Play Clay

Watching the boys play with twelve different colors of Play Doh the other day got me thinking.  What type of hippie parent AM I if I can't manage to make this stuff from scratch? went the thought.  And yes, it was closely followed by both don't eat that! and if you mix all those colors together you're not going to like...oh well. 


I tried to make play clay (or salt dough, or whatever you want to call it - it's not REALLY Play Doh if it doesn't have that smell, you know) once for Trevor when he was about Jake's age.  It didn't go so well - first it was too sticky and then about five minutes later it was too dry and we ended up throwing it out.  But I'm older and wiser now, am I not...?  Plus, it was raining today and there was really nothing else to do.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups flour.  Yes, that white whole wheat flour that's been sitting in a ziplock bag in the cabinet since you bought it six months ago thinking you could use it for pancakes and your family would never even notice the difference will work just fine, which is a nice bonus to making play clay.
• 2 cups warm water
• 1 cup salt
• 2 Tbsp vegetable oil (canola is fine, or whatever you have in the house)
• 1 Tbsp cream of tartar (don't leave it out, otherwise first it'll be too sticky and then about five minutes later it'll be too dry.  Hello, a-ha moment.)
• Some type of colors (more on this in a minute)
• A couple drops of essential oil or tea tree oil (it won't make it smell like Play Doh, but it'll cut the white whole wheat flour smell a bit and make it more interesting.  Plus, both the baby and the dog may be less likely to taste it if it smells like tea tree.  A bite or two won't hurt either of them, but it does apparently have enough salt in it that it can cause the dog some problems if she eats too much of it.)

Easy cleanup with this - you can mix it together right in the pot.  A large saucepan works well - the big bottom surface area makes it get done faster and more evenly.  Mix together the flour, water, salt, oil, and cream of tartar over low heat.  It will look like library paste.  Stir it with a wooden spoon and after a few minutes it will start to clump together.  Keep stirring until it's totally pulled away from the sides of the pot (5-7 minutes or so) and when you press your finger into it, your finger comes away clean.  Take it off the heat and dump it onto a clean counter top.  Split it into two, three, or four balls, depending on how many colors you want.

Jake wanted pink and orange this afternoon.  I had natural colors and paprika and pomegranate juice in the house, so I figured this might be possible.  It wasn't - we ended up with one ball of sort of grayish blueish purple and one ball of sort of goldish mustardy yellow.  Even if you don't ever cook with them, buy a set of conventional colors for the play clay - your toddler will love how bright they are and your 3rd grader won't roll his eyes at his weird hippie mom who's SO uptight about artificial colors that she won't even put them in PLAY DOH, for Pete's sake.  Put a few drops of each color in the middle of each ball and knead it on the counter until it's smooth and the color is distributed evenly.  Add a couple drops of tea tree or other oil, if you like.

This will keep nicely in ziplock bags, but not for a terribly long time.  Which is okay, since half the fun is making the stuff anyway.  And you do have that whole bag of white whole wheat flour to use up...

Chicken Pot Pie

With the somewhat unhappy defeat of Prop 19 in California this week (otherwise known as the Proposition to Legalize Recreational Marijuana Use, or the I'm-Hungry-and-I-Don't-Know-Why Proposition), I figure the time has come to tell the story about the chicken pot pie.

When Trevor was about three years old, one of his favorite people in the world was our friend Tara.  She was over one night and he was cooking her a pretend dinner on the pretend stove in his room.  I was eavesdropping, because listening to a three year old pretend cook is one of the cutest things on the planet.

What are you cooking? she asked.

Chicken pot pie was the immediate response.

Awwww...I thought.  How cute is that?  Not only is he pretend cooking, but he's pretend cooking something I cook!  I listened harder.

What do you put in your chicken pot pie? was the next question from Tara.

Chicken, said Trevor.  There was a short pause.  And pot.


Needless to say, my recipe differs just a bit from his - I use either thyme or rosemary.

There are a lot of things I'm happy to make from scratch - cookies, scones, pancakes.  Spaghetti sauce, chili, soup.  Chicken pot pie is not one of these things.  I cheat unabashedly when making it, and it somehow manages to be delicious anyway.  Even though I made it up, it always somehow reminds me of something you'd find in a Betty Crocker cookbook from 1962, right next to the tip about how you should reapply your lipstick just before your husband gets home because he's had a hard day.

It does require a little advance planning - namely, buying a package of boneless skinless chicken breasts (about a pound and a quarter, but you can easily go a little either way), dumping them in a pot of water and boiling them gently until they start to fall apart (usually about 30-40 minutes).  Sometime during this process you're probably going to have to skim off the foamy stuff and add more water, but otherwise they pretty much cook themselves.  Once they're cooked, pull them out of the water, shred them, and set them aside (in the fridge, unless you're continuing with the recipe right away).

Ingredients:

• Shredded cooked chicken breast (see above)
• Chopped onion, carrot and celery (if you live near a Trader Joe's, this is easier.  Buy a package of mirepoix and it's done for you)
• Butter (How much?  Some.  Half a tablespoon, maybe?)
• Frozen chopped broccoli, thawed.  About half a bag if your family likes broccoli, about a quarter of a bag if they don't (even if they hate it, it's pretty much camouflaged by everything else.  Unless they completely and passionately despise it, in which case, leave it out and use thawed frozen peas instead)
• 3 cans (or a little less - sometimes about two and three quarters will do it) of Campbell's Healthy Request cream of chicken soup (you can use regular Campbell's cream of chicken if you must, but the pie will be too rich to eat as much of it as you'll want to.  And you can use the reduced fat if you REALLY must, but the Healthy Request is pretty low in fat without tasting like melting plastic like the reduced fat does)
• One pre-made pie crust, thawed if frozen.  Trader Joe's makes a great one that's not all full of artificial crap, but a Pillsbury crust will do in a pinch.
• Black pepper and either thyme or rosemary (not pot) to taste.  Grind or mortar-and-pestle the thyme or rosemary before you add it so it's not so long and woodsy.

Melt the butter over medium or medium low heat and add the onion, carrot and celery.  Saute until the onions are translucent and the other veggies have softened a bit (if you don't saute them long enough, the carrots will still be crunchy when it's done...and it's better if they aren't).  Add the broccoli, the chicken, and the soup.  Stir until heated through and add spices.  Be sure you taste it - you may find it needs a little salt.  Once you've got it to your liking, pour it into a pie plate (give your kids tastes of any that won't fit in the pie plate and call it chicken pot pie guts - they will happily come eat it), cover it with the crust, flute the edges and cut a couple of vent holes in the top.  Bake (on a foil lined cookie sheet for less mess - it WILL go over at some point) at 350 for about 30 minutes, or until the crust starts to turn golden brown and the filling is bubbly.

Great with a green salad and French bread (but really - isn't everything?) and brownies for dessert.  Of course.

Scones

So.

When your wife has been awake half the night because you caught the kids' cold and couldn't stop hacking and then she had to get up three times with the baby, twice with the cat, and once with the dog and then she had to get out of bed AGAIN at 7 AM even though she asked if YOU would please get up with the baby because you didn't put your glasses on when you got up, thinking you were just going to lie down with the baby, and even when he said he had to make a poopoo in the potty you thought, "I can manage this without being able to see" and you could, except that when he got off the potty to wash his hands he made more poopoo on the stool he was standing on while he washed and you figured you needed to be able to see the poopoo in order to clean it up sufficiently so had to yell for your wife to please bring you your glasses and she was REALLY not happy that you hadn't just put them on your face to begin with like she told you to, making sure she has fresh warm scones and coffee to wake up to when she gives up on getting more sleep and just gets out of bed will not necessarily make everything perfectly better, but it will be a start.

These scones are super easy and you can make them a million ways.  And except for the buttermilk, you probably have everything in the house...and if you listened to me and made Lila's Chocolate Cake recently, you might even have that.

Ingredients:
1/3 cup butter
2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
Pinch of cinnamon (optional)
2/3 cup buttermilk (reduced fat works fine)
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.  Melt butter and let cool for five minutes.  While it's cooling, combine the dry ingredients and the chocolate chips.  Add the cooled melted butter to the buttermilk and mix.  After about 20 seconds, it will begin to curdle and clump and look like you've just screwed up and are going to have to throw the whole mess out and start again.  You didn't and you don't - mix a tiny bit more until it gets really thick and clumpy and then add it to the flour/chocolate chip mixture.  (You might have to get in there with your hands to get the last bit of floury stuff at the bottom to mix in, but your hands are clean, right?)  Drop by 1/4 cupfuls onto the baking sheets and bake 25 minutes at 350.  If you think about it, switch the pans halfway through (this makes about 10 scones and you can fit five on a sheet easily if you arrange them like dots on dice), but if you forget to switch them they'll still be fine.  Let cool just a bit on a wire rack and feed them to your wife with lots of coffee for best results.

Notes on this - there is a strange alchemy at work in this recipe.  You have to let the butter cool for five minutes.  You have to add the butter TO the buttermilk and not the other way around, or the big clumpy clotty curdley thing won't happen and they won't be quite as good.

Like I said earlier, there are a million ways to make these.  Skip the cinnamon and substitute dried blueberries for the chocolate chips.  And a pinch of clove and/or nutmeg, use dried cherries instead of dried blueberries, and sprinkle slivered almonds on the top.  Use cinnamon, clove, AND nutmeg and use peeled chopped apples instead of cherries (you might want to add just a tiny bit more sugar if you're doing this).  With the cinnamon apple ones you can go a little bit lower fat and substitute unsweetened applesauce for about 1/3 of the butter and they'll still be good, just a little more moist and cakey than they would otherwise have been.  Skip the spices and use dried currants for traditional English scones.

Any other good variations you find, let me know...but I'm betting the chocolate chip ones will work best to cheer up your sleep deprived spouse.

Chili

This post is for Tiff, who put out a plea on Facebook this morning for a chili recipe.  It's my secret hope that she'll make it, win the cook-off, and thus have a great story to tell that will become something of a family legend, leading somehow to her daughter falling in love with my son in twenty years or so, leading to the creation of the most gorgeous babies on the planet.  But I digress...

I actually HATED most chili throughout my childhood, with the exception of the chili-like substance at Wienerschnitzel that came on top of the hot dogs.  I adore my mother and she's a fantastic cook, but chili was something she never really managed to master.  Like this one, hers was a slow-cooker recipe, but somehow it always came out much more like soup than anything else.  When I was older, she started to buy the chili kit in the brown bag (remember those?) and make it when my father would work late.  It was less soupy, but somehow not any better.  Sorry, Ma...

This is equally fantastic with about a pound and a half of reasonably good steak, about a pound and a half of ground turkey (I haven't been able to buy ground beef since I read Fast Food Nation five or six years ago) or a package of vegetarian "meat" (if you're going to go this route, try Yves Original Ground Round).  Top it with shredded cheddar and chopped onions.  Or a little sour cream.  Or hot sauce. Or all of the above...

Ingredients:

• Meat (see above)
• 1 green bell pepper, cored, seeded, and chopped
• 1 red bell pepper, cored, seeded, and chopped
• 1 large yellow or brown onion, chopped (more for topping)
• 2 cloves of garlic (or more, if you're me), minced or pressed
• 1 large can (28 oz) chopped or diced tomatoes, with their juice
• 1 small can (8 oz) tomato paste
• 1 can (19 oz or so) red kidney beans, drained and rinsed well
• About 10 ounces of frozen corn kernels, thawed and drained
• 3 Tbsp chili powder
• 3/4 tsp ground cumin
• 1/4 tsp salt or garlic salt
• 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper (more if you like it spicier - 1/8 tsp will make it pretty mild)

The great thing about slow cooker recipes is that you can toss everything in in the morning while you're still half awake and then come home to a house that not only smells like dinner, but actually contains dinner.  If you have a slow cooker, all you really have to do is throw everything in it (veggies and beans first, then meat, then seasonings) and turn it on low for 8 hours or so.  If somebody's home during the day, ask them to mix it a couple of times.  If nobody's home, just mix it as soon as you walk in the door, wait 10 minutes, taste it and adjust the seasonings.  If you don't have a slow cooker (or if you need it faster) adjust the recipe like this:

• Brown the meat (unless you're using the veggie stuff) in a little oil in a Dutch oven.  Or a similarly shaped big pot.  Why do they call them Dutch ovens, anyway?  After you brown it, take it out and put it on a plate lined with a paper towel.
• Add a little more oil to the pot and saute the onion and the peppers, about 5 minutes.  Add the garlic and saute 2 minutes more.
• Add the rest of the veggies, the beans, the seasonings, and about 8 ounces of either beef stock or veggie stock (you don't need this in the slow cooker.  You can add it if you don't believe me, but you'll end up with chili soup and then you'll wish you'd listened.)
• Put the meat back in (or in the first time, if you're using the veggie meat), cover the pot, and simmer on low for an hour or a bit more.  If it's too thick after an hour, you can add a little water.

Regardless of your method, taste it about 15 minutes before you want to serve it and adjust the seasonings.  You'll likely want a little more of all of them, but start with what's listed just in case.

Serve with a big green salad and some good French bread.  Or cornbread, if you like cornbread.  Or on top of corn chips and call it Frito pie.  Or in taco shells with sliced avocado on top.  Or right out of the slow cooker at the cook-off, if you want a great family story that will eventually lead to the most gorgeous babies on the planet.

Lila's Chocolate Cake

Before I tell you about the chocolate cake, I have to tell you about Lila.

Lila was my father’s stepmother.  I remember her as funny and blunt (if she thought you were full of shit there was a good chance she’d tell you so – and likely in those exact words) and sometimes difficult and mostly not afraid of anything.  I saw her a lot until I was about six; then my father and his father had a falling out and that was pretty much the end of that.  Until my mother’s mother died when I was 27 and I was standing outside the chapel dreading the rabbi’s call that it was time to go in for the service and a car pulled up under the portico and discharged a classy-looking old lady with a perfect blonde coif and a cane and a pair of sunglasses, and she made her way directly toward me and when she got to about two feet away I realized who she was and blurted out, “ohmygodgrandma” and then collapsed in tears on her shoulder.

She was at the hospital the night Trevor was born (he was her first great-grandchild) and I remember being comforted in labor just knowing she was in the room.  I have a wonderful picture of her holding him at one day old, looking at him like he was the most amazing thing ever to grace the planet (which of course he was).

When I was 32, she came to the end of the cancer thing.  About two weeks before she died, I asked her if she was scared, and she told me she wasn’t.  It had been a good life, she said, and she felt sure she would see my grandfather soon.  She talked about what a wonderful husband and father he’d been, and how much she’d missed him.  On a whim, I asked her if she would do me a favor – if she happened to see my mother’s mother when she got to wherever it was she was going, would she tell her about Trevor?  Her response was to ask me to hand her the phone…which she promptly used to call the mortician and ask him if the traditional Jewish burial garment was allowed to have a pocket.  I never knew for sure, but I think it’s highly likely that she was planning to somehow bring my grandmother a picture of Trevor so they could exclaim together over his wonderfulness.

I wasn’t there when she died (we were in Arkansas with Lisa’s mother, who was also dying of cancer – October of 2005 was a sucky, SUCKY month), but when I went to say goodbye to her a few days before, there was a moment when no one was in the room but the two of us.  She was in and out of consciousness, and a pained look crossed her face.  Do you hurt? I asked her.  She nodded, slowly, and I asked her if she wanted a pain pill.  She shook her head.  I asked if she wanted water, or another blanket, or some hand lotion.  Each time – head shake.  Do you want anything?  I finally asked.  Slow nod.  Deep breath.  Open eyes, looking far far far into mine.

Time, she breathed.

This cake will forever be “Lila’s Chocolate Cake”, capital letters and all.  It’s famous, as well it should be.  My mother makes it, I make it, and I’m sure in a few years Trevor will make it.  It doesn’t look like much – it’s kind of plain looking and flat and not real beautiful.  But it tastes like nothing short of heaven.

Ingredients (cake):

 *2 cups flour

·      *2 cups sugar

·      *1 tsp salt

·      *½ pound butter (yes, you read that right.  I said it tasted like heaven, not like skinny people.)

·      *1 cup water

·      *4 Tbsp powdered cocoa

·      *2 eggs, beaten

·      *½ cup buttermilk (use reduced fat if you must, but really – with all that butter, is it going to matter?)

·      *1 tsp baking soda

·      *1 tsp vanilla

Ingredients (frosting):

·      *1 stick butter (yes, that IS three all together)

·      *6 Tbsp milk

·      *4 Tbsp powdered cocoa

·      *1 box powdered sugar

·      *2 tsp vanilla

You need a jellyroll pan for this cake.  If you have (or can find) one of the “old” ones that’s an inch and half deep, that’s perfect.  Apparently sometime in the last few years, “they” decided jellyroll pans only need to be one inch deep.  That’ll still work, only the cake will be a little messier at the top and you might not fit all the frosting on.  But that’s okay – it just means there’s more to eat right out of the bowl.

Preheat oven to 350°.  Mix flour, sugar, and salt.  Combine butter, water, and cocoa in a saucepan and bring to a gentle boil.  Pour over the dry ingredients and mix well.  Add eggs.  Dissolve baking soda in buttermilk and add; add vanilla.  Mix well and pour into greased jellyroll pan, bake at 350° for 20 minutes.

While cake is baking, combine butter, milk, and cocoa over low heat.  When butter is melted, add the powdered sugar (you can sift it first if you want to be fancy) and the vanilla.  Beat well.  Poke holes in warm cake (that carving fork that you only break out at Thanksgiving works great for this, but a regular fork works too) and pour frosting on.  Allow it to set before cutting it into large pieces, otherwise you’ll have a mess.  If you need it in the evening, bake it after breakfast and it’ll be perfect…just resist the temptation to cut yourself the aforementioned large piece to go with your midmorning coffee.

Guacamole

Guacamole is one of the first things I ever learned to make.  Half an avocado, some lemon juice, chopped tomatoes, garlic salt, and exactly two drops of Tabasco sauce.  Three, if you really wanted to walk on the wild side.  My mother and I would sit down with the bowl between us and watch I Dream of Jeannie or Bewitched or That Girl until every scrap was gone.  It was one of my favorite things to eat then, and it still holds a special place in both my heart and my stomach.  Guacamole is like other things – when it’s great, it’s REALLY great…and even when it’s not so great, it’s still pretty good.

This may be, in my opinion, the best guacamole ever.  The recipe’s changed a bit from my childhood, and these days it’s more likely to be Phineas and Ferb than Samantha and Darrin (although we do have the Bewitched box set, and the boys do love it).  When Trevor came to see if he could help make dinner the other night, I seized the opportunity to pass on the family guacamole-making tradition.  I can’t wait to see what he’ll do with the recipe.

Ingredients 

• 2 large Haas avocados (you can easily double or even triple this recipe if you don’t want to hear, “what happened to all the guacamole?!?” five minutes after you’ve finished making it)
• Juice of one lime
• 2 cloves of garlic, pressed
• 1 green onion, green and white parts, chopped fine
• About 5 cherry tomatoes, chopped fine
• Garlic salt (yes, I know it has garlic in it already.  No, you can’t just use regular salt – it won’t taste the same.)
• A spoonful (to taste) of a really good salsa.  We swear by Mrs. Renfro’s medium in our house (in fact, it sends Trevor into paroxysms of joy…“I LOVE this stuff,” he murmurs over the jar, very nearly rolling his eyes and collapsing on the kitchen floor with the ecstasy of it all), but your favorite kind will do. 
• Your favorite tortilla chips for dipping.  Or carrot sticks if you’re being virtuous.  Or both, if you’re doing that angel-on-one-shoulder, devil-on-the-other thing.

Press the garlic into a bowl and add the lime juice and green onion.  Put the avocados on top and mash them (tip that perhaps everyone knows but me – if the avocados aren’t quiiiiiite ripe enough, use the potato masher instead of a fork).  Add the other ingredients and stir well.  Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.  Taste again.  And one more time to be sure it’s all right to feed to other people…

Who, Why, and What

This blog was inspired by several different things.  First, Catherine Newman’s fantastic Dalai Mama, which I adore and read religiously every week.  The writing and the food photography are both gorgeous, and everything I’ve ever made of hers has been good.  I cherish a secret hope to someday be her neighbor and absorb some of her combination of warm hippieness and the occasional Velveeta moment.  She’s a woman after my own heart…check her out here. 

Secondly, my friend Mike’s Gay Gourmet.  Mike is a wonderful human being (even if he is an Aries) and makes the most incredible pasta and red sauce around.  When I was pregnant with our second child, it was the only cure for my all day morning sickness…AND his cream sauce recipe is the only way I will willingly eat mushrooms.  I refuse to make it for myself, partly because I know it will never measure up to the way he makes it, and partly because I’m afraid that if it ever did, I would weigh 400 pounds before I could say gay Jewish Italian man.  Check Mike out, too – here.

The name comes from one of my very best friends, who made the assessment (over cocktails at Vesuvio in San Francisco, but that’s beside the point) that I’d grown “domesticated”.  While to him it sounded like a fate worse than death (the man is perpetually 22 years old – sort of a recently-college-graduated Peter Pan, even though he’s four whole years older than me), it’s come to mean something entirely different to me.  Is life hectic?  Of course.  Stressful?  Check.  Am I occasionally beset by the feeling that I know I have a wife around here somewhere because I vaguely remember what she looks like awake and not focused in 12 other directions?  Absolutely.  But when my eight year old starts a conversation on the way home from school with, “Mama, I have a question…”, or my wife’s amazing blue eyes meet mine knowingly across the chaos of the dinner table, or my two and a half year old falls asleep with his head on my shoulder and his hand in my shirt (he nursed until a week before his second birthday and the boobs still have their magnetic force field thing going), domesticated becomes synonymous with nothing short of pure bliss.  Pure, pure bliss.

So – to sum up: the blog came from a woman in Massachusetts I’ve never met, a gay Jewish Italian Aries, my Peter Pan best friend, my wife with the amazing blue eyes, and my two magical children.  And to them, it is dedicated.