I Miss You

Last Sunday was Father’s Day. My own father died in 1989. I miss him. He was only 81 when he left us. His father was 82. Guess that gives me an idea how long I’ll last.

Daddy used to love to eat. He loved some of the strange things my mother made. He loved what I made too. I remember long ago when he suggested I add more rye flour to the first two loaves of rye bread I made. I made them immediately. (The first two were being eaten fast.) I was only twelve years old. I was a good girl. I did what Daddy told me. We ended up with two loaves of what could have been very nice door stops.

Dad loved my chili and my pizza. Mom loved a night off from cooking. Of course, I never stopped making bread. I had my master recipe back then. It was good for pizza, bread sticks, onion bread, and Taos Indian bread. Izzy has gotten some of that master recipe too. Bread isn’t as easy to bake in Florida as it was in Illinois. But we still try. Chili worked well in Illinois, Arizona, and Florida. Glad enchiladas worked when I took them to Brooklyn!

For Father’s Day Izzy and I had pork chops. Ever since the iced tea experiments the beginning of June, I wanted to braise the chops in green tea infused with five-spice powder. I did it and I was glad. Daddy would have liked it. I can hear his voice now. “You made this up? It’s good. Not too spicy. Can I have more?”

Sure, Dad. You can have more. Save some for Tom and some for Ernie. There’s plenty for all my men who are no longer with me. All the men I miss . . . .

Not Your Famous Southern Sweet Tea

June in America is, among other things, National Iced Tea Month. June 10, 2011, also happened to be National Iced Tea Day. With temperatures hitting the mid-90s every day, the timing seemed perfect to experiment with iced tea.

A check of the cabinet found Russian black loose tea and dozens of boxed-up teabags. Yerba Mate, orange pekoe, peach, raspberry, white, green, and rose offered plenty of base ingredients. Since June 10 was also National Herb & Spice Day, that’s the direction I went.

I started off with orange pekoe collected from Chinese take-out meals. Nearly out of coffee, a day of iced tea seemed to go well with 95 degree temperatures on a sunny afternoon. About six years ago I bought a spoon-shaped tea infuser on the clearance rack of my favorite grocery store. I put some dried rosemary in the infuser, closed it up, and put it in the cup to steep with the teabag. My bargain infuser wasn’t worth the promises. It was, however, worth the dollar I paid. Curled up dry rosemary leaked from the edges of the infuser leaving evidence of the flavor floating in the tea and hugging the sides of the cup. It was worth picking rosemary from my morning drink.

The next test was simple: Green tea with ground ginger. It was good. Izzy and I liked it better than the first tea. My preference, I must admit, was influenced by no need to pick hard, stem-like things out of my cup. I think Izzy preferred it because she got more of it. I think it may have worked better with candied ginger rather than powdered.

My favorite of all the teas came on Saturday. Green tea with five-spice powder was a winner! I love cooking with five-spice. Never thought I’d want to drink it. I drank three cups. I remembered my five-spice chicken with orange marmalade, five-spice pork chops with cherry jam, and five-spice chicken with cocoa and hot chile. They were all done in a sauté pan. Most ended up overcooked. With the heat that should stick around past Thanksgiving this year, I think I’ll play with my five-spice tea and the slow cooker.

Think I might carry this tea experiment past the end of June. Hot or cold, sweetened or not, flavored teas are a pleasant change from the plain unflavored water I drink by the pint (at least 10 cups a day!) and slow down the need for coffee.

Revenge Part Deux

In REVENGE! you learned why I feel no guilt eating pork and chicken. But what about beef? What about the bovine made “Gotta have my cow!’’ a motto of mine for years? No, it had nothing to do with shipping bovine seminal vesicles (otherwise known as bull balls) to England for years. I have no idea what they did with them but I feel responsible for thousands of steers during that time.

Let’s start with the Cook County Fair. I think the year was 1960. Mom got to drive the Budweiser team around the race track at Arlington Park. I got to meet Elsie the Cow. Elsie threw up on me. She ruined my day.

I was an exhibitor at the Illinois State Fair two years later. That’s a whole story in itself. A local florist in Palatine, Illinois was glad I was invited. I bought my flowers there. My flower arrangements brought me to the fair. We drove to Springfield in a station wagon that smelled like a funeral home. Checking out the livestock exhibits was the quickest way to wash all that sweet from my nose.

Somewhere between getting there and going home I cuddled sheep, pet rabbits, and got stomped on by a huge Black Angus steer. He must have broken a couple of toes but after my mother’s bout with the medics at the fair, I wasn’t about to let them look at my foot. Some tape from the first-aid kit and a new pair of socks and I was good to go. And go I did. I must have walked about a hundred miles. Think I had a hamburger as my next meal.

Geese are safe but ducks are not. I had a girlfriend who lived on a farm with “watch geese.” The first time I went there, a dozen geese circled the car. I hopped out and my friend yelled, “Get back in the car!” I didn’t listen. Instead I held out my hand and ran it over the head of one goose. Before I knew it, six geese were nuzzling me. The other six were chasing the other three people who had gotten out of the car. My friend, also named Judy, told us the geese had never been friendly with strangers. They watched the farm better than trained dogs.

And ducks? My brother and I got baby “chicks” on Easter that grew into ducks. Dad built an enclosure for them behind the garage. Whenever I went out to feed them, they bit my hands. I’ve been lucky enough to bite back as often as I can find the right chef. The expense? I chalk that up to the price of bandages for the farmers who raised the ducks.

One night during a rain storm the ducks demolished their pen made of chicken wire and lumber poked into the now muddy ground. It was late and Mom and Dad took off hunting our ducks, armed only with flashlights. Our parents returned without our ducks. My brother was heartbroken. I started thinking about planting onions where the duck pen had stood. I didn’t care if they ever brought them home. My I think my brother roamed the neighborhood for the rest of the week searching for his duck, Coca-Cola, and mine, Ducky-Lucky. I sensed the truth the Sunday following the great duck escape. Mom said it was pheasant. I knew better. My only question was which duck we were eating.

I do feel guilty eating some animal protein. I grew up eating lamb. It was always a special dinner for me. Then I met some sheep. They were warm and soft and cuddly. The lanolin in their fur made my hands feel so good. Best of all, they were friendly. I think my diet went lambless for five years after spending Fourth of July in a livestock trailer with a timid little lamb. (No, its fleece was not white as snow. Sort of gray actually.)

How do I justify the Thanksgiving turkey? Don’t think I’ll be doing that for a while. When I did, it was simple. If imagining a turkey, nude and roasted, as a giant evil chicken doesn’t work; listing examples of turkey intelligence should do it. Have you ever heard that turkeys drown during rain storms because they run through the rain staring at the sky? Don’t believe it. They suffocate themselves by huddling together so tight they can’t breathe. If an animal ever earned the right to be dinner, it’s Ben Franklin’s favorite fowl, the turkey.

While we’re talking meat, have you ever tried alligator? You should. It’s delicious. Besides, it’s scary, ugly, and could kill you. No need to feel any guilt. Besides, you could make luggage with some of what’s left.

Tofu burgers, anyone?

REVENGE!

Revenge is a dish best served cold, it has been said. The only way I like revenge served cold is maybe on a sandwich. Yes, I’ve been known to eat revenge.

It all started when I was a little over two years old. Dad and his boss went hunting, for pheasants I think, and brought the families with. One family consisted of Joe, his wife Josephine, and their black Lab named Prince. The other was Mom, Dad, and me. I wasn’t expected to be as helpful as the retriever.

I got to feed the chickens on the farm the first morning we were there. The chickens were much more interested in pecking my ankles through my socks than they were in the corn I threw from the bucket I carried. After my legs were cleaned up and my bloody socks changed, I went back outside, steering clear of the chickens. I headed over to the pigpen to check out a sow and her new litter. The sow was a very protective mother and tried to tear down the wall of the pen to scare me away. I had just climbed up for a better look when the world shook and the sow snorted as if to say, “Leave my babies alone!” I got the message and spent the rest of the day in the kitchen with Mom, Josephine, and Mrs. K to keep me safe.

That night, after dinner, I went to bed in an upstairs bedroom. I like to think I slept with Prince but think it was more likely I did not. He probably slept in the barn.

The next day the men took the women with them in my father’s Nash sedan when they went hunting. Of course I went with. I was afraid to be left at the farmhouse with animals trying to get me. Daddy’s car had always been a safe place.

The men grabbed their guns and Prince and headed out to hunt birds. They hoped to get enough to take home for themselves and to feed the farmhouse for dinner. Soon enough they were nowhere to be seen.

The women talked women talk. I looked out the window and ate apples and oranges from a paper bag. Mom and Josephine ate apples and oranges too. They threw the apple cores and orange peels out the car windows. So did I. That was not allowed on the streets of Chicago but seemed perfectly natural in a farmer’s field in South Dakota.

Belly full, I took a nap until I heard a commotion from the front seat. Mom and Josephine were very upset. I think it was the first, and maybe the last, time I saw my mother afraid of anything. Josephine tried her best to keep from screaming. She failed. Mom wished out loud the men had left her a gun. I looked out the windows of the car and saw the ground had changed. Gone was green flecked with wildflowers, apple cores, and orange peels. Now all we saw were the backs of giant animals surrounding the car. Maybe it was instinct that sent me balancing on the back of the driver’s seat and reaching for the car horn. Mom helped me with the car horn. She was bigger than I was, closer to the steering wheel, and much more successful at making a racket our hunting men were sure to hear.

Hear it they did. The first evidence of their return were gunshots into the air, of course. It wouldn’t do to kill a bunch of Farmer K’s hogs. Prince tried carefully to herd the hogs away from the car. Dad and Joe yelled at the hogs, shooting in the air each time the giant pigs halted. Soon we were all together. Daddy heard the story of the hogs surrounding us. Then he heard how I was the hero with the car horn. On the way back to the farmhouse, birds collected and put in the trunk, Prince sitting next to me in the back seat, my father suggested I think of those hogs the next time he cooked bacon for breakfast. It was his way of making any fear disappear. I took it one step more, pretending the pheasant I would eat that night was really one of those chickens from the morning before.

Can anybody really blame me for enjoying pork and chicken? Yes, friends, revenge is sweet, especially with a good barbeque sauce.

HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY!

Memorial Day means many things. It’s the calendar-challenged beginning of the summer season. (Summer is always calendar challenged in Florida. It usually lasts from nine to eleven months.) It’s an anchor date for family reunions. Some just see it as a three-day weekend. It can be the first serious grilling day of the year. Hopefully most of us realize it’s the one day we’re given to honor those who have served our country.

I won’t be grilling this year. That’s because I haven’t grilled in years. I cook in my kitchen. I use the stovetop, oven, and microwave. So this year I’ll be in the kitchen. It may be hot. It may feel crowded. I’ll be making pork meatballs and thinking about my parents. They were both in the Army during World War II. Both confined to the U.S. My father was a sole surviving son back when that meant something and became a mechanic in the Army Air Corps. My mother was an orientation officer. That meant she taught women how to be WACs. She said she taught grown women how to use indoor plumbing, a pretty rough job for a girl from Chicago. Neither saw battle. Neither saw war. But they helped those who did.

My parents both had their Army stories. They were never stationed together. That guaranteed twice the amount of stories. Dad fried eggs on airplane wings in Tucson, Arizona. When he was stationed in Riverside, California, he made films with a couple of guys named John: Forsyth and Wayne. He also got to meet Doolittle on the way to Tokyo. Mom’s stories weren’t as celebrity-filled but she had food stories. Considered underweight by the Army, she got extra rations. She couldn’t eat all the food the Army gave her so she shared it with the women under her command. Mom’s little driver, minimum height and weight by Army standards, who cleared a jack-knifed semi tying up traffic by using her experience of getting through spots too small for even her, ate well for weeks.

I’ve often wondered whatever happened to my mother’s Purple Heart. She only had the ribbon, not the medal, because it wasn’t official. Someone she was stationed with the week the war ended had earned a real Purple Heart and given her the ribbon to honor her for a burn suffered cooking breakfast for my father after she married him.

That is tied to the story from Dad about being called on the carpet by his CO for getting married without his permission. Dad told the Colonial he was under orders from his wife and his wife out-ranked him. The war may have been over but the Army was still too busy for the Colonial to check to see the Sergeant on the other side of his desk had married a Lieutenant. Dad didn’t lie. The way he phrased it was correct. Mom outranked Dad. And that’s the way it went.

Whenever I think about my parents, I think about food. They fed me, of course, and helped form my opinions of what good food is. My father helped me plant my first garden when I was six or seven. My mother let me help cook our first harvest. Meals were a family affair.

Mother was famous for her spaghetti, cooked for what seemed like all day. It started with a recipe given to her from Gene Sage (of Sages Sage’s in Chicago) and continued on to suggestions from family and friends until it was perfect. We ate a lot of spaghetti dinners before Mom’s spaghetti sauce was perfected. It was never bad. And I’ve never been able to duplicate it.

Dad made breakfast every Sunday morning. Even on Father’s Day – unless I insisted on making French toast or pancakes. Every Sunday we had Dad’s stovetop frittatas. No need to light the oven with a tight-fitting lid for the frying pan. He called them open-faced omelets. He would make them using anything in the refrigerator. Sometimes that was just a stick of salami. Leftovers made it interesting. Tacos, chop suey, steaks, roasts, anything that wasn’t enough to make another meal. We loved our Sunday surprise breakfasts even when they were no surprise.

I miss my Army heroes, my parents. I see them every day in my mirror and hope to bring them with me throughout my life. Though Dad’s daily weapon may have been a wrench and Mom’s a chicken drumstick, they were my heroes as much as soldiers flying Dad’s planes and nurses who shared Mom’s meals. This day I thank all who served my country in any and every way they could.

Imaginary Food

I just spent a few days writing about quesadillas for the appetizer chapter for “A Table for One or Two.” The odd part was there were no tortillas in the house. Not even a tortilla chip! Everything was done from memory, including the tastes.

Today we’ll be inventing imaginary deviled eggs. Again we’ll be relying on memory and imagination. The eggs in the refrigerator, all five of them, are starting to get old. It may be time to make French macarons in the middle of the night if we have a middle of the night cool enough and dry enough.

Rain had been predicted for a couple of days this week but has now been stricken from the forecast. My poor garden may wilt into oblivion. So much for cooking fresh veggies from the yard. The rain forecast disappeared but now has resurfaced for Memorial Day weekend. Happy grilling, neighbors!

Izzy has been making requests lately. Guess I could call it a dogsend. Sometimes planning meals alone gets to be a chore. It’s nice to have help. Her latest request is that we make pasta from a heap of flour on the counter. I know she loves pasta. We both do. Secretly I think she will enjoy watching me clean the kitchen a little too much. Don’t tell the dog but I’ve wanted to do homemade pasta for decades.

With limited imagination and limited foodstuffs, I’ve been “cooking” frozen and canned foods a lot lately – way too much to satisfy the cook in me. While the neighbors are trying to grill between raindrops this weekend, Izzy and I will be making pork meatballs. We’ll also be inventing a tomato-based vegetable sauce from the freezer and pantry. I’d better get to the store next week or I’ll be making Beneful stew. Maybe I should save a can of tomatoes.

Lest anyone worry that I don’t eat enough these days, rest easy. I’ve gained one pound eating imaginary food in the last week. It may melt off next week. By that time, I’m afraid, I’ll be assembling – and eating – real food.

The Saga of The Tomato Soup Cake

Last week someone on TV mentioned tomato soup cake. (I can see her face but can’t think of her name.) I became fascinated. Google brought me over 2 million results in 0.12 seconds. I haven’t read them all. About the middle of page 2 of search results I picked one recipe found on page 1. (It’s true that placement counts on search engines.)

I made a few very minor changes to the chosen recipe before even starting to assemble the ingredients. The more I cook, the more I can taste the recipe just by reading it. I often get sidetracked while getting ready to cook. I look at the spices that must be moved to grab the ones I want and think about things to make. I walk back to the laptop to check something in the recipe and start another web search in a quest for something utterly unrelated. (By the way, the woman responsible for my tomato soup cake obsession is Elizabeth Falkner.) I digress . . . and digress again.

First, I assembled tools. Three bowls, measuring cups and spoons, whisk, rubber spatula, big bamboo spoon, and regular dinner fork (just in case). The room on my small counter almost exhausted, I wedged a stick of unsalted butter (the only kind I ever buy) between the can of tomato soup and the bowl waiting for wet ingredients. Went and played on Facebook for a bit while the butter came close to room temperature. It was also time to turn on the oven to 350 F. to preheat.

It was now time to do everything at once so I measured out dry ingredients first. Everything went straight into the biggest bowl. In went two cups of all purpose flour. The flour looked a little lonely so I added ¼ teaspoon of salt. White stuff in a gray bowl looked boring so I added a teaspoon of ground cinnamon. The recipe called for another teaspoon of ground cloves and another of ground nutmeg. I eyeballed about half a teaspoon of each with the one-teaspoon measure. Just for kicks, I added about half a teaspoon of ground ginger. That may have been a mistake. On the other hand, it may have been a good idea. I haven’t decided yet and Izzy likes it just the way it is. I added a teaspoon of baking powder and combined everything with the whisk. One bowl finished!

I put the butter into the next biggest (or next smallest, depending on how you look at it) and added a half cup of sugar then creamed them together with the big bamboo spoon. It’s the first time I used it instead of a wooden spoon. I love my bamboo tools!

Then came the really cool part. I dumped one can of tomato soup into the smallest bowl (about a quart) and added one teaspoon baking soda. I stirred that in with the dinner fork and just watched. It’s kitchen magic. The red soup turns an orange-pink color. The acid from the tomatoes in the soup mixes with the soda. The whole thing swells a little and bubbles a bit. It’s fun to watch!

Mixing ¼ cup of water added to the soup can to get as much soup as possible into the cake can be a little anti-climactic but it does add a little more fizziness.

Time to get mixing! Add the foamy soup mixture to the butter and sugar. I stirred it with the dinner fork. (No need to clean it. You’re stirring in the stuff that’s already on the fork.) You can use a mixer, stand or hand. Then mix in the dry ingredients in two or three additions.

Once mixed, pour into well-greased and floured cake pans. These cakes are pretty forgiving. I used a Bundt pan but any cake pans or even a loaf pan will work. The directions said to bake the cake for an hour. Ever read the back of a cake mix? Time and temperature differ for different sizes and different types of pans. My suggestion is to keep a close eye on it after about half an hour. Make sure a skewer or toothpick comes out clean before you take the cake out to cool.

Cool cake about half an hour in the pan and turn it out to a cake plate to finish cooling. You can frost it (cream cheese frosting or some variation thereof is recommended), glaze it, or dust it with powdered sugar.

The batter is thick enough to use the waffle iron. That should make Marc happy. I could probably make Napoleons with tomato soup cake waffles layered with macaroni and cheese without even changing the recipe. That should make Kathy happy. Playing with all this should make me happy. Of course, can’t forget Izzy. She’ll be happy because I always share with her.