A Mess 'o Magazine (Pages)

Janet here: Sooooo last year I posted about my magazine, um, problem. The picture probably tells the story but if you want to hear all the messy details, you can read it here.

At the time, my very clever solution was to simply tear the pages out of the magazines, thus eliminating the ever-growing stack. (You can probably tell where this is going.) But now, I have a mess of — yup — pages, including recipes I've printed from things I've read online. It's not pretty.

Clearly this strategy isn't working, especially since on top of it all I have hardly cooked a single thing from this pile. Pathetic I know.

But I've been thinking a bit about why we do this. For me I think it's all part of my lifetime quest to create the family I wished I'd had as a child. Don't get me wrong: plenty of things about my childhood were perfectly wonderful. I grew up in a middle class neighborhood and never really wanted for anything; my family was intact and many of my memories are happy ones. But there was, as there is in every family, a dark side, and in my particular case that dark side involved alcohol and all the many messy, confusing (to a child particularly), scary things that disease invokes.

And at a certain point — I think I was in 9th grade — I vowed my family would be different. I can picture the moment quite clearly. I was in my room and I looked up at the sky, hand clenched, and vowed, not unlike Scarlett in that seminal scene in Gone with the Wind, that my family, the one I created with my future husband, would be different.

I've been working at that mission ever since we had children. And food — making food from scratch, trying to ensure that everyone liked the food, literally keeping my family well fed — has played a major part. So as I flip through magazines or scroll through food blogs and recipes, this desire to feed people well is always in the back of my mind. It's about showing my love and, of course, looking for love in return.

So I rip, thinking G and S might like this one or maybe I can make that one for Rachel and her family or perhaps this one would be great when we have some of our friends over for dinner. I rip, thinking, hoping, that this next meal will add just another knot in the quilt of my life I've been sewing since I was 14. The more knots, apparently, the stronger I think it will be.

Still, something in this method has to change. So here's my (kind of) New Year resolution about this. I am going to cook something from this pile at least three times a month. (I originally was going to say once a week, but that would fail oh probably around week two, at which point I might give up on the whole thing and I'd be back to just a growing mountain of magazine pages.) Anyway, once I make the recipe, I will decide if it's a keeper or a tosser. The keepers will go in a notebook for posterity. And some day, as my children clear out what's left, they'll be able to know that these particular recipes were some of the ones that made the cut.

In the meantime, if anyone has any brilliant ideas about how they deal with their ripped-out recipes — I know I'm not the only person who does this — please share them! You'll be doing us all a favor.

Great Great Aunt Eurania's Snowball Cookies

Rachel here.

So, Monday I promised you all the easiest cookie recipe of all time. Tucked among these...

And these...

Is this!

And no, it's not an address book. Or, you know, it IS, but it doesn't contain addresses. Instead, it contains recipes recorded by my great great aunt Eurania and given to my grandmother. My parents brought it out for me the last time they visited and I was ecstatic. Nothing quite says I-lived-through-the-depression like an address turned into a recipe book, does it?

It's a fascinating read, too. Filled with anecdotes (such as, This recipe has been Methodist tested and repeatedly approved...because, you know, Methodists are the measure of deliciousness or something like that) and jello salads, my southern great great auntie was a missionary on a mission to convince my grandmother of the wonders of the pecan. There are pecans in EVERYTHING, and pages of lists of other foods that would be well served by the addition of pecans. There's even a recipe from Eurania's grandmother (that would be my great great great grandmother...come on, how cool is that that I can cook something my great great great grandmother cooked? I'm totally geeking out over this) that I'm fixing to try just as soon as I recover from the amount of lard it requires.

But anyway, tucked among these pages of tidy script is a recipe for Snowball Cookies. I'm sure you've eaten these--they're round and rolled in powdered sugar and essentially are simple shortbread cookies with pecans added to them. Sometimes they're called Mexican Wedding Cookies. I'd probably call them that instead of Snowballs if my great great aunt didn't have such an awesomely unusual name. Mexican Wedding Cookie definitely sounds more exciting than Snowball Cookie, but nothing sounds more exciting than Great Great Aunt Eurania's Snowball Cookies. In fact, I think there should probably be an exclamation mark added at the end.

So now, without further ado, I present to you Great Great Aunt Eurania's Snowball Cookies!

Sorry I don't have a picture to offer of the cookie proper. They're umm...all gone.

Mo (as in Mo Rocca) and Me

Janet here: So yesterday was the Big Day. It was time for my close-up at CBS studios to see whether I can make it on to Mo Rocca's new food show on the cooking channel called My Grandma's Ravioli. (Yes, that would be the Mo Rocca of The Daily Show fame and NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.)

It all started when my friend Michael sent me an email that started "Don't bop me in the nose but...." and then said, "but you are a grandmother and this is Mo Rocca." Then he included a link to an open casting for grandmothers and grandfathers who are great cooks to come on Mo's new show and teach him how to cook one of their favorite recipes. I thought about entering for about 2.5 seconds and then wrote Michael and said, "Are you kidding? I LOVE Mo Rocca!" We then exchanged a few emails about how he wants to marry Mo and I promised I would invite him to the taping if I get on etc. If that happens, trust me you will hear about it here.

Anyway, I found a photo, answered their questions (What is your favorite recipe? What recipe would you make for the show? Where did you learn to cook?), hit send and waited. Last week, they called me and asked me to come in for a camera interview.

I'm not gonna lie. I was jumping up and down. And then I freaked out and wondered how I could lose ten pounds in four days, prompting some conversations with Rachel about the possible benefits of investing in some Spanx.

I decided to go au naturel — and based on three of the competitors I saw in the waiting room, it was a good call. Let's just say, I was looking good.

The interview began with an assistant who is probably the age of at least two of my kids taking a few photos of me holding my questionnaire — I was number 36. Now those who know and love me know I HATE getting my photo taken. The reason is simple: the photos are rarely any good. In fact, if I didn't have decent self-esteem, I would get depressed over said photos. But I had figured this might be part of the deal and so this morning I actually practiced smiling in front of the mirror. I'm not sure the results were any different — they didn't show me the photos — but I at least felt as if I looked more normal.

But we weren't here for still photos. We were here for the camera interview. I went into the small office and met two other 20-somethings and sat down on the couch. A few more photos later, including one of each side of my head (obviously looking for my good side :)), and we were ready to roll.

One woman took the lead and started asking questions. What family memories do you have about cooking? Who taught you to cook? What's your favorite kind of cooking? Have you had any cooking disasters? What kind of cooking have you not mastered? What are your favorite cookbooks? Why do you want to be on this show? What do you like to do in your free time when you're not cooking?

The time flew by and I had them laughing for a lot of it (at least the two women laughed; the guy was a little harder to read and more aloof.) I left thinking it had gone pretty well.

Time will tell. I know enough to know that this might not be about me at all. They might already have a white woman with a touch of snark in their mix.

I should hear around Labor Day if I'm still in the running, with the taping to happen (in our kitchen!) later in September. Just enough time for me to lose those ten pounds ... or get me some Spanx :)

Books That Make Us Hungry: In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite

It's been a while since we chatted about a book that was making us hungry, but Melissa Clark's new cookbook, In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite, is worthy of note. When I asked to get a copy of the book from the publisher, I figured it would be a typical, but tasty of course, cookbook. What I didn't realize was that Clark has written the book we'd planned to write. Dammit!

So I was prepared not to like the book or Clark. But instead we had a lovely chat on the phone AND I love her book! A food columnist with the New York Times, Clark peppers her food escapades with recipes and memorable anecdotes. Sometimes they are about her life and her family’s; other times they focus on food trends and ideas. It’s a chatty, down-to-earth style that immediately makes her recipes seem equally accessible.

The book’s chapter titles—titles like Things with Cheese, There’s Always Room for Pie (and Tarts) and My Sweet Tooth and Me—further reflect Clark’s down-home approach. She opens each one with a memory before moving on to recipes and more stories for each one. The chapter My Mother’s Sandwich Theory of Life, for instance, describes her mother’s premise: “Good sandwiches are like interesting people, unpredictable and filled with surprises,” writes Clark, “Each bite should be a little different; otherwise it gets boring. It’s like a conversation. If you can anticipate the next sentence, why bother? If you know exactly what the next bite of a sandwich will taste like, why eat it?”So true, don't you think?

Clark moves on to her favorite sandwich recipes, opening each with her own recollections. The recipe for pan bagnat, a traditional tuna and vegetable sandwich hailing from Nice, France, is prefaced by a tale of her family’s yearly trek to France for the summer where they essentially ate their way around the country. (Not what was happening in my family, I can tell you, where the Jersey shore was the annual option, not exactly a place known for its culinary wonders.) When her mother made this flattened sandwich, she relied on Clark or her sister to sit on the well-wrapped sandwich to mash it down to just the right consistency of olive oil and vinegar mixing. Today, Clark relies on a filled kettle placed on top of a baking pan to achieve the flatness she desires, but I just loved picturing a squirming little girl schmooshing a sandwich.

Switching a kettle for a butt is no biggie for Clark because she is the consummate relaxed cook. No capers for that soft-shell crab sandwich? No problem. Use the jar of caperberries sitting in the fridge instead. I love that about her and her cooking.

By the time I was done with In the Kitchen, I felt as if Clark is a friend, someone I could easily chat with at a party or over a meal. Oh, and I also had a 150 tasty recipes to try.

Now, dear readers, here's the good news! You, too, can have this fabulous cookbook. Just leave a comment below and we'll be picking a reader at random on Friday to have a copy mailed to them. It's Free! Free! Free!

In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite, 150 Recipes & Stories About the Food You Love, by Melissa Clark, Hyperion Books, 444 pages, $27.50.

Help! My Magazines Have Fallen and I Can't Get Up!

Hey Rachel

There are many reasons to invite friends over for dinner. Obviously pouring over my many cookbooks and magazines to find interesting recipes to make is one. So, too, is the anticipation of good conversation and wine. But the other obvious reason to invite people over for dinner regularly is so I can rediscover my dining room table.

As the editor of a home and lifestyle magazine (shameless plug for you to check it out on Facebook at life@home magazine or online at www.timesunion.com/lifeathome), I know all about clutter and feng shui and how all our useless stuff gets in the way of our clear thoughts and emotions etc. I have written articles on it for God's sake.

But then the reality of my life hits, and I put things aside to read later and suddenly what began as a small pile of paper takes on a life of its own. This little foible is particularly problematic when it comes to magazines. I am a magazine addict and in particular magazines that feature recipes. I regularly turn down pages of recipes I want to try, and then place the magazine on the dining room table — where I promptly forget about it for the most part until it looks like this.



And this is just the magazines with recipes. The table also included my many (very organized in my head, thank you) piles of research for this book I was working on. Needless to say, we hadn't eaten there in a while.

Enter the dinner party. I was sick of looking at the mess and wanted to celebrate the fall and create a nice tablescape for the table, so I invited friends over and started tossing. I was conflicted about what to do with the recipes and decided to rip the pages out of the magazines. So now I have a nice (much thinner) pile of magazine pages. It's not the best organized concept, but at least it's a step. And the dinner party was a blast.

Does anybody have any suggestions for how to handle this magazine recipe addiction? How do you all organize your recipes? I could seriously use the help!

Ladies and Gentlemen, Get Out Your Recipe Cards

Hello folks:

It's that time of the year again. That time of hanging out with friends and family, staying up late, sleeping in, feeling cozy...and eating lots and lots and lots of food.



In our family there are foods that get made every year. There are gingery treats that appear in each of our homes, chocolate candy that I have to go to my mom's house in order to devour, and my Grandma's shortbread that barely makes it through November here in California. There are also lost recipes, like my Grandy's red cabbage, that we try in vain to recreate since she didn't leave a recipe behind.



The point is this: the holidays are about many things, but one of the main ones--that spans denominations, traditions, families...the list goes on--is coming together over cherished annual recipes. We've been thinking that it would be really cool if during this holiday season we all--that means YOU all, too--shared some of our favorite recipes. We'd love them with a memory attached, we'd love them alone. Just shoot us an email at lifetoldinrecipes@gmail.com and we'll post your recipe to spread the holiday cheer across tables. We can post it anonymously if you'd like, we can credit your great great great aunt Betty...you tell us how you want to share it and that's how it will appear here on the blog. Our idea is to create a big communal holiday cookbook here and a space for us all to come together and pause--however briefly--and reflect on what fortune we find in holiday feasts.



So, get out those recipe cards and send us an email. We can't wait to hear from you. And in the meantime, enjoy these really awesome photos from holidays past of each of us (you're welcome, Ma and John).

XOXO
R

Home for the Holidays

Halloween is over and that means we're starting to think about holiday baking. Rachel and I are planning a virtual holiday recipe swap with you all and will be kicking that off soon. Stay tuned. In the meantime, here are some of my remembrances of my dad.

I did not grow up in a household with a strong Christmas baking tradition. My dad made legendary pumpkin and apple pies for Thanksgiving, but come Christmas, he was much more focused on the ham and side dishes. My mother, probably in part due to my father’s pie-making prowess, mostly didn’t even try to compete in the baking arena. Sure, she made tasty chocolate chip cookies and various other dessert dishes in general — her sour cream cheese pie is still one of my go-to desserts when I need a cheesecake fix but don’t want to put in all that time — but she didn’t go out of her way to make anything special at Christmas.

But then my father retired, and he became fixated with making holiday candy. He called the recipe Bristol Road Kitchens Toffee, a reference to the road in Maine he and my mother lived in at the time, and added this little subhead on the recipe card: expensive but worth it.

The expense part undoubtedly stemmed from his days of scrimping as a young man during the Depression. Today, I regularly use butter and the darkest — read more expensive — chocolate bits in all of my recipes. I wouldn’t think twice of substituting anything else.

But the real worth, if you will, of this toffee was that my father made it. My dad was a tall man, broad of chest, with hands the size of kitchen mitts. While gregarious in social situations, he was reticent with his emotions at home. His hugs, while solid when they occurred, were not daily occurrences, and he preferred to show his love rather than say, “I love you” out loud.

And so he cooked. Not all the time but on the weekends and holidays, sometimes for the cocktail parties he and my mother would throw. It was his way of saying he cared.

His holiday candy became an annual tradition, eagerly anticipated at our house each December. He would mail the candy from Maine or, later, California, and then call to make sure it had arrived in the proper condition. One year the box included the recipe card, a moment that made me both happy and sad, because while I was pleased to receive the secret, I knew it also meant that his days of making it were nearing an end.

Like my father, I have made creating certain foods as much a part of Christmas as Advent calendars and candlelight Christmas Eve services. Come the day after Thanksgiving, you can find me making the first of many loaves of Swedish gingerbread. A couple of weeks before Christmas, I’m busy making rolling out dough for Swedish pepparkakor, a kind of ginger snap.

And, of course, I make a batch of the toffee. Pulling out the recipe card filled with my father’s chicken scratch (seriously, if unreadable handwriting is a criteria, my dad should have been a doctor). By now, the red ink a little smeared from having been picked up with wet hands, and the card is dirtied with bits of chocolate and sugar from toffee-making sessions over the years.

As our children have aged — the last one is in college — I’ve cut back on the quantity of these goods. Where I once made two batches of pepparkakor, I now make one; loaves of Swedish gingerbread are down to about 6 now, depending on who is receiving one as a housewarming holiday gift.

And the toffee is now just one batch. About two years ago, I asked our youngest, who was still at home and is the main consumer of this toffee, if maybe I should forgo making it. After all, plenty of other holiday edibles were in the house. “Are you kidding me?” he said in the inflection only a teenager can muster. “Not an option.”

I was secretly pleased, of course. I want to keep making the toffee and other special items. Making these annual recipes is a way of connecting with my father, who is gone, and with my children and our happy memories of the holidays when we were all together under one roof. Some day I’ll be ready to pass the wooden spoon. But not just yet.

(Illustration is available for free at Dreamstime.)