother, Dagny Johnson, zealously pursued short and long films about Paris for her film festival in the 1960s and 1970s, Paris en Films.

She understood the race against time involved in finding and saving films of all sorts. I have seldom seen her happier than she was the day on which she announced that one of her contacts had found a film about the French resistance in a gypsy camp—in perfect condition. I’d love to have half of her knowledge of French film. (I wouldn’t mind her personal charm, either!)

Dagny Johnson in Cuba in 1950 with a mysterious stranger (Courtesy of Eric Johnson)

2. My former colleague Jane Klain in the Research Services division of the Paley Center for Media in New York is a bloodhound when it comes to finding old television programs that were once considered lost—particularly when those programs involve her great love, American musical theater. I love watching Jane work and listening to her enthusiasm when she is on the trail of a television program. She is one of Manhattan’s unsung heroines.

This 1959 production of "What Makes Sammy Run?" is one of Jane's finds.

3. Finally, my graduate-school pal Dan Streible at New York University organizes a biennial Orphan Film Symposium. The next one will take place in April.

The symposium finds, celebrates, and helps preserve films that have no commercial homes. (Dan has a much better definition than this on the Orphan site!) In it Dan brings together scholars and enthusiasts who recognize the aesthetic, historical, and cultural value of diverse orphan films.

Dan’s orphan metaphor is perfect for preservation. It indicates the ways in which these films have been cast adrift as well as the moral imperative for people to help save and protect them.

Dan and Friend (Courtesy of NYU)

Dagny, Jane, and Dan, I salute you and the other wonderful film and television preservationists in my life (hi, Mike!).

In addition to attending the Orphan Film Symposium you can show your support for preservation by donating to the National Film Preservation Foundation. The NFPF is giving away four DVD sets to donors chosen in a random drawing this week. Here's the link to donate.

And of course please do visit some of the other bloggers who have spent at least part of this week writing For the Love of Film. The blogathon is sponsored by Ferdy on Films and the Self-Styled Siren, who hope to raise awareness of, and funds for, the NFPF.



Preservation, Tinky Style: Peach Jam

I’m not a person who preserves film or television professionally. I’m more likely to save vegetables or fruit.

In case you’d like to contribute to food preservation as well as film preservation, here’s a simple peach jam recipe. Spice it up a little if you like with some crystallized ginger—or color and flavor it with a few raspberries. This is the basic formula.

I know peaches aren’t in season for most of my readers right now, but if you’d like to cheat a little you may certainly use unsweetened frozen peaches. Be sure to defrost the peaches before cooking and to adjust the recipe proportionately to fit the volume of peaches you have. You can’t really go wrong with fresh jam on the table.

Ingredients:

4 cups peach slices or peaches
3 cups sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 pat butter

Instructions:

In a 4-quart nonreactive pot combine the peaches, 2 cups of the sugar, and the lemon juice. Let the mixture sit for an hour or so to allow the peaches to juice up.

Cook the fruit over low heat until tender. Add the remaining sugar and butter, and cook rapidly until thick, stirring frequently. The jam is ready when it sheets off a cold, stainless-steel spoon. Remove any foam you see (there shouldn’t be too much, thanks to the butter). Stir the jam for 5 minutes before you ladle it into sterilized jars; this keeps the fruit from rising to the top of the jars when cooled. Process in a boiling-water bath for 5 minutes.

Serve with toast, biscuits, or scones.

Makes about 4 cups.





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For the Love of Film: Reflections on Iris Barry

Iris Barry (Courtesy of "A Clock Without Hands")

Long ago and far away, I wrote a not very fascinating master’s thesis about a person who was very fascinating indeed.

Iris Barry (1895-1969) was one of film preservation’s heroines. This chic Britisher was an influential film critic in London in the 1920s, writing for three separate periodicals—the popular Daily Mail, the literary Spectator, and the fashionable Vogue.

A founder of the London Film Society, she was one of the first people in Britain—indeed, in the world—to call for films to be preserved.

Barry moved to New York in 1930 and cultivated friendships with a number of people in the city’s artistic and philanthropic circles. In 1932 her contacts paid off; she was asked to establish a library at the Museum of Modern Art.

In 1935 the museum started a film library—and Barry became its first curator. Her charge, according to Time magazine, was to “preserve for students and posterity important moving pictures of the past.”

For the next 15 years she helped invent and establish the whole idea of saving and curating films.

I recently asked Haidee Wasson of Concordia University, author of Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (2005), about Barry’s accomplishments at the museum. Wasson replied in part:

Barry wrote in her autobiographical notes that the accomplishment of which she was most proud was that after her work at MoMA, she believed that “films would be dated like fine wine.” Before her, this was not a convention of film culture.

I hadn’t thought about Barry for years until a few days ago, when I read about a wonderful idea and cause. This week Ferdy on Films and the Self-Styled Siren are organizing a blogathon called For the Love of Film to highlight the ongoing task of film preservation and to raise funds for the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Barry was conscious from the very first of her role as a promoter and defender of film. Her 1926 book Let’s Go to the Pictures (titled Let’s Go to the Movies here in the States), like her criticism, embodied the different personae she adopted in relation to film.

Barry was conscious of her membership in London’s artistic and literary circles. A protégé of Ezra Pound, she had written poetry and fiction before finding an occupation in film criticism. She wanted to establish film as an art form and to define the sort of art form it might be.

She also saw herself as an unabashed film fan—a lover of the experience of going to the movies as well as of individual films and stars.

It was in part this schizophrenic nature of Barry’s film criticism that drew me to her. She could heap praise on Felix the Cat (whom she called “an institution, a totem”) as well as D.W. Griffith’s masterwork Intolerance.

I believe that most of us who have written about film and its history share this duality. We want to study and preserve films because they can be rich examples of cultural history or magnificent works of art.

We also want to study and preserve them because we grew up getting a thrill from westerns or thrillers or screwball comedies, from Clint Eastwood or Ginger Rogers or Anne Hathaway. Like Iris Barry, we are all fans of the flickers.

One of Barry’s other appealing characteristics as a critic was her insistence that “[t]he Cinema exists to please women.” She maintained that the majority of filmgoers in Britain were women and that filmmakers programmed for them.

She also urged her fellow female film watchers to be discriminating, to ask for more than sweet love stories in their film fare. “The cinema provides us with the safe dreams we want,” she wrote, “and if our dreams are often not worth having, it is because we demand no better.”

Marcine of the blog A Clock Without Hands wrote a post last summer citing Barry’s accomplishments and concluding, “Is it even necessary for me to say that [Barry] has lived my dream life?”

I also applaud Iris Barry’s accomplishments. Her life was not always a dream, however. In a recent email Jillian Slonim of New York, who is working on a biography of Barry, described her as ”a person whose public activities were known and acknowledged but whose private life was both complicated and kept under wraps by her.”

I look forward to reading Jill’s work as I indeed know little about Barry’s life. Jill says, “[T]he more I delve into Barry the more interesting she becomes to me.”

I do know this: Iris Barry was often poor. She arrived in New York at the onset of the Depression with a great wardrobe but not much else. I admire her courage in striking out on her own this way, but the experience doesn’t sound pleasant.

Her close relationships were stormy. She seems to have been drawn to men who abused or neglected her. The most significant example of this phenomenon (and probably the most significant man in her life) was the poet and artist Wyndham Lewis, with whom Barry lived from 1918 to 1921.

Wyndham Lewis, "L'Ingenue" (1919, a portrait of Barry), Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Lewis was a stereotypical Bohemian artist of his period—temperamental, unfaithful, and occasionally just plain mean. He and Barry had two children, both of whom were farmed off to others to raise.

Barry married twice—once in London to a poet named Alan Porter; the second time in New York to John Abbott, a financier who was an administrator at the Museum of Modern Art and technically supervised her, although it seems clear that she was the one in charge of the Film Library. Neither marriage lasted.

In the late 1940s at the Cannes Film Festival she met Pierre Kerroux, a Frenchman who was apparently working as a smuggler at the time. She lived with him in Fayence at the end of her life. At least one friend of hers I interviewed at the time of my master’s thesis was concerned that Kerroux abused her physically.

The two had few resources on which to draw. Barry’s occasional work for the museum could not have supplied much income. And she clearly had a drinking problem by the end of her life if not before.

Barry may have been thinking of her own relationships with men when she wrote in her Portrait of Lady Mary Montagu (1928):

Love she really knew very little about. That is the misfortune of women, that they have an appetite but no natural genius for it…. It is simple enough for a man to be attracted by a woman; but so very hard for him to accept her as a human being.

In my correspondence with Haidee Wasson I asked what attracted her to Barry. Here is part of her reply:

I was drawn to Iris Barry partly because she was such a pivotal figure for the history of film, and its relationship to art institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The more I learned about her the more compelling I found her to be. She was dynamic and uncommonly intelligent.…

And, I long have had the sense that she didn’t suffer fools. Barry also managed to balance the compromises required of working within established institutions yet also mining a deeply personal passion. I don’t think she was always the most likable person in the room. But, she was bold, proud and uncompromising.

I don’t wish for Iris Barry’s life—the poverty, the difficult relationships, the willingness to strike out blindly on new courses without thinking them through. Nevertheless, I do envy her passion: for film, for art, for preserving beauty and culture.

I celebrate her achievements as a critic and a curator. And I admire her poetic soul.

In a 1931 Bookman article about London’s literary and artistic milieu during World War I Barry wrote:

The effect, all too little realized at the time, was as though something that mattered very much had somehow and rather miraculously been preserved round that table when so much else was being scattered, smashed up, killed, imprisoned or forgotten….

It was, for the hours the gathering lasted, less important that so many were being killed and more that something lived: possible to recall that for every Blenheim there is a Voltaire and that the things that endure are not stupidity or fear.

Iris Barry herself accomplished “something that mattered.” And she was someone who mattered.

Happily, Barry is beginning to achieve the recognition she deserves. Haidee Wasson and Leslie Hankins have both published journal articles examining her writings. Jillian Slonim is finding everyone she can (and every piece of paper she can) to shed light on Barry’s life and work.

Jill reports that MoMA is planning to launch a “Modern Women” exhibition in Spring 2010 that will include some of Barry’s original programming.

More intimately, perhaps, with Jill Slonim’s help the town of Fayence, France, held a “Jour Iris Barry” last fall. On this day Fayence celebrated its late resident and officially named the movie theater in the town’s new cultural center after her.

If like Iris Barry YOU have a passion for film, please consider donating to the National Film Preservation Foundation. The NFPF is giving away four DVD sets to donors chosen in a random drawing this week.

And of course please do visit some of the other bloggers who are writing this week For the Love of Film.

Meanwhile, here is a (vaguely) Iris-inspired recipe.

I have to admit that none of my old research on Barry gave me a clue about what to cook. Unfortunately for me but not for her, Jillian Slonim is currently at the Berlin Film Festival. She wrote:

Iris did like to eat though she went through many periods in which she could not afford to eat well or what she might have wanted to eat. I seem to remember reading something she wrote in her later years–when she lived in Fayence–about liking asparagus but won’t be able to check that until I’m back home…too late for the blogathon.

I turned to Haidee Wasson, who told me of Barry’s “tea habit.” Apparently, she enjoyed afternoon tea, particularly in her London days. So I brewed a pot of tea and made some smoked-salmon tea sandwiches. I’m sure that when Barry was doing well financially she enjoyed them. I hope you enjoy them, too.

And I promise my next post will be MUCH, MUCH shorter than this one…….


Film (and Fish) Lovers’ Tea Sandwiches

I started to write down exact proportions for these little treats, but I gave up on that idea rather quickly because like most tea sandwiches they are best assembled to taste. I just stirred lemon zest, dill, and pepper into the cheese until it tasted delicious but not too strong.

If you want to vary the recipe, you may certainly add capers to the cheese and/or garnish. And if you’re like my mother (who adores butter), you may add a layer of butter underneath the cheese.

Ingredients:

thinly sliced white bread (either a solid homemade bread such as the one I used in my BOLT sandwiches or a commercial brand such as Pepperidge Farm)
whipped cream cheese or soft goat cheese, at room temperature
a handful of fresh dill, chopped but not too finely
grated lemon zest
freshly ground pepper
sliced smoked salmon, cut into small pieces

Instructions:

If you want to, cut your bread into pretty shapes. Since Saint Patrick’s Day is coming up, I used shamrocks. Cut off the crusts even if you don’t make shapes.

In a bowl thoroughly combine the cheese, most of the dill, most of the lemon zest, and the pepper.

Spread the cheese mixture generously onto the pieces of bread. Top with salmon and a bit more dill and lemon zest.

Brew up a pot of tea and watch an old film.

Iris Barry in France with artist Jean Raine (courtesy of www.jeanraine.org)

Corn Waffles

Today is Shrove Tuesday, a.k.a. Mardi Gras, a.k.a. Pancake Tuesday.

Pancakes are a traditional food on the day before Ash Wednesday since they contain several substances Christians traditionally gave up for Lent—milk, eggs, and butter.

My family has rechristened the day Waffle Tuesday so that we can eat our newest breakfast creation, Corn Waffles. We first made them last week to help my nephew Michael study for a test.

Michael lives in Virginia. Recently in school he has been studying Virginia’s past—specifically, the state’s part in the Revolutionary War.

The other day we were quizzing him on material he had been asked to learn.

He did a great job mimicking John Paul Jones and declaring, “I have not yet begun to fight.”

He knew where Thomas Jefferson lived even though we have yet to visit Monticello. (I hope we’ll get there in the spring!)

For some reason, however, he had trouble remembering details about the Battle of Yorktown—specifically, the name of the British General who surrendered at Yorktown to George Washington, Lord Cornwallis.

In order to make Cornwallis’s name more memorable we started calling him Lord Corn Waffles.

Soon we decided to reinforce the lesson by allowing Michael to taste the general’s namesake.

The rest, as they say, is history……

Corn Waffles

Ingredients:

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) sweet butter
1-1/4 cups flour
3/4 cup yellow cornmeal
1/2 teaspoon salt
1-1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 cup buttermilk
3/4 cup milk
2 eggs, separated
2 tablespoons sugar

Instructions:

Melt the butter and set it aside to cool slightly while you assemble the other ingredients.

In a medium bowl use a whisk to combine the flour, cornmeal, salt, and baking soda.

In a larger bowl combine the buttermilk, milk, and egg yolks. Stir in the dry ingredients.

In a clean bowl beat the egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Beat in the sugar. Gently fold the sugared egg whites into the milk combination.

Cover the batter and place it in the refrigerator overnight. (You may just let it stand at room temperature for a few minutes, but your waffles will be fluffier if the batter can stand overnight, and the cornmeal will be better blended.)

The next morning take the batter out of the refrigerator and let it stand at room temperature for 15 minutes.

Brush your waffle iron with butter and preheat it. Cook the waffles as needed (usually 3 to 5 minutes, depending on your waffle iron).

Serves 4 to 6.

The Surrender of Cornwallis by John Trumbull (Photo Credit: Architect of the Capitol)

A Winner!

(Courtesy of Kosher.com)

Thanks to everyone who left a comment or wrote a Tweet to enter the Hamentaschen drawing from Kosher.com.

I loved reading about your favorite holidays–which included Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Passover, and one’s own birthday–and seeing what interested you at Kosher.com. (This ranged from bread to arugula!)

I'm pleased to announce that the random drawing has taken place. The winner is Commonweeder, a.k.a. Pat Leuchtman. A gardener, writer, and librarian, Pat lives in Heath, Massachusetts. Her blog, Commonweeder, is well worth a visit.

Pat had a little trouble identifying her favorite holiday. “To choose a favorite holiday or favorite holiday food is impossible,” she wrote in her comment. “All holidays are just great reasons for making a seasonal treat.” You took the words right out of my mouth, Commonweeder!

Pat highlighted the link on Kosher.com about trying to eat moderately (and exercise!) even in the midst of holiday feasts.

Pat, your Hamentaschen should be on their way shortly. Happy almost Purim, everyone, and thank you again to Kosher.com for offering this holiday treat!

(Courtesy of Commonweeder)

Heart-y Chocolate Sugar Cookies

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Naturally, I have something chocolaty for this month’s installment in my Twelve Cookies of Christmas series.

Today’s chocolate sugar cookies were cut into hearts (although they could certainly be trees or stars or reindeer in December) and iced with a basic butter icing.

They tasted wonderful.

Royal icing would have been prettier and easier to transport than the butter version we used on the cookies—but royal is harder to make and harder to keep. It has to be used right away or it dries out.

I wanted my icing simple and foolproof to use because I had a vision of a bunch of children happily decorating and eating cookies—a vision that came true.



My nephew Michael and his friends in Virginia have been snow crazy this week. No one has been to school. Sleds and snowballs have replaced electronic games (well, almost).

We called around the neighborhood a couple of days ago and asked whether anyone would like to take a break from the snow and come decorate cookies.

We ended up with eleven joyful children gathered around the kitchen table slathering icing and tossing sprinkles around.

The resulting cookies were heavily decorated. (We actually ended up making a double batch of icing to make sure there was enough.)

And they were VERY popular. The pictures above and below were taken with a cell phone (my battery ran out of steam at the critical moment) so they’re a little fuzzy, but you can see that our gang had a really good time. One of them was camera shy so we have only ten in the group photo.

If you enjoy these cookies half as much as the kids did, you’ll be happy indeed………



Chocolate Sugar Cookies

Ingredients:

for the cookies:

1 cup (2 sticks) sweet butter at room temperature
1-3/4 cups sugar
2 eggs at room temperature
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup Dutch-process cocoa
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 cups flour

for decoration:

1 recipe (2 if you MUST) butter icing (see below)
lots of festive sprinkles

Instructions:

Cream together the butter and the sugar. Beat in the eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Blend in the baking powder, salt, and cocoa, followed by the vanilla. Stir in the flour.

Chill the resulting dough, covered, for 1 hour. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

On a nonstick surface (a silicone mat or a marble board) pat the dough out to a thickness of 1/4 inch. Cut it into the desired shapes.

Bake the cookies on parchment- or silicone-lined cookie sheets for 10 to 12 minutes. They should be solid but not rock hard.

Let the cookies cool on the sheets for a couple of minutes before removing them to a rack to cool. Let them cool completely before frosting them with butter frosting (see below) and sprinkling the heck out of them.

Makes about 2 dozen cookies.

Butter Icing

Ingredients:

1 cup (2 sticks) sweet butter at room temperature
confectioner’s sugar to taste (probably between 1 and 2 cups)
2 teaspoons vanilla
milk if necessary to stir
a couple of drops of food coloring (optional—I used my sister-in-law’s Wilton food coloring, which was excellent; I’ll have to get some!)

Instructions:

Beat the butter until it is fluffy; then add confectioner’s sugar. Beat in the vanilla. Add milk and/or more confectioner’s sugar until the icing is spreadable.

Truffle wasn't allowed to eat any cookies, but she loved being with the kids anyway. They are all her Valentines.

A Little More Moo Goo Gai Pan

Bob Newhart (Courtesy of the William Morris Agency)

I am making Moo Goo Gai Pan for the Chinese New Year. The Year of the Tiger starts this Sunday, February 14 (maybe the tiger will wear pink hearts?).

Moo Goo Gai Pan, a Cantonese chicken-and-mushroom dish, isn’t necessarily classic new-year fare. It isn’t even my favorite Chinese recipe. Although I like its gentle balance of flavors I tend to prefer spicy Chinese food.

I’m serving Moo Goo Gai Pan because I’ve been watching The Bob Newhart Show lately.

I have never been a fan of physical humor. Much of it is based on pain or at the very least embarrassment. I cringe at my nephew Michael’s most recent passion, the Three Stooges. To a nine-year-old boy hitting someone over the head with a giant mallet ranks as the epitome of funny, but it leaves me cold.

Verbal humor, on the other hand, I have appreciated since I began understanding language. A clever pun or a flight of wordful whimsy tickles my fancy more than all the slipped-upon banana peels in the world.

As a result I’m fond of Bob Newhart. An early stand-up (and recording) comedy star who went on to play the lead in two successful televised situation comedies, Newhart doesn’t launch his humor with his body or his facial expressions. His face tends to be blank no matter what he’s saying or reacting to.

He just stands there and delivers deadpan lines. And we laugh.

Newhart’s characters tend to be everymen, folks with whom any of us can identify. In one of his earliest routines he portrayed a hapless security guard at the Empire State Building trying to deal with the arrival of King Kong.

On The Bob Newhart Show his character, Bob Hartley, is a psychologist but not a know-it-all. Bob listens patiently to his slightly neurotic patients, to his wife, to his friends, and to anonymous bureaucrats on the other side of a telephone line.

He doesn’t always understand them, and they don’t always understand him, but the conversation continues. It’s always worth listening to.

One of the best remembered episodes of this series is “Over the River and Through the Woods,” which aired in November 1975, during the show’s fourth season.

We are now used to television programs that have multiple, intertwined plots. “Over the River,” like most episodes of its era, revolves around only one basic plot. Bob Hartley’s wife Emily decides to go to a family reunion for Thanksgiving, and Bob elects to stay home.

He and his lonely buddies (all regular characters) gather at the Hartley apartment to spend the day together watching football on television. They can’t cook, but they can drink from the jug of vodka and cider Jerry the Orthodontist has brought to the party.

Jerry is a graduate of William and Mary, and his alma mater’s team has an important football game scheduled on Thanksgiving. He shares with his friends the William and Mary tradition of taking a swig from the jug every time the opposition scores. The opposition scores a lot in this particular game.

The men gathered in the Hartleys’ apartment finish the day drunk, with a small frozen turkey still stowed away in the dishwasher (yes, the dishwasher).

In order to counterbalance the abundance of alcohol in their system they order Chinese food. Bob calls the House of Hu and places multiple orders for Moo Goo Gai Pan. At the end of the program the bill comes to almost $100, a sizeable sum for take-out in 1975.

The plot doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t. What works in this episode, as it does in so many of the programs put out by the MTM production company in the 1970s, is the careful combination of writing and acting that makes the characters at once funny and very real.

One feels as though one knows them. I’ve never gotten drunk on Thanksgiving (although I’ve often had a hankering for Chinese food!). I empathize with the endearing characters sitting around Bob’s living room watching football and trading bad jokes, however. We’ve all had holidays that didn’t quite work out as planned—and we’ve all shared strange as well as happy days with our friends.

If you’d like to see Bob Newhart, director James Burrows, and other colleagues reminisce about the “Moo Goo Gai Pan” episode of the The Bob Newhart Show, visit TV Land’s clip from the Archive of American Television’s tribute to the show’s 35h anniversary.

And this Chinese New Year please join me in a little Moo Goo Gai Pan.

At eighty Bob Newhart, bless him, is still touring the country doing comedy and answering his own fan mail.

Let’s raise a glass of cider and vodka—well, maybe just cider–to him, to his writers, to his fellow actors, and to the little MTM kitten that (in homage to Leo the MGM Lion) meowed at the end of every MTM production.


Moo Goo Gai Pan

Ingredients:

for the marinade:

1 teaspoon salt
pepper to taste
2 egg whites
6 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 tablespoons peanut oil

for the sauce:

6 green onions, chopped (the white part plus a little of the green)
1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger
1-1/2 cups strong chicken broth (you may want to add a bouillon cube to your broth to make it stronger)
3-1/2 tablespoons dry sherry
1/2 teaspoon salt
pepper to taste
1 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch paste (cornstarch dissolved in JUST enough water to make a paste)

for assembly:

2 boned, skinned chicken breasts, sliced as thinly as possible
peanut oil as needed for frying
6 ounces mushrooms (oriental mushrooms such as shitakes work best), sliced
1/2 pound snow peas, ends trimmed
a few pieces baby corn if you have them

Instructions:

In 2 different medium-sized bowls combine the marinade and the sauce. Place the chicken pieces in the marinade and leave them for at least 1/2 hour.

In a wok or similar wide frying pan pour enough peanut oil to make a little pool—probably at least a cup. Heat the oil over high heat until it shimmers. Add the chicken a few pieces at a time. Blanch the pieces—that is cook them on the outside, but don’t worry about browning them.

Remove the chicken, turn off the heat, and put the mushrooms, snow peas, and baby corn pieces into the oil. Blanch for about 15 seconds; then remove and drain.

If you have more than 2 of tablespoons oil left in your wok, pour all but 2 tablespoons out. If you need more to make 2 tablespoons, add it.

Turn the heat on again to high and pour the sauce into the pan. Cook it until it thickens. Add the chicken and vegetables, and cook, tossing, until the chicken is cooked through and everything is moistened—a minute or two.

Serve with rice. Serves 6.

This statue in downtown Chicago honors the character of Bob Hartley. It comes complete with a couch on which passersby can recline. (Courtesy of TV Land)

Don't forget: You have until tonight at midnight to enter the drawing for a tin of gourmet hamentaschen from Kosher.com.

Just leave a comment on this post (or post a tweet on Twitter) that mentions YOUR favorite food holiday and provides a link to the Kosher.com web site.

Good luck….

Wacky Cake

February may be the shortest month of the year, but it hosts a disproportionate number of holidays.

This month we are celebrating Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, Mardi Gras/Shrove Tuesday, the Chinese New Year, and Purim. (I’ve probably left out a few!)

We commemorate the birthdays of quite a few historical figures, from Charles Dickens on February 7 to Handel on February 23, not to mention Gypsy Rose Lee on February 9 and Susan B. Anthony on February 15.

And as a food writer I always love the nutty food holidays to be found in this month. These include National Indian Pudding Day on February 17, Cream-Cheese Brownie Day on February 10, National Tortilla Chip Day on February 24, and Surf & Turf Day on February 29.

(I guess most of us can afford that last holiday only once every four years.)

Clearly, despite the chill in the air there is much to celebrate this month.

In today’s post, looking forward to Valentine’s Day, I offer an amazingly simple chocolate-cake recipe sent in by Mattenylou, the blogger responsible for the charming On Larch Lane.

This “Wacky Cake” dates back to the early 20th century. It’s considered wacky because it includes a little vinegar and because all of the ingredients get dumped together in one bowl and mixed simply with a wooden spoon.

It includes neither eggs nor butter so you don’t have to wait for any ingredients to come to room temperature. (It’s dairy free, too—until you frost it!)

Reference librarian Lynne Olver, who runs the wonderful Food Timeline web site, suggests that Wacky Cake (a close relative of Dump Cake and Crazy Cake) first saw the light of day in its present form in the 1940s.

Olver adds that similar cakes first appeared during World War I, when (as in the Depression and during World War II) fresh ingredients were scarce.

Mattenylou originally sent the recipe to my nephew Michael to make for my birthday in December. She told him that she used to bake it every year for her mother, whose birthday was December 23 like mine, using Christmas-tree shaped pans.

Things got a little frantic this past December, as they so often do at that time of year, so Michael and I decided to save the recipe for February.

We tossed a little pink icing on top and threw a bunch of red and pink sprinkles on the cake (Michael is a whiz with sprinkles!)–and a Valentine cake was born.

Mattenylou points out that her recipe can be halved to put in a 9-by-9-inch pan (or a round single-layer pan). She adds that if one mixes up the dry ingredients and stores them in a bag one has a quick, easy cake mix to use when needed.

My family loved the cake, which was terrifically moist and rose beautifully. We certainly couldn’t taste the vinegar!

Wacky Cake

Ingredients:

3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup cocoa
1 tsp salt
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp vanilla
2 tablespoons vinegar (I used cider vinegar, but white distilled would do as well)
2/3 cup canola oil
2 cups water

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour 2 9-inch cake pans.

In a bowl combine the flour, sugar, cocoa, salt, and baking soda.

Make three wells in the combined dry ingredients. Pour the vanilla into one, the vinegar into the second, and the oil into the third. Pour the water over everything and stir with a wooden spoon until the dry ingredients are wet and everything is thoroughly combined.

Pour the batter into the prepared cake pans. Bake the layers until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean (about 30 to 35 minutes).

Frost as desired and decorate with festive sprinkles. Serves 12 to 16.

Mattenylou’s Cooked Frosting

Here is the recipe for the fluffy frosting Mattenylou puts on her Crazy Cake. We liked it but would probably use a standard buttercream or cream-cheese frosting another time; this one takes a LONG time to mix!

Ingredients:

1 cup milk
1/4 cup flour
1/2 cup shortening
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla

Instructions:

Cook the milk and flour until the milk bubbles and is thick and smooth, stirring constantly with wooden spoon or whisk. Set the mixture aside and let it cool.

Beat the shortening, butter, sugar, and vanilla until they are blended.

Add the cooled milk/flour mixture and beat well, for 10 minutes.

Add a few drops of green (for Christmas) or red (for Valentine’s Day) food coloring and beat until fluffy. This may take up to 15 minutes, depending on your mixer. The frosting should be fluffy and hold peaks.

Ices 1 layer cake.

Don't forget: You have until Friday night to enter the drawing for a tin of gourmet hamentaschen from Kosher.com.

Just leave a comment on this post (or post a tweet on Twitter) that mentions YOUR favorite food holiday and provides a link to the Kosher.com web site. Good luck....

Hamentaschen Drawing

(Courtesy of Kosher.com)

Purim is almost upon us, and the nice folks at Kosher.com have offered to send a tin of gourmet Hamentaschen to one of my blog readers or Twitter followers.

I highly recommend the holiday of Purim to those of you who are unfamiliar with it. It may well be the most joyous holiday in the Jewish calendar.

It celebrates one of the relatively few heroines in the Bible—Queen Esther of Persia. Here’s a brief rundown of her story:

A young Jewish girl in the fourth century B.C.E., Esther won a beauty pageant held by King Ahasuerus (a.k.a. Xerxes), who was looking for a new wife. He had executed the previous one in a fit of pique. He replaced her with Esther.

Esther’s cousin and former guardian, Mordecai, warned her not to reveal to the king that she was Jewish. Living in exile in Persia, the Jews were often subjected to anti-Semitism.

The king’s evil counselor, Haman, took offense when Mordecai refused to bow down to him and arranged to have all the Jews in the country killed. Esther went to the king and revealed her identity. This act took great courage, given the fate of her predecessor. Esther pulled it off, however.

In the end, the horrible Haman was hanged at the gallows he had erected for Mordecai. Esther and the Jewish people were given permission to defend themselves against their enemies. Jews in Persia held a HUGE party to celebrate their brave, beautiful queen and their enhanced status.

To commemorate Esther’s resourcefulness Jewish people party on Purim. It’s a time for dressing up in costumes and playing pranks. It’s also a time for giving to the needy and for exchanging gifts of food. And it’s a time for getting drunk—or at least for seeing the world from a new, youthful perspective.

"Esther" by John Everett Millais (Courtesy of the Tate Online)

Hamentaschen are a sweet Purim treat. I’ve loved them all my life. They rank somewhere between a cookie and a small cake in bakeries. They are triangular (some say to mimic the shape of nasty Haman’s tricorn hat). And they’re enhanced with poppy seed or fruit filling.

As you can see from the photo at the top of this post, Hamentaschen are occasionally filled with and/or covered with chocolate in our chocoholic culture!

I’ll be posting a traditional Hamentaschen recipe soon. Meanwhile, I encourage you to enter the drawing from Kosher.com. Here’s what you have to do:

Leave a comment on this blog or post a tweet from now through this coming Friday, February 12. I’ll cut off entries at midnight EST.

The comment or tweet should contain two pieces of information.

First, it should tell me what YOUR favorite food holiday—religious or non-religious—is.

Second, it should provide a link to the Kosher.com web site. Find something on the site that intrigues you—a recipe, a product (they have tasty foods available year round, not just for Purim!), a piece of information about a Jewish holiday.

If you choose to tweet rather than post a comment here, please send a tweet to me (remember, my Twitter name is LaTinque) so I won't miss your contribution!

Next Monday, February 15, I will randomly select a winner from the comments and tweets. Kosher.com will send that lucky person the tin of Hamentaschen. It should arrive in plenty of time to help you usher in Purim on February 28.

As they said of Levy’s rye bread, you don’t have to be Jewish to love Hamentaschen!

While you’re thinking about your comment and/or tweet, you might like to try this recipe from Kosher.com’s Chef Jamie Geller.

Jamie has provided several recipes that enable readers to consume alcohol during Purim without getting drunk. She calls them her “saucy” selections. This soup will enable you to celebrate this holiday without going overboard.

I look forward to reading your comments……

Jamie's Soup (Courtesy of Kosher.com)

Kosher Italian Bean Soup
(Courtesy of Kosher.com and Jamie Geller)

Ingredients:

1 medium onion, quartered
6 cups water
3 cups Imagine Organic No-Chicken (or Vegetable) Broth
3/4 cup dry red wine
1 (14.5-ounce) can chopped tomatoes
1 (15-ounce) can white beans, drained
1 (15-ounce) can red kidney beans, drained
1 (15-ounce) can chickpeas, drained
10 baby carrots
10 baby zucchini
1 frozen crushed garlic cube
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon coarse black pepper

Instructions:

Place all ingredients in a 6-quart stockpot. Cover and bring to a boil.

Reduce the soup to a simmer and cook it uncovered for 18 to 20 minutes.

Ladle into bowls and serve. Serves 8.

Jamie Geller (Courtesy of Kosher.com)

Slightly Spicy Super Popcorn

From left to right: Jackson, Michael, and Benjamin at the stove

I’m getting ready for Game Day.

I’m not a football person; I’ve never actually understood the appeal of this particular sport. I get tennis. I get baseball. I get hockey. I even get golf (a good excuse for walking). I especially get bridge. But guys running up and down the field in those huge pads and jumping on each other…?

Nevertheless, as a lover of popular culture I view the NFL’s big display every year. I can’t resist the spectacle of it all—the halftime show, the brand-new ads, the excited if broke fans (the prices on those tickets are scary!).

I even watch most of the game itself although I try not to listen to the “experts” as they blather on and on about it.

I don’t plan a huge menu for Super Bowl Sunday, but I do like to make something special in honor of this annual sports fest. I originally thought of making nachos for Sunday. I love nachos: they’re salty and fatty and satisfying and versatile (you can put just about anything you have in the house into them!).

After looking at the elegant, creative nachos in Wednesday’s Washington Post, however, I abandoned the nacho plan. I didn’t need the shame: my nachos were going to be pedestrian in contrast. And actually my family didn’t need the calories.

Instead I decided to spice up a little popcorn. I love popcorn almost as much as I love nachos. It’s flavorful. It’s cheap. And it can be made with relatively little fat (although I draw the line at air popping; the kernels need SOME fat).

My nephew Michael had a snow day from school on Wednesday so I enlisted him and his friends Benjamin and Jackson to help pop the corn.

Popcorn is a great project for kids as long as they are careful (which our boys were) and adults are supervising. (I know you can’t see us in the pictures, but there were three of us in the room!)

I decided to work with Indian spices. The first batch of popcorn we tried went a little overboard in the spice department: we threw in cumin, turmeric, garam masala, curry powder, paprika, and red pepper flakes as well as salt.

Michael ate one handful and went running through the house shouting “Water! Water!” The other two boys just kept their distance and laughed.

I tried it myself and found it spicy (although not overly so) and a little too busy in terms of flavors.

The second batch used the combination of flavors below. Its subcontinental flavor was subtle rather than “in your face”—perfect for young (or timid) football fans. It should complement rather than overwhelm any other munchies we consume as we watch the Saints and the Colts battle it out.

Enjoy the popcorn—and the halftime show—and the commercials. If you must, even enjoy the game!


Tinky’s Indian Corn

Here are a few hints before I start:

Check with your guests about allergies before you make your popcorn. Peanut oil is ideal for popping the corn, but canola will do if someone has a peanut allergy.

Popcorn pops best in a cheap, not-too-thick pan. Put away the Le Creuset and the All-Clad if you’re lucky enough to have them and get out an old aluminum pot. By the time the fancy pots heat up the popcorn will burn. A wok with a lid works very nicely.

The lid should be on your pot (so the popcorn doesn’t pop right out and hit you) but the pot should have a little room to breathe. Keep the lid slightly ajar so that steam can escape. Place one hand on the lid as you shake the pot with the other hand so the lid will stay in position.

To make your own popcorn salt (I got this hint from watching Alton Brown: thanks, Mr. Brown!) put kosher salt in a small food processor and pulse it 10 to 12 times.

Ingredients:

enough peanut or canola oil to line the bottom of your pot (3 to 4 tablespoons)
1/2 teaspoon popcorn salt (a tiny bit more if you must)
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1/2 cup popping corn
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon curry powder

Instructions:

Place the oil, the salt, the cumin seeds, and 1 kernel of popcorn in your pot and stir to combine. Put the pot over fairly high heat (see above remark about the lid) and start moving the pot gently back and forth over the burner.

When the initial popcorn kernel pops add the remaining popcorn, the turmeric, and the curry powder. Stir to combine and return the pot to the heat. Continue shaking. In a little while you will be rewarded with the sound of popping corn.

Listen carefully. (This was the hardest part of the whole recipe for the boys, who have the enthusiasm of youth and like to talk loudly through most activities.)

When the popping subsides enough so that you hear a pop only every few seconds remove the pot from the heat and pour the popcorn into a bowl.

Serve the popcorn immediately or cool the popcorn and then store it in a sealed plastic bag for up to a week.

Makes just under 2 quarts.

BY THE WAY, if you're looking for additional Super Bowl ideas, here are a few suitable posts:

Mexican Chicken Pizza

Apple-Sage Cheese Spread

BOLTs (in honor of the COLTs)

Red Beans & Rice (in honor of the Saints)

Amy's Super Chili

Fabulous Fudgy Brownies

(Courtesy of ebay--I can't afford the darn things myself!)