For the Love of Olives

I would like to go back to Federal Hill the Little Italy Providence and buy lots of oil - cured olives. I love them and they taste like black licorice. The Kalamata olives taste like the smell of cow manure. I like them too. We got a bunch of olives last week with a piece of dried sausage and a triangular chunk of Romano cheese and ate it all up. Throw it all in a basket with some grapes and a chunk of bread and find a windy hill or a perfect piano under which to have a meal.

Indoor Cats

I was shopping for cat food and saw the for indoor cats only bag and imagined this label on a cereal box for humans.

I Learned this From My Dog

I found a tiny bag of Fruit Gushers candy on the sidewalk, unopened. They are fun to eat. It's amazing how many fun things I find in the street unopened and I pick them up and eat them. I learned this from my dog.

The Mice and the Ziti

The mice took seven pieces of ziti out of the colander while we were watching TV. Woonsocket has robust mice - as strong as pit bulls. Where was Sammy, our cat? Luckily he doesn't jump up on the counters but if he could he would've ignored the mice and eaten the ziti.

Pavlovian Zone

On Thursday I was in the dentist's waiting room reading food magazines. I have always been comforted by reading recipes but pinup closeups of steaming potatoes and braised beef with electric green asparagus put me in the Pavolian zone of drool. By the time I was called for my cleaning in I needed to wipe saliva off my chin.

Spruce Pond Creamery

Treat yourself to a fabulous experience at the Spruce Pond Creamery.
Here too.

Monday

I was grouchy this morning - the back to school blues. I had no appetite. So I took a very long walk with Lily not the usual way but down Privilege Street to the park with the little waterfall. I climbed up the hill labeled No Trespassing imagining getting arrested and I bushwhacked along the tall chain link fence out to the street. I walked the neighborhood and came upon all the elementary school kids from Edgewater Drive waiting for the bus. They all know Lily. They gathered around and she sat down in the middle while they all were petting her on the head. She'd be purring if she were a cat, I said. The girl with corn niblet teeth laughed and the girl with mini silver Christmas ornaments for earrings said her little sister in the car was going to throw up. Then the kids yelled bus, bus and the big school bus came around the corner and hauled them all away. I kept walking. I ran into the elderly lady wearing her fur-rimmed hooded white coat walking her tiny dog Oreo who was wearing a little red coat. She told me her 89 year old neighbor died. He's lived here over fifty years, she said. I ran into Riley the golden retriever and his mom. By this time I was so hungry my stomach was growling, and I began imagining my next meal. When I got home I fried two eggs in a tiny piece of bacon fat, in my mini skillet and I made toast and coffee. A good morning after all.

Have a Party, Eat the Chairs!

read

Pearl's Duck Cupcake

the beak melted off your duck
cupcake
so I ripped his head off
and ate it,
it was delicious!
then I ate his marshmallow body
and the chocolate dirt
that was his home.
then I ate your strawberry cupcake
to keep him company
in my belly.

Meat Gum

A small bite of dried salami is like savory gum, meat gum.

The Belly

In Asia the belly is one's spiritual center and source of power, so rubbing the laughing buddha's belly brings good luck, and is as close to achieving buddha nature as most of us will get.
-Cecil Adams

Slow Baking Fast Eating

I told a friend on the west coast If we were neighbors we'd have to open a soup kitchen cooking school - psychiatric institute.

I've been making bread by not even using my mixer anymore - or really measuring I just shovel about 6 heaping scoops of medium grind whole wheat flour (fresh from the 100 pound bag in my chest freezer) into a bowl add a heaping tablespoon kosher salt and a cup of my sourdough starter and a mason jar and a half of water until it is like quicksand. It sits for 24 hours and becomes gulteny and springy by itself! Then I shape it and it rises about 6 more hours and I bake it in three loaf pans. I do this 2 times a week.

Tibetan Cuisine

In company with their unique culture, Tibetans have food of a very distinctive character. Among the great varieties of Tibetan food, zanba and buttered tea are the most popular and distinguished. The former, made of qingke (barley flour) and tastes a little bit sour, is very nutritious and easy to take, while the latter, a Juema, a Tibetan snack mixture of butter, tea and salt, claims to be a good energy-giving beverage. Quite a lot tourists drink it during their stay in Tibet, in order to get used to the high altitudes and dry climate and it becomes quite addictive. Qinke wine, however, seems to have quite the opposite effect due to its strong after-effects. Many outsiders shrink from the challenge of drinking this wine despite in popularity with the locals. Other typical Tibetan foods include dried meat, mutton served with sheep's trotters, roasted sheep intestines, yogurt and cheese. You can't say you have really tasted Tibetan food without trying qingke wine, buttered tea, sheep blood soup and yak meat.

source

Egg Rolls

We made egg rolls last night with my lovely mother-in-law and brother-in-law. They came out delicious and were fun to make but I noticed I am a little out of practice. The egg rolls are excellent eaten with ginger beer and a spicy dipping sauce. I will make them again soon.

Tibetans celebrate Water Dragon Year

In Tibet, people are busy preparing for the traditional Tibetan New Year, where 2012 is the Year of the Water Dragon. The 15-day holiday will start on Wednesday.

In Lhasa, The Tibet Autonomous Region’s capital, Potala palace square has been adorned with festival decorations. Major commercial streets have been swarmed with last-minute shoppers since Monday. Beef, fresh yak butter, and tea bricks are all essentials.

Many Tibetans also are buying fresh flowers to bring some color into their homes. And azaleas, revered for their especially bright colors, are favorites. In addition, 5 thousand locals will put on group dance performances at Potala Palace Square on Friday.

source.

Runaway

America's narcissistic romance with consumer spirituality and consumer eating is really getting to me. Perhaps I'll runaway to Nigeria where people share meals.

Aldente Kale

Aldente kale with Lebanese salt lemon and garlic dressing. Steam kale lightly until bright green. Mix the triad of olive oil or sesame tahini, freshly squeezed lemon juice and freshly cored and chopped garlic and Kosher salt. Mix and pour on top. Enjoy.

Seattle Bread Baker

It always brings me special joy to bring my faith to life - baking and
then breaking bread with my friends!
-Seattle Bread Baker

Tibetan Prayer Flags

I'd love to make my own Tibetan Style Prayer flags with a group of kids. We'd carve linoleum or woodblocks and print on muslin and dye the fabric and sew them to a string and then hang them outside in the wind to rot. Wouldn't that be sooooo cool?
Read about Tibetan Prayer Flags here.

A Dream Come True

I came to New England because I love cows, apple orchards, and old timey music and those were the three things that struck me as most lovable about New England when I visited as a child. I have lived here since 1978 and I am walking distance from Wright's Dairy Farm and the Woonsocket Harris Public Library. My neighbors down the street have chickens and bunnies and ducks. I love urban and farm living all within walking distance. A dream come true!
visit.

Breaking Sad

by Jennifer DeBell

I am bread! I am an avid combination (and twice a week for 35 years, I am a woman). Any less avid a combination is as dangerous as heroin, chocolate, meat, or potato chips, and mustn't be found in the home. So many women I know are running in horror from me. They are also self-conscious around me, humble loaf that I am—believing they fall short of some domestic ideal because they don’t embody my delicious aroma and comforting presence. They even think that as toast, they are less crunchy and buttery than me! When visiting, they often flat-out refuse to squeeze me. Be damned, I say!
Dancing and running and walking and bicycling are life! As is meat, chocolate, and me, bread. A sad day is a day with no appetite, and a sad year is a year with nobody to share myself with. What of jam? And butter, and honey, and ham, and cheese, for that matter? I love the appetite I inspire—the childish dreams of peanut butter and jelly, the sophisticated dinner parties in which I take center stage, that handsome French baker named Xavier who molded me into the avid combination I am…grain, leavening, seeds, even raisins, cherries, and chocolate, oh, Xavier! Oh pardon… that’s another story, ahem.

Breaking Bread

I am sad. I am an avid sourdough baker (twice a week for 35 years), and I am a woman, and the combination sends other women running in horror. So many women I know have decided that bread is as dangerous as heroin, chocolate, meat, or potato chips, and mustn't be found in the home. They are also self-conscious around my baking skill, believing they fall short of some domestic ideal. When visiting, they often flat-out refuse my bread, the bread one breaks for the sake of community, calories be damned.

Bread and chocolate and meat are daily in my life, as is dancing and running and walking and bicycling. I am not obese or unhealthy or overly domestic. I love my appetite, and I love to think about, dream about, and share food. A sad day is a day with no appetite, and a sad year is a year with nobody to share my bread.

Sue Dickman

Freedom From Fear of Pie Crusts
read here.

Yonah Schimmel's Knishery

read about it here.
and here.

I just discovered by accident, that my step-brother Shawn Gargagliano is in the slide show, image number eight. I wonder if he knows!

Grow Up

Community Garden here.

Turned Orange

A friend of mine who I met at summer camp lived on raw carrots and turned orange.

Bat Cave

I incline toward the early hours, and at times I require naps later in the day. Since daylight sometimes fools my body into thinking I don't need sleep when I actually do need it, I have devised what I call the bat cave. I hang thermal blackout curtains or a dark blue blanket over the bedroom window and crawl into bed for a 90 minute nap. What I have discovered works even better than the bat cave is to take a 3-4 mile walk which invigorates me and makes me sleepy when I need to be.

Foodie

I've made a new friend. I thought she was a foodie but it turns out she's a drinkie.

Sunrise 6:38

I walked Lily through Oak Hill cemetery morning sunshine coming over the hill lighting up the treetops and houses and grave stones was beautiful.

I ate leftover sesame green beans for breakfast.

I love to cook but nobody eats with joie de vivre and gusto anymore.

I should invite people to sit at my round table in my unheated house with overflowing junk mail on the couch and an 80 pound Luscious Lily-dog who will jump in your lap and my monkey Sammy-cat who steals food off your plate. A REAL bohemian tea in my ghetto palace.

Shake it and Bake it!!

I made my own Shake and Bake today using ~ Adobo, extra cumin, tumeric, garlic powder, paprika, freshly ground black pepper, Kosher salt, and half a cup of whole wheat flour, I shook the flour spices and chicken parts in a plastic bag. Then I placed the seasoned chicken parts evenly spaced in two large cast iron frying pans and baked them at 450 degree (preheated) oven until the smoke alarm went off, then I lowered it to 350 for 20 more minutes. 60 minutes total. They came out fabulous! Now heartburn.

Childhood Foods

I ate a hot dog last night and it brought me back to my childhood weekends at Grandma and Grandpa's. Nathan's on the boardwalk served fat stubby crinkled french fries in a paper cone. They were so good with a squirt of ketchup. Sunday mornings Grandpa would take us on a drive in his convertible from Brighton Beach to Manhattan. He'd smoke a cigar as we cruised a quiet, deserted Midtown, and we'd stop and eat hot dogs under the Sabrett umbrella. Later Grandma would take us for slices of NYC pizza on Coney Island Avenue. Once a fat lady walked by, and Grandma said under her breath God forbid I ever get that big.

My grandparents ate like 12-year-olds who had just come into money.

My New Beverage

Green tea mixed with Jamaican Ginger Beer. Make the green tea in advance and chill. Mix together half and half. Enjoy.

My New Sandwich

The Head Blow - pepper-Jack cheese on my sourdough whole wheat bread pepperoncini and Kalamata olives and horseradish on there too. Have nose blowing materials handy.

Pie Fidelity

"We must have a pie," David Mamet wrote in "Boston Marriage," his 1999 play about Victorian women. "Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie."

source.

The Great Recession

I've been thinking a lot about my beloved Brighton Beach Grandparents Nat and Sophie and wish they were here to discuss the Great Depression with me. We have a lot more in common now but they are in heaven. Would I tell them of my finding unopened foods in the street and taking them home to eat? Would I tell them stories of my finding abandoned clothes in parks, and taking them home to wash and wear, maybe not.

My pal Joe Doherty is a magnificent writer and historian and he told me a Lincoln RI woman recalled from her childhood during the Depression, that her family kept Blackstone River snapping turtles in their basement for food. Another Woonsocket mother during the Depression used to hunt and trap squirrel fox raccoon muskrat and fish on the Blackstone River for her family.

We're getting ready.

Chocolate Nuns

here.

I Bake Therefore I Am

It's true!
There's a blog by this name too.
View it here.

Horseradish

I had horseradish and pepper-jack cheese sandwich with pepperoncini chaser for breakfast.
The kids are right. I am a witch!

Sips of Home, Bites of Memory

read.

I Love these!

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.
-A. A. Milne

For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul.
-Judy Garland

Where there is great love, there are always wishes.
-Willa Cather

Love is a game that two can play and both win.
-Eva Gabor

-Love is being stupid together.
-Paul Valery

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
-Michel de Montaigne

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
-W. H. Auden

Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.
-Ben Hecht

We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.
-Lucretius

To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever.
-Henry Drummond

Love is the flower you've got to let grow.
-John Lennon

Come live in my heart, and pay no rent.
-Samuel Lover

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.
-Maya Angelou

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
-Ingrid Bergman

When love is not madness, it is not love.
-Pedro Calderon de la Barca

A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.
-Frank Morgan

Love is what you've been through with somebody.
-James Thurber

Where there is love there is life.
-Mohandas Gandhi

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
-Zelda Fitzgerald

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
-Margaret Atwood

Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.
-Andre Breton

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
-Zora Neale Hurston

Love is metaphysical gravity.
-R. Buckminster Fuller

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
-Victor Hugo

Mark Twain

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear
and life stands explained.
-Mark Twain

Valentine's Day Chocolate for Breakfast

I graduated college on Valentine's Day 26 years ago today!

I am eating a McVittie's chocolate biscuit for breakfast with a cup of coffee. We love to light Sabbath candles every night. The mice love candlelight. They love to eat candle wax and our bars of soap when we are asleep. They wait. We have Sammy the Marmalalade-colored symmetrical Rorschach Clown-Face-on-his-back cat who chases Lily the mice, string, and anything plastic. Lily loves to drink our bath water. Such a compliment!

Baking Circles

I just made a batch of potato, carrot, and collard greens chowder using the leftover heavy cream from my Wednesday butter making class and a batch of English digestive biscuits using the leftover cinnamon-butter my 2nd grade Romeo's made.

I love rolling out the dark dough with my old wooden rolling pin and cutting small scalloped-edged circles and baking them on my gigantic cast iron frying pan.

I met a lady who lives on my street who has a new dog she adopted last month named Samson and he is even bigger than Lily! He's a handsome chocolate Labrador mixed with golden retriever. A Golden Door?

Orange Comfort

Not many comfort foods are orange but the sweet potato is and it is extremely cheerful on a dark winter's night.

Eating Road Kill

During the last Great Depression in the 1930’s road kill was considered a table delicacy for many who would otherwise be going without meat. Deer, various birds, rabbit, bear, raccoon, even porcupine and a variety of other animals killed by vehicles and left lying on the side of the road became an important source of protein for many a family.
An important feature of road kill is that the hunting has been done for you. There the animal lay; all you need to do is pick it up, skin it out, and cook it up. A gift from the Gods a hungry man should not pass up!

Road Kill is Good Food
Road kill is traditionally accepted mealtime fare in many areas. In my neck of the woods moose are almost daily hit by motorists speeding through moose country. Referred to as the “bull of the woods”, moose are often afraid of nothing and are frequently encountered crossing roads. Besides totaling the vehicle, a 1000-pound moose is usually severely injured or even killed. As you can imagine a moose of this size has considerable quantities of meat. In some cases these road killed moose are given to poor families, charitable organizations, or even the owner of the vehicle that hit it.

As when you shop for meat at the supermarket, you want to insure your road kill meat is fresh and has not “gone by”. Although obvious signs of potentially spoiled meat include smell and the presence of scavenging insects, maggots, and the like, meat can also be spoiled without these signs. You must cook all meat thoroughly in order to destroy any disease causing organisms or parasites.

If you find road kill on a stretch of road you had just passed over several hours before, then chances are your road kill is reasonably fresh and you are in meat. As in all things, the best survivors are aware of their environment and open to opportunity as it presents itself, however unexpectedly. Road kill meat is a potentially valuable resource in times of need and not to be overlooked by the hungry survivor.

-read

Spiced Popcorn

Make old fashioned stove top popcorn then add freshly ground black pepper, salt, adobo, and finely-grated extra sharp cheddar!

God's Chocolate

by Emily Lisker

My grandmother
hid chocolate bars all over
her Brighton Beach apartment.

After she was gone
we found her chocolate bars under the mattress,
above the tall bureau,
in drawers,
tucked away with silky pink lingerie.

Perhaps this is why I love the nuns
of Wrentham, with their own white windmill,
making chocolate in the woods at three a.m.
for God.

Histamine Hell

read here.

Bumpersticker

Love People
cook them tasty food

-Penzeys

Love and Chocolate

Baci chocolates are reputed to have been used as a clandestine method for delivering love notes between two confectioners, Giovanni Buitoni and Luisa Spagnoli. Story here.

Dryer Sheet Murders

Why aren't there murders over dryer sheets? They should be outlawed. As an asthmatic I am enraged when my air is polluted by my neighbors.

In a recent study conducted by UW professor Dr. Anne Steinemann, a research team conducted a small study to understand the effects of fragrances in laundry products (both detergent and dryer sheets). The results found more than 25 VOCs emitted from dryer vents, with highest concentrations of acetaldehyde, acetone, and ethanol (two of which are considered carcinogenic). To put it in context, one of the carcinogenic VOC's, acetaldehyde, had emissions that would represent 3% of total acetaldehyde emissions from automobiles in the study area. That might not seem like a lot, but given how commonplace they are in homes, the findings are significant.

Steinemann states, "this is an interesting source of pollution because emissions from dryer vents are essentially unregulated. If they're coming out of a smokestack or tail pipe, they're regulated, but if they're coming out of a dryer vent, they're not."

The trouble with household products is that companies are not required to list any or all ingredients, making it difficult to decipher how harmful they might be.

Imagine the Angels of Bread

by Martín Espada

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;

this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;

this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;

this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border's undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;

this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;

this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;

this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;

this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.
If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,

then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,

then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,

then this is the year.
So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.

The Ultimate Aphrodisiac

Poets writing on food.

Laurie Colwin on Chocolate

In the beginning, the Lord created chocolate, and he saw that it was
good. Then he separated the light from the dark, and it was better.
-Unknown

Chocolate

from Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin

My sister, who is in most other ways a perfectly normal person, is so addicted to chocolate that she routinely compromises her expensive dental work by eating something that I believe is called Rose Schaeffer’s Chocolate Lace. This particular confection is made by covering a Jackson-Pollock-looking lattice of sticky, filling-and-bridgework-pulling toffee with chocolate. My sister believes that milk chocolate is for twinks and wimps. She eats bittersweet chocolate by the pound and still remains thin.
There are those who must have chocolate and those who can take it or leave it alone. For the afflicted there are magazines devoted to the subject, choco-late cookbooks, candy-maker’s instruction guides, antique chocolate molds, chocolate dipping courses. There is high-ticket imported chocolate imported chocolate, often in the form of a truffle and often costing only a little less than a real truffle, and novelty chocolate in the form of chocolate arms and legs and telephones. There is weird chocolate*, as in chocolate-covered grasshoppers. And then there are candy bars, which those in need of a fix can find almost anywhere.
I like chocolate but I don’t love it. I think it is nice every once in a while. I am however a sucker for fudge, which, in my opinion, is chocolate in its most sublime form. On the other hand, I do not like chocolate cake or ice cream and I find the taste of chocolate mixed with liquor just plain awful except in the case of the chocolate-covered cherry, which is the food of my childhood.
In some form or another, chocolate figures in every American’s childhood.
I remember walking home from school with a candy bar in the days when Three Musketeers really had three pieces. I remember my first taste of Rocky Road ice cream, which my sister adored and I hated. To this day my idea of a perfect dessert
is a slightly undercooked chocolate chip cookie made from the recipe on
the back of the chocolate morsels’ bag. I remember the kind of chocolate pudding that formed a tough skin on top, and the instant kind that did not.
We did not have chocolate cakes for our birthdays but chocolate played an important role in the cakes we ordered. They were always the same: yellow cake with split layers, the layers alternatingly spread with mocha and apricot jam. The middle layer was marzipan, and the whole thing was covered with bittersweet chocolate icing and decorated with sugar roses, not buttercream, because my mother believes that buttercream turns in the hot weather, when all of our birthdays take place. We always found bakers to make this cake, which would have been insipid without that dark, not too sweet icing.
The world is full of chocolate lovers and I have come to rely on three recipes to help those who invite them for dinner: flourless chocolate cake, steamed chocolate pudding, and chocolate bread pudding, which when it bubbles over fills the house with what Mary McCarthy describes in ‘The Groves of Academe’ as ‘a rich smell of burning.’ The smell of chocolate bubbling over and slightly burning is one of the most beautiful smells in the world. It is subtle and comforting and it is rich. One tiny drop perfumes a room as nothing else...
Steamed chocolate pudding is a throwback to a cozier time in American life and is definitely worth making. The 1964 edition of ‘The Joy of Cooking’
has one recipe for it – an elaborate one containing six eggs and nuts, not my
idea of a good time. But the 1943 edition (the one with the recipe for gum-drop cookies which begins: ‘Good for soldiers’ boxes as they keep fresh
and do not crumble’) contains the real winner – a plain, easy and sincere
steamed pudding, made as follows:


Old-Fashioned Steamed Chocolate Pudding

1. Melt 2 ounces of unsweetened chocolate. Let cool.
2. Sift 1/2 cup of sugar.
3. Beat one egg until light. Add the sugar to it gradually and beat
until creamy.
4. Add melted chocolate and then add 1 tablespoon melted, cooled
butter.
5. Sift 1 cup of all-purpose flour. Resift with 1/2 teaspoon baking
powder. Add to the egg mixture in three parts, alternating the thirds
with 1/2 cup of milk in three parts. Beat until smooth after
each addition.
6. Pour into a buttered pudding mold. Cover with waxed paper tied
down with a rubber band and steam in a kettle for about one hour.

This pudding tips nicely out of its mold and looks like a baked hat. It is delicious with a raspberry purée, or with whipped cream. Some people
like it sliced with a little jam. Steamed puddings have a wonderful satiny texture: half a pudding, half a cake and the nicer half of each.
As for chocolate bread pudding, there is nothing more consoling on a
horrible cold night. Any standard cookbook has a recipe for bread pud-
ding, to which you simply add chocolate to the milk and egg. The version
I first ate was made of lightly toasted bread spread with sweet butter and
set in a dish. The egg, milk and chocolate were poured over it, and the
whole thing stood soaking for an hour before being baked in a 300-degree
F oven for forty- five minutes.
When it comes to chocolate, I prefer the simplest and plainest. To this end
I have made chocolate meringues, which must be made when the weather
is nice, and chocolate wafers, which taught me a lesson.
These wafers come from ‘The Settlement Cook Book' by Mrs. Simon
Kander (copyright 1926). I have my mother’s copy, which is falling to
pieces and has written on the endpaper the telephone number for Charlie’s vegetable truck service from 1947.


Chocolate Wafers

1. Melt 2 ounces of chocolate.
2. Add 1 cup sugar and 1/2 cup melted butter.
3. Add the yolks of two eggs into the beaten egg whites and stir into
the chocolate mixture.
4. Add 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla.
5. Spread on a well-buttered pan. Place in a 350-degree F oven but
gradually decrease the heat to 300 degrees F.
6. This recipe does not tell you how long to bake. I would say about
ten to twelve minutes. Cut into squares while still warm.

I made these cookies to serve with a fruit salad one spring night and was alarmed at how tasteless they were. No one liked them very much but I
could not bear to throw them out, so I put them in a tin and left them for
a couple of days. One afternoon when my blood sugar dropped and it was
time for tea, I remembered the chocolate wafers. ‘Better than nothing,’
I said to myself, biting into one. To my amazement, they were delicious.
They tasted strongly and wonderfully of chocolate and were hard and
crunchy, too. It had taken a couple of days for the taste to bloom and it
was worth the wait. And so I add to Mrs. Simon Kander’s admirable
recipe a seventh step:

7. Let cool, put in a tin and do not eat for at least two days.

And of course, for those of you about to give a dinner party for choco-
late nuts, you know what bakeries are for: so that, at the end of dinner,
you can put your feet up and have the chocolate dessert you didn’t bake.

Old Sturbridge Village Cookbook

These are strange Gingerbread Cookies

These are so simple! Bake them if you want to remember how lucky we are for sugar and butter!

This cookie recipe from the Old Sturbridge Village Cookbook can add a bit of early-American tradition to your kitchen.

... "Take a teacupful of molasses, a teaspoonful of saleratus dissolved in half a cup of boiling water, a teaspoonful of ginger, and flour to make it hard enough to roll. Bake it five minutes."

1/3 cup boiling water 1 tsp. baking soda 3/4 cup molasses 1 tsp. ginger 2-1/4 cups sifted whole-wheat flour

Modern Method: 1. Pour boiling water into a large mixing bowl and add baking soda, then molasses. When mixed, add ginger. 2. Add flour mix well and refrigerate for 15 minutes. When chilled roll out the dough and cut your favorite cookie cutter shapes and bake on baking stone or cast iron skillet for 8 minutes at preheated 350 degree F oven.

Martín Espada

read.
here too.

A Good Day

I was in a panic yesterday because the 50 degree weather caused my lungs to react badly to mold. Bill got home and we ran to CVS to refill my emergency inhaler. HURRAY! We got two for the price of one and it was covered on our insurance. AMEN!! As we were getting into the car I looked down and saw a folded up to an inch - 10 dollar bill on the asphalt parking lot. I picked it up and unfolded it. Look! I said to Bill, A gift from my Grandparents in heaven! We raced off to the dairy farm and got a gallon and a half of milk and with the three dollars left we got a quart of Budweiser. We came home and had my Jambalaya soup and Bill had a glass of beer. A good day.

Spicy Breadsticks

I love savory foods. This morning I ate garlic bread and coleslaw sprinkled with Romano cheese for breakfast - or maybe it was a very early lunch!

3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup pecorino Romano cheese (freshly grated)
3/4 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp black pepper (freshly ground)
5 tbsps water
1 tsp olive oil or 4-8 pitted Kalamata olives (freshly chopped)
1 teaspoon garlic powder (optional)
2 teaspoons of combined fennel, poppy, and or caraway seeds (optional)

1 Preheat oven to 450°.
2 Combine flours, cheese, baking powder, and pepper in a bowl.
3 Add 5 tablespoons water and oil; stir until dough forms. Turn dough out onto a floured surface; knead lightly 4 or 5 times.
4 Divide dough into 10 - 12 equal portions, shaping each portion into an 8-inch rope. Place ropes on a baking stone, large dry cast iron skillet, or oiled baking sheet
5 Bake at 450° for 10 - 15 minutes or until bottoms are golden brown. Remove from oven; cool on a wire rack.

adapted from yummily.com