As life has gotten bigger and wilder in the last few weeks, my mind has become full of untamed beasts, all clamoring for my undivided attention. I have spent the last few days trying to wrestle each of these beasts into cages, to no avail. They will be wild. So, rather than a trip to the zoo, how about a little safari through life in its natural habitat? Here we go.

There is no denying it, I have gained more weight than I am comfortable with this winter, so I am trying something new. Mark Bittman just came out with a book, VB6, which recounts his commitment to eating vegan every day before 6 PM, to lose weight and get healthier. He lost a lot of weight, and has kept most of it off. I have been eating this way for about 3 weeks now. It’s really not that difficult, and it immediately eliminated the biggest culprits of my daytime bingeing, namely butter, eggs, and cheese. I can’t tell whether I’ve lost weight (don’t want to know the number just yet, so haven’t stepped on a scale), but I feel more energetic and clear-headed during the day, and not at all self-deprived. I suspect those who have chosen a vegan lifestyle for ethical reasons find this a bit co-opting on Bittman’s part, but this is something I feel I could really do for the rest of my life with very little effort, and still eat bacon. So I’m going with it for a while. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I am entering a recipe contest on Food52. I adapted a recipe in Joy of Cooking to use up some egg yolks and cream of coconut I had left over after making a Coconut Layer Cake for some friends. It’s delicious, and the theme of the contest is coconut, so here it is, my big moment. ;) I’ll let you know how it goes.

Mother’s Day was spectacularly geeky. Well played, Family. Well played.

The Stanley Cup playoffs have begun, and the Bruins, in their singular way, have made it through the first round, having given us one gigantic heart attack to do so. (If you are a Maple Leafs fan, I am truly sorry for your loss. We Bruins fans have been there.) Yes, I am excited enough to elaborately paint a beer bottle every time the Bruins win. Don’t judge me.

The garden is celebrating the most beautiful spring we have had in years. So much is sprouting and growing and blooming with wild abandon, and only a tiny bit of poison ivy has popped up, to add some (I suppose) necessary temperance to the party, reminding us to be ever vigilant to troubles, and catch them when they’re small. However, when the garden grows, that means it needs tending, and working that into the day has been a challenge.

Speaking of growing, and blooming, and tending a garden of another sort, The Boy has been my biggest passion/preoccupation this year, and as we approach the end of the “school” year, I continue to be amazed at how much he has grown, in so many ways. This is my view of him as he stands in front of me:

clearly he has growing mastered. Watching him learn about his passions, himself, and his world, has been my greatest reward.

In my search for all things that will aid The Boy in learning and growing, I have embraced video gaming. It’s truly an activity that can take up a lot of time, and yet, I have found that by faith-leaping into that activity, I have learned important lessons about The Boy, and life in general. The most valuable one, the one I want to share with you, is this:

Life is full of quests.

Quests are made up of many small achievements, which culminate in great reward.

Some achievements are easy to accomplish, with very little use of time or resources.

Some achievements are more complicated, and require the assistance of others.

Assisting others in their achievements is rewarding in itself.

Some achievements are relevant to the quest you’ve chosen, and some are not. Don’t waste time and resources worrying about the irrelevant ones.

Quests cannot be finished in one sitting, one day, one week, or even one month, and that is okay, because you have time, and along the way there might be a parade and jugglers! Yes, I’ve been playing Coasterville. Don’t judge me.

So, sorry for the radio silence, but now you know what’s what.

Begin a quest, and I’ll see you soon on the Road.

So while I get my act together, head over to The Perennial Plate (there’s a link to click in my list of blogs) and enjoy! I’ll see you soon.

The cake recipe is from a kid-friendly cookbook I received as a promotional free item from Gold Medal Flour a long time ago. The icing recipe is from Wilton Cake Decoration class materials, but you can use any icing you want. It’s your cake. The book cover is for the first novel from Lorrie Thomson, our friend and book club member, to be released in the fall. Look for it! Read it! Tell your friends! (oops-photo credit Ann Grummon!)

“Xtra-Special” Celebration Cake, from Alpha-Bakery Children’s Cookbook, Gold Medal Flour, 1997

3 cups all-purpose flour (the recipe specifies Gold Medal Flour, but how will they know what kind you use?)
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup cocoa (pretty sure they mean cocoa powder, and that’s what I always use)
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2/3 cup vegetable oil
2 tsp vinegar (they don’t specify, but use plain white vinegar)
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups cold water

1. Heat the oven to 350 deg.F. Grease 2 round pans, 9 x 1 1/2″; dust with flour.

2. Mix flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. (I measure everything in, and then use a whisk.)

3. Mix oil, vinegar and vanilla. Stir oil mixture and water into flour mixture real hard until well blended, about 1 minute. Immediately pour batter into pans, dividing evenly. (I start out stirring very carefully to moisten it all, then really go to town with a wooden spoon for a minute or so.)

4. Bake until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean, about 35 minutes; let cool (on a rack) 10 minutes.

5. Remove from pans; let cake cool completely before frosting. (Removing from pans can be touchy; if you really want to be sure, line your cake pans with a round piece of parchment paper after you have greased and floured them.)

Wilton Chocolate Buttercream Icing

I’m not sure I’m supposed to share this *secret* recipe with you here, so if I inexplicably disappear in the next week or so, blame it on the Wilton Cake Police.

1 cup solid white vegetable shortening (We all know this means Crisco, but I have also used Spectrum Organic All-Vegetable Shortening and it works just fine. Just add the water carefully to make sure you get the right consistency.)

1 tsp flavor extract (this time I used 1/2 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp almond extracts, but you can just use vanilla)

2 T water (to start with; you will probably have to add more to get a thinner spreading icing-this will depend on what shortening you use, the humidity where you are, the alignment of the planets, etc.)

1 pound (yes you read that right) pure cane confectioners’ sugar, by weight.

3/4 cup cocoa powder

1 T Wilton Meringue Powder (If you don’t have this and don’t intend on decorating a lot of cakes, don’t bother with it. It’s only for stability of icing decorations and flowers and such. The icing will do all right without it.)

a pinch of salt (optional)

Cream the shortening, flavorings, and water. Add the dry ingredients (sift them if you need to, to remove lumps) and mix on medium speed until all ingredients have been thoroughly mixed together. Blend an additional minute or so, until creamy. Here’s where you test the consistency for spreading; if it’s still very stiff, add water a tablespoon at a time until it’s as thin as you want it.

I love this cake because it doesn’t use my mixer, I don’t have to wait for anything to come to room temperature so it’s a great impromptu cake, and it is darn-near foolproof. It comes out moist and delicious every time. It’s just as enjoyable plain as it is with icing. And it’s chocolate. What’s not to love?

Make a cake for someone you love, put Equilibrium on your books-to-read list, and I’ll see you soon on the Road.

It is finally starting to look and feel like spring around here. After dropping an additional foot of snow on our winter-weary heads, Mother Nature has at least had the decency to come back every day and melt it. The frozen ground underneath the ice and snow is turning to mud, and little green shoots are poking their heads out to feel the warm (!) sunshine. All the mud has earned this time of year an in-between seasonal nickname: Mud Season. But it is also Maple Tapping Season here in northern New England, and there is nothing, I mean nothing, like real maple syrup that went from tree, to pail, to tub, over fire, to jug, to you. I have waxed on about REAL maple syrup before, so I will stop now.

Maple syrup has been a New England local product for a very long time, used as a sweetener in syrup form, as well as maple sugar. Cane sugar was too expensive and hard to come by for early New Englanders, and during the 19th century, was frowned upon by abolitionists as supporting slavery. So maple sugar has held favor here for some time.

When I began reading recipes for “Boston Baked Beans”, I noticed that maple syrup and sugar had been replaced with white and/or brown sugar, which in conjunction with molasses, contributed the classic sweetness to these beans. I wanted to come up with a baked beans recipe which got its flavors from maple syrup and molasses, but there was still something missing. I had also never seen a baked beans recipe with apple in it, another traditional New England local food that would have been lurking in an almost-empty root cellar by the end of winter. Baked for a long time, I hoped the apple would cook down into sauce, and lend its own sweet flavor to the beans. I was not disappointed.

Apple-Maple Boston Baked Beans

1 lb. dried navy beans
1/2 lb. salt pork (bacon works too, if that’s what you have), cut into 1 inch chunks
1 large onion, quartered
4 whole cloves
2 medium apples, peeled, cored and quartered
1/2 C molasses
1/2 C maple syrup
1 tsp dry mustard
salt and pepper to taste

1. Soak your beans overnight, drain and rinse them, put them in a big pot with water to cover by an inch, bring to a boil, reduce to simmer, and cook until they are just tender, but not mushy, about 25 minutes. Drain and reserve the cooking liquid. You’ll need about two quarts, so if you need to, add more water to the liquid.

2. Preheat the oven to 350 deg F. Place the beans in a large Dutch oven. Put one clove into each onion quarter, and nestle the onion, salt pork, and apple quarters into the beans. Pour the molasses and maple syrup over it all, and sprinkle the dry mustard over it.

3. Pour the 2 quarts of liquid over the whole pot evenly, put the lid on the pot, and place in the oven. The cooking time is long, about 4 hours, but you should check it every hour or so to make sure it hasn’t cooked dry. Add some hot water if it does, just enough to come nearly to the top of the beans. If you don’t want your beans to be as saucy as we like ours, take the lid off for the last 30 min. or so.

4. Near the end of cooking, you can finally stir it all together, and let it simmer that way for another 15 min. or so. The onion and apples will have nearly melted in (you may have to hunt for the cloves to remove them), and the salt pork will be very tender. When you take them out of the oven, salt and pepper them to taste, and let them rest for 20-30 minutes.

I love baked beans, because they are another one of those alchemical food transformations. The before-and-after of them is so remarkable. Of course, I also love them because they are delicious, simple comfort food.

I read a lot of recipes to come up with this one. Here are my sources:

Yankee Magazine Best New England Recipes-Homemade Favorites For Every Season

The Martha’s Vineyard Cookbook-Louise Tate King and Jean Stewart Wexler, 2nd edition

Union Oyster House Cookbook-Jean Kerr and Spencer Smith

The Yankee Cookbook-Imogene Wolcott

Bean by Bean-a cookbook-Crescent Dragonwagon

Old Sturbridge Village Cookbook-edited by Debra Friedman and Jack Larkin, 3rd edition

New Hampshire From Farm to Kitchen-Helen Brody

Once more, I strongly urge you to acquire some Real Maple Syrup. Leave the “pancake syrup” behind on your way down the Road. See you again soon.

Just a quick post to let you know I have not gone completely insane since Mother Nature decided we needed another 12 inches of snow in the yard. Even Luna the Dog doesn’t want to go out in it anymore.

The pizzas and little mini-pies were our impromptu celebration of Pi Day, which to those not blessed/cursed with the geek gene, was March 14. (3/14, get it?) I was doubly entertained by the fact that our pizzas, bedecked with sausage in the shape of the greek letter pi, were also round, and pi is the number that you multiply the diameter of a circle by, to get the circumference of the circle…

Sorry.

The pizzas were a) Pepperoni and Sausage (The Boy’s favorite), and b) Prosciutto, Dried Fig, Gorgonzola, and Sausage (for The Husband and I). When figs are in season, we love to top slices of fig with a little Gorgonzola cheese, and wrap them in prosciutto, so I figured the combo had to work on pizza, and it did.

The little pies were made with the ridiculous unitasker I fell for, the Babycakes Pie Pop Maker. I admit it, I was seduced by the Suzie Homemaker siren song of all the possibilities this appliance promised: desserts, party treats, appetizers, all at my fingertips. Not to say the little dears aren’t tasty (fill them however you want, use your favorite crust recipe or frozen puff pastry dough), but the thing is so obnoxious to clean, it’s not exactly a go-to toy for some quick fun with your food.

But they’re round. Plus no one was really into an actual pie, so making one seemed dangerous (for me, the one who would end up eating it).

So, that was our Pi Day! I’ll see you soon, somewhere down the (hopefully) sunny Road.

This year’s deathmarch through winter has seemed interminable, and has brought on two maladies: a bit of Writer’s Block, and that peculiar cube-shaped fever known as Minecraft Mania. The Boy and I have been playing a lot of Minecraft together, it being far more colorful and compelling than the actual scenery outside. But I have been cooking, so, time to come out of hibernation (cube-ernation?) and let you see what I’ve made.

I bought a pound of Meyer lemons at the grocery store a couple weeks ago. They were so, so, so yellow-orange, and their fragrance was so inviting, I hoped they would be a rescue from my snowy doldrums. But they nearly succumbed to those doldrums, sitting on the counter until impending spoilage forced my hand. The result was Meyer Lemon Bars.

Meyer Lemon Curd Bars – adapted from Joy of Cooking, Rombauer/Becker

Crust:
1 1/2 C all-purpose flour
1/4 C confectioners’ sugar (powdered sugar)
Pinch of salt
3/4 C (1 1/2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

Curd:
6 large eggs
3 cups sugar
Grated zest of 2 Meyer lemons
1 C fresh Meyer lemon juice
1/2 C all-purpose flour

1. Preheat the oven to 325 deg.F. Whisk together in a bowl the 1 1/2 C flour, confectioners’ sugar, and salt.

2. Add the butter, and using a pastry blender or your fingertips, cut in the butter until the mixture is the size of small peas. Press the dough into the bottom and 3/4 inch up the sides of an ungreased 13×9-inch baking pan.

3. Bake until golden brown, 25 to 30 minutes. Transfer the pan to a rack and reduce the oven to 300 deg.F.

4. Whisk together in a large bowl the eggs and sugar, until well combined. Stir in the zest and juice. Sift the 1/2 C flour over the top of the mixture, and stir in until well blended and smooth.

5. Pour the batter over the baked crust. Bake about 35 minutes, until the topping is set. Cool in the pan on a rack.

For some interesting reading about Meyer lemons, while you enjoy your lemon bars and a cup of your favorite hot beverage, pop over to a blog I follow, The Unorthodox Epicure. He recently wrote an extensive post concerning our perky hero-here’s the link: Food Snob Chronicles — Meyer Lemons 101 | The Unorthodox Epicure.

That’s all for now. Somebody please come and take all this snow away, and I’ll make you Meyer Lemon Bars. Heck, I’ll cook you anything you want if you’ll just make it stop. Meanwhile, I do believe it’s time to go zombie and creeper hunting…

See you on down the Road.

If you don’t know what you think of Monsanto, google Monsanto and seed-saving, and see what you think then. Google Monsanto and GMO. Google Monsanto and rGBH. But don’t just sit there and take for granted that Monsanto is some benevolent food giant that wants to feed the world, because that is not what they really want.

Eat Local, Eat GMO-free, and I’ll see you down the Road.

I first heard a bit about this years ago in a book I did not finish reading, “The End of Overeating”, by David Kessler. But Michael Moss seems to have something more exposé-like here, and I look forward to the release this month of “Sugar Salt Fat: How The Food Giants Hooked Us”

Meanwhile, I highly recommend the NYT Magazine article. You may not want to read it with a bag of chips or a soda at your side.

See you soon.

This was dinner the night of the snowstorm. The menu was planned by The Boy, the meal was mostly prepared by The Boy, and it was also plated by The Boy. What we have here are Salmon Fish Fingers, and Crispy Salmon Skin Strips. They are served on a bed of buttered orzo, and accompanied by steamed broccoli. I removed the skin from the salmon, then The Boy cut it into portions, and they were salted, peppered, and dredged in flour. While I pan-fried the salmon, The Boy put the orzo into boiling water, and trimmed the broccoli for steaming. I sauteed the skin strips in a very hot pan, while The Boy stirred lots of butter into the cooked, drained orzo. Finally, The Husband took the lovely photo of the finished dish. It was delicious, and we enjoyed it all the more because we all put something into it. The Boy wants to add bread crumbs to the fish fingers for next time. I’m looking forward to the next time we cook together, no matter what it is.

Cook with your family, cook whatever you all like, and see if it doesn’t taste just a little better, with that special added ingredient. You know the one.

See you on down the Road.

1. The Perennial Plate cooking show! Yes, those krazy kids from Minnesota have a cooking show on YouTube. Go check them out here: The Perennial Plate In The Kitchen. Also, if you haven’t seen their latest video stylings of their trip to India, you really should watch it, it’s one of their best videos yet: A Day In India.

2. If you are in the path of the Winter that Is Coming, I strongly suggest you check out the latest posts from Stephanie Pearl-McPhee over at Yarn Harlot; she was a very smart (lucky) woman who managed to be out of Toronto for this possibly historic weather event, and instead finds herself in the Caribbean. The photos alone are a perfect antidote to what’s going on outside on the East Coast of the United States right now, but also read the posts, as her descriptions of her island paradise will warm you right through.

That’s all for now; there is some serious cooking in the works, and that means some serious blogging in the next few weeks. See you soon.