Nobody Knows Anything

Yesterday the Possummomma posted about a woman who said:

The school is supposed to give the kids a healthy lunch. So what that
there’s fact and sugar or chemicals. It’s food. We’re a working
class family that can’t afford to fix a good lunch for the two dollars I give
the kids for school lunch. The kids wouldn’t eat fruits and veggies anyway. When am I supposed to make these lunches? I work. Besides that it’s not my responsibility to go out of my way to make lunches that the school must give by law.

To which my only reaction can possibly be:

My brain reads “So what that there’s [fat] and sugar or chemicals” and it ’splodes a little. What on Earth do you mean, So what? Are you the one in charge or not? Are you the one modeling behavior for your kids, or are you not? On what planet is it not your responsibility?

(In case you didn’t look at the webpage in question, in response to this declaration, the Possummomma shows her how to fix a good, healthy lunch for under two dollars.)

And with fruits and veggies: I honestly can only guess she’s never given them to her kids. My kids won’t eat everything — they won’t even eat all the things they used to eat. (Sophia the girl who could eat an entire bunch of asparagus when she was two won’t even touch the stuff now.) But we still offer them a variety of foods and they have favorite fruits and veggies despite being picky.

One of the key things I decided on early was that I was not going to be a short-order cook. There are a few choices for breakfast on school mornings — not as many as I’d like, but we tend to be rushing around in the morning and I keep the menu simple. I offer them a few choices for their lunch: they can pick what kind of sandwich they want or a thermos of soup, plus a fruit and maybe a snack. For dinner, I serve one meal. They can eat some of what’s put on the table, or they can pass and wait for breakfast in the morning. Strangely enough, they usually end up eating some or all of what I’ve served. Not always, and probably not with as much variety as I’d like. (For instance, they’ll usually have some of whatever starch I serve.) But they know they’re not getting anything else instead.

One good book worth checking out on the subject is Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children by Ann Cooper and Lisa Holmes. And a quick glance through Amazon shows a number of books on the subject: Brown Bag Success: Making Healthy Lunches Your Kids Won’t Trade, The Top 100 Recipes for a Healthy Lunchbox, and The Healthy Lunchbox. Several of which turn out to be available at my local library, so I’m going to pick a few up and check them out.

I know it can be a pain in the ass to find out everything about everything, but please: this is your body, and your kids’ bodies. You take charge of what goes into them, okay?

Today’s Adventures in Non-Euclidean Geometry:

Your pantry is a small room, approximately 8 feet by 4 feet in size, with shelves on three of the walls. It is crammed full of stuff and you are beginning to have trouble using it. You are also annoyed because you have a cereal bug infestation that you have not been able to stop. Because spring fever is setting in a few months early, you have decided to spend your Monday, with the help of two others, cleaning out the entire pantry from top to bottom and then only put back the things you like. You remove every single object from the pantry — boxes, cans, books, glassware — and you fill up your entire kitchen with what used to be in your pantry. Then, after the pantry gets scrubbed down and mopped and disinfected, you return things to the pantry. At the same time, you fill three black garbage bags full of items you are discarding.

When you finish, your first thought is:

1. “Wow! This is so wonderful!”
2. “Take THAT, cereal bugs!”
3. “Why is it I have a ton less stuff and it still doesn’t all fit back in?”

Answer: 3. I still can’t figure it out. If you have a lot of stuff, and you remove a ton of it, you should have LESS, right? Apparently it doesn’t work that way. Weird.

You have removed the six shelves’ worth of cookbooks so that you can rearrange them or get rid of them, as the case may be. It used to be that collecting cookbooks was your husband’s thing. Since you’ve begun cooking and more especially since you’ve begun baking, however, you’ve taken over the cookbook buying habit. How many books have you bought in the past year?

1. 10
2. 20
3. 50

Answer: 2. I’m pretty sure I’ve managed to keep it to about 20. Lots of cupcake books (Why? Have I been making many cupcakes? If so, when?), lots of baking books, a couple of casserole books.

What’s the oldest expiration date you find in the pantry?

1. 2005
2. 2002
3. 1993

Answer: 3. Which means it’s from the year Darin and I got married. Which means it survived a move to Los Angeles… and a move back. It did not survive today’s purge, however. And strangely enough? I can’t remember what this item was. Probably for the best.

You are confused by the presence of which item(s) in your pantry?

1. The Flours: all-purpose, bread, cake, rice, potato, and whole wheat.
2. The endless containers of balsamic vinegar.
3. The three separate bottles of Ancho Chile Powder, a spice you never use.
4. All of the above.

Answer: 4. Okay, I kind of understand the flours. But the 5 separate bottles of balsamic vinegar? I think the pantry must have been such a mess I didn’t know I already had balsamic vinegar. (Gee, ya think/) And the Ancho chile powder: go figure.

One of the first things you find once you’ve put everything back in the pantry is:

1. That library book you’d been searching for.
2. A cereal bug.
3. Something for tonight’s dinner.

Answer: 2. GodDAMN cereal bugs. Everything that a cereal bug might find tasty is in plastic buckets, so I’m hoping to God this is going to starve whoever’s left.

Despite having had a lot of help in doing the pantry, I am completely wiped. Tonight’s dinner will be leftovers, ’cause I got nothing left for actual cooking. This is why you need a small house, so that you aren’t tempted to have all this crap to begin with.

This is totally the year we get this house in order. I need to feel less hostile toward my living environment on a day-to-day basis.

I am completely wiped. The kids are playing nicely together in the other room with their new dolls — Simon got Batman and Robin, Sophia got Batgirl and Princess Genevieve, and somehow they’ve come up with a shared universe. My father-in-law is finishing up some of the dishes from yesterday. I’d stop him, but that would take effort and, well, let him do it if he wants. Darin is upstairs in bed, not sleeping as I had supposed, but reading his birthday/Christmas/Hanukkah/Solstice gift from his brother Mitch: Absolute Sandman. Mitch also gave me a book that I was up reading into the wee hours (well, well past my bedtime): Essence of Chocolate, by the founders of Scharffen Berger Chocolate. As I lay in bed last night reading this book, I kept thinking, “I’ve got to get some sleep. I’ll read just one more recipe. Okay, I’m going to make that. No, I’m not going to make that, because I have not one but two refrigerators stuffed full of food. But as soon as we have run out of food, I am so making that.”

(I actually bought a small refrigerator this year specifically for Christmas. It fits into a utility closet. Darin says he’s going to take it to work when he goes back in January. I said we’re going to see about that.)

The reason I had to get to sleep (and not bake anything when I woke up) was that yesterday was Christmas and we hosted 15 people for dinner: my family, Darin’s family, and a family of friends of ours. I asked my guests to bring hors d’oeuvres and Mitch to make salad while I concentrated on dinner and the local French pastry master did dessert. I need to make a few notes of things to remember for next year:

• I’m not cooking for 15 people, I’m cooking for 9 adults and 6 children. Thus, I should make food for 10, not 15..
• And not 10 hungry people either, but 10 people who’ve just gorged on delicious appetizers.
• Take the roast out when the internal temperature is about 120. We took it out at 130 and while it was pink inside, it wasn’t rare and we were all kinda hoping for rare.

On Christmas Eve I made the batter for the Yorkshire Pudding, so it would be nice and cold when the time came. And so I didn’t have to worry about it come the morning. I also made about 3 dozen gingerbread cookies “for the kids to decorate.” Uh huh. If you say so, Diane.

First thing Christmas morning at about 7 am I took the 12-pound, 5-rib prime rib out of the fridge and put it on the counter to get to room temperature by noon. As it turned out, it did not get to room temperature by noon — we put it in the microwave for a few minutes at 20% power, and that seemed to work without cooking it.

I trimmed and washed three pounds of spinach. I washed each clump of spinach twice, and there was still sand in it when I was all done. That was for the creamed spinach, which was wonderful, although three pounds of spinach steams down to about a handful.

I scrubbed, peeled, and sliced (using a mandoline) four pounds of russet potatoes into 1/8-inch slices. This went into potato au gratin. I actually topped the potato au gratin with a bunch of gruyere cheese, so it was a bit of a gratin dauphinois too. Every recipe I read said, “Supposedly one batch serves 8 but everyone had two helpings so make more!” Of course, you should only make more if you have 10 hungry people and not 10 people stuffed with hors d’oeuvres. I’m going to learn. Seriously. But the potato au gratin was wonderful: creamy and just enough tang from the cheese.

I made actual egg nog, with raw eggs and rum and everything. It was not nearly as thick as the store-bought stuff. I don’t know what I did wrong (if anything). Probably didn’t fluff the egg whites enough.

As hors d’oeuvres we had a variety of hard cheeses, sour cream coffeecake (from Zingerman’s), leek pie, spanokopita, spicy chicken drummettes, goat cheese, and some other tasty things that I don’t think I got around to.

When the beef came out we deglazed the pan, poured a 1/4 cup of drippings back in, poured the Yorkshire pudding batter on top of it, and put it back in. I watched it for a while and started moaning, “It’s not puffing.” “A watched pudding never puffs,” I was told. Repeatedly. By everyone in the kitchen. It did, in fact, eventually puff up and quite nicely too. Yorkshire pudding? Rocks.

We all ate like kings for dinner, if I don’t mind saying so myself (and I don’t), and after resting for a bit we had the chocolate buche de Noel and tarte Normande with creme Anglaise. Oh, they were good. I could only eat small slices of both, but you didn’t need more than a small slice because they are so flavorful. That Pascal Janvier, he is a genius.

The kids played on the Wii for a while (which was tricky, given that we had 4 controllers and 5 kids, but apparently they shared pretty well). After my sister’s family and our friends left, Mitch played Zelda for a while. We had to keep telling the kids, “No hints! Let Mitch figure it out!” But they wanted to share everything they knew about the game, despite being told not to.

After Mitch left and I did as much cleaning as I could stand, I headed upstairs and started reading the chocolate book. I forced myself to stop around 11, when my eyes were closing of their own accord.

It was a pretty good Christmas day.

ETA: Darin started reading The Essence of Chocolate and said, “This is the greatest book EVER.” He agreed I should wait to make a few of the recipes until we have a space to store them, however.

My God, how I love the Internet. I’m still going through the projects, so I can’t even tell you which is my favorite yet. The giant Bounty! The insanely large Kit Kat! The liquid gold caramel that ate Leeds! Or vice versa! Wow, does this site inspire me. Unfortunately, it inspires me to try one of these things with really high quality and expensive ingredients, thereby missing the point entirely. (Via Sugar Savvy.)

I took Martha Stewart Baking out of the library. It looked great! Excellent pictures. A wide range of great baking recipes, not all of the whip-up-this-little-wedding-cake-in-your-spare-time variety, but homemade Oreos and cupcakes.

She had a recipe for Pullman bread (also known as pain de mie), and since I am still looking for the sine qua non of pain de mie, I couldn’t wait to try it.

Then I read the instructions and went, “Huh?”

Let me summarize it: make the dough. Let proof. Punch down; let proof again in the proofing bowl. (Most recipes I’ve read do only one proofing in the proofing bowl, but whatever.) Take the dough out, fold up, put in pain de mie pan, let rise.

So far, so good. Then we get to this:

Close the lid completely and bake, rotating pan halfway through, until loaf is light golden brown, about 45 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 350F, close the lid, and continue baking another 30 minutes.

I assume that second “close the lid” is there because you opened the lid to check on the loaf’s color. But this baking time — what the hey? 75 minutes total is almost double what any other recipe I’ve read has called for.

I pulled the loaf out after the 45 minutes were up: the loaf was a deep golden brown, and the crust was actually several millimeter thick. To be absolutely sure I used my insta-read thermometer, and the interior temperature was fine.

What’s up with that extra 30 minutes? If this was the first time I’d baked bread, I would have cremated the loaf.

This makes me very nervous about trying other recipes.

I learned something new this week: when you’re violently ill for 24 hours, it’s not a “24 hour thing,” it’s the “stomach flu.” I haven’t gotten the flu very often, okay?

Anyhow. Whatever this thing was, it has completely kicked my ass for the past week. I’ve been lethargic and my stomach has felt queasy for days. I’ve been home a lot.

During this week, I’ve discovered that one way I like to pass the time is by baking. In fact, several times I was itching to get started baking something and felt stymied that I had to do something like, I don’t know, laundry. Or napping.

On Friday I made the Cook’s Illustrated recipe for shortbread. I burned the first batch. So I dumped the entire thing and got to making a second batch. Not that I particularly felt like eating any, and Darin certainly wasn’t in the mood for a cookie. (I’m a little disappointed, because while the CI recipe is good, it’s still not the kind of shortbread I want to make, which is the kind I get at a local coffee house: softish, flaky, very buttery. Maybe I can’t make it at home, but I keep trying.)

I picked up Chocolatier magazine (personally entranced by the “perfect chocolate chip cookie” recipe, just as Ivonne at Paper Palate was, but the deciding factor was the Chocolate Cherry Bread recipe, which I want to make for Darin) and 125 Best Cupcake Recipes by Julie Hasson. Yes, I’m currently into the whole cupcake craze.

I made the honeycomb recipe from Chocolatier, mainly because I had some honey on hand and because I love Violet Crumbles so much. It was fun to make — the part where the sugar-honey goo bubbles up with the baking soda is cool — but the end result screamed, “Extreme dental work will be required if you eat more than one crumb of this!” So I tossed it.

Yesterday, however, was the sine qua non of baking mania: I made a loaf of sandwich bread, I made biscuits for dinner (the best I’ve ever made! and the kids didn’t eat them! what’s up with that?), I made banana chocolate chip cake after dinner.

While I am enjoying some of the fruits of my labors (I am as fond of banana chocolate chip cake as the next person (the next person who likes banana chocolate chip cake, that is)), I’m not especially crazed to eat these things I’m making. I’m just finding that baking is very relaxing for me. The idea of mixing a whole bunch of stuff together and having a new food at the end is just deeply appealing. And very odd. Would never have thought it was possible, but there it is.

If When we remodel the kitchen, I am so asking for a baking area.

Now even chocolate milk is good for you. Hear that, Rob and Nina: chug! chug!

I bought myself a seltzer bottle for Christmas. Isn’t it pretty?

At first, I couldn’t make it work. Then I noticed the cartridges not only said “Cream” but also said NO₂ instead of CO₂. (I had those cartridges because that’s what the chick at Williams-Sonoma sold me, okay?) I took the cartridges back, got the ones labeled “Soda,” and discovered they work much, much better.

Normally I drink carbonated water mixed with a slug or two of Torani syrups, available in nearly every flavor you can think of (and even more, if you buy the full-sugar ones — currently i use the sugar free ones flavored with Splenda). I hope adulterating perfectly good water with syrup removes it from my “glasses of water per day” total, but I can’t say that with certainty.

The best thing about making the bottle of soda is, of course, adding the CO₂ to the water. You add the cartridge to the cartridge holder, carefully screw it in… and when the seal on the cartridge is pierced, WHOOMP! The water bubbles up. Then you shake the bottle a few times (to distributed the CO₂?) and you’re good to go.

Now that I have used the seltzer bottle (successfully), I can give you a side-by-side comparison of how the bottle stacks up against a bottle of carbonated water (say, Crystal Geyser) bought at the store:

Clearly in the short run it’s much more cost-effective to keep buying the carbonated water at the store, but I much, much prefer using the seltzer bottle. It tastes better, there’s no sodium, and best of all, I’m not filling up our recyclables container every week with four or five bottles.

So if you’re like me and a)like carbonated water and b)like to make your own Italian sodas with Torani syrup, I highly recommend picking up a seltzer bottle. There are both cheaper ones and bigger ones out there, depending on your needs.

Via the Accidental Hedonist, there is a settlement to the Hershey’s trademark infraction suit concerning a Hershey’s bar appearing on the cover of a biography of Hershey. The story contains the best quote of the Foodie year:

Author Michael D’Antonio called the settlement “a victory for people who can’t tell the difference between recycled paper and chocolate”

Hahahahahahahaha.

Seriously, I don’t like the mouthfeel of Ghirardelli’s anymore — I can’t imagine trying to stomach a Hershey’s bar.

Despite being fairly sick yesterday — I didn’t get out of bed until 11am, and I don’t know when the last time that happened, other than it was undoubtedly Before Kids — I felt an urge to start baking. Like Christmas didn’t cure me of it. So I made Layered Brownies last night and Cocoa-Chocolate Chip Muffins this morning, both from Lisa Yockelson’s ChocolateChocolate. And it’s not like I have a fleet of people coming in to celebrate the New Year!

(The Cocoa-Chocolate Chip muffins seem to have turned out better than the Chocolate Chocolate Chip muffins I made from Baking By Flavor for my birthday — today’s muffins are a nice deep brown, whereas the ones on my birthday were kind of a light brown and nowhere near chocolatey enough.)

§

I am wondering how I’m going to get back into the swing of things next week. We’re all waking up late — even the kids aren’t getting up until 9. Have I really been in the habit of getting up at 6 to meet my friends for early morning runs? This is going to take some doing.

I was reading Barbara’s post at Tigers and Strawberries about shopping for lemons at Whole Foods. One paragraph definitely stood out for me:

However, once I got up to the fish counter, and leaned in to take a look, the heavy smell of fish once again got to me. It was bad enough that I will not buy fish from them, but at least the smell is confined to within a few feet of the fish counter.

I have the same problem at the Whole Foods near me. At both of them, in fact. I do not buy fish from Whole Foods. I have no problem buying beef, chicken, pork… but I skip right past the fish counter because the smell is so overwhelming. I have no such problem at Lunardi’s, which has beautiful fish nicely laid out. What’s Whole Foods doing wrong?