Creative in the Kitchen

Happy end of February….

I have just discovered a wonderful cookbook, newly out in paperback, so not all that new to the rest of the world, the brilliant and funny: Make the Bread, Buy The Butter, by Jennifer Reese. She prices out the cost of convenience foods vs. homemade, but here’s the genius part: she also factors in the hassle, the quality and the fun.

In other words, for once it’s not just about the dollars and cents.

Haven’t we all had that stubborn economizing voice whispering to us in the grocery aisle when faced with an absurdly expensive convenience food? “Are you kidding me? I could make it just as easily, and it would be better! Moreover I would be thrifty and uphold the lofty and creative tradition of home cooks who will not be dictated to by the ad department of some giant corporation!”

Here’s what else: the recipes really work.

I have made: the Fig Newtons, which are far superior to Nabisco’s, the Margaritas, which were the best I’ve ever had, the chicken soup with rice, lemony Greek style, which for some reason, I’ve always shied away from, and the croissants. A day into that last project I was convinced I’d killed off the yeast with too-hot milk. But no, it worked. I served a couple mini-croissants to my husband with tea and gloated over their success.

Aside from the croissants, this doesn’t seem like a very ambitious list. Yet I am a good cook: I’ve made individual beef wellingtons, my own puff pastry from scratch and swooningly good ice cream.  I also make a mean martini.

But this book is growing my confidence. I have now made the bagels am curing my own pancetta and will try making the Camembert. I am, in fact, thrilled as I make out my shopping lists.

The reason has to do with something Reese says in her afterword: “Big food companies flatter us by telling us how busy we are and they simultaneously convince us that we are helpless. I am moderately busy, but not all that helpless. Neither are you.”

That something so basic to our comfort and happiness should be surreptitiously swiped and then sold back to us in vastly inferior forms is criminal. Perhaps it’s not a felony, but it’s a sneaky and undermining misdemeanor.

Make the Bread has about it a certain trial and error toughness that allows for the occasional, educational failure that is momentarily mourned and then fed to the dog.

Consider Reese’s experiment with goats, which she decided to buy because she had become an enthusiastic cheese maker.

Goats are an exceedingly tricky wicket. Cooperation never, ever makes an appearance on any caprine To-Do list, so you can imagine what happened. Reese spent upwards of a thousand dollars on feed, housing, vet bills and stock—and never got a drop of milk. But Reese is a good enough sport to love her goats despite it all.

The great thing about her Trial and Error approach is that she admits that a certain percentage of her projects flopped, and were not worth repeating. But they didn’t stop her from trying something else.

Psychologist Carol Dweck of Stanford University says that most people have either a performance orientation or a learning orientation. In the former, it’s more important to do well, to get things right, than it is to learn. So if a performer flubs a new challenge, she will likely give up and go back to something that she can do well. Someone with a learning orientation will see a mistake as a temporary thing, requiring another try, a different way.

The performance orientation can kill creativity faster than almost anything. If all your attempts must be successful in order for you to maintain your self-esteem, you will live in a very careful, rather dull little box.

This is not to say that performance doesn’t count. There are times when you need to learn your lines perfectly, when you really need the soufflé to rise, and when you must turn in clean, error-free copy.

But that’s not all the time. You’ve got to have some room for experiment. Give yourself a grade-free zone in which you can dare to make some mistakes. Your creativity—to say nothing of your dog‑‑will thank you for it.

The illustration is of my homemade pancetta hanging (unfortunately, sideways)—and we hope, drying, as opposed to lurking—in our cellar. Mice or raccoons have yet to discover it.

Book Farm

The Book Farm

A few months ago, my husband called our enterprise a “Book Farm”. He did it partly in jest, but like many such jokes, it contains a lot of truth. We live on a tree farm, where we have a vegetable garden, bees and visiting goats. When someone asked Marshall what, exactly, we produced (snarkily, I thought), he replied, cool as could be, “Oxygen.”

No slouch, my hubby, in either the wit or tractor-coaxing departments. He’s right, too. Reading, writing, editing and nurturing books is our passion and business on this earth. Doing it on a farm has allowed us the space to house these various--and in some cases, extremely bulky—projects.

Perhaps someday we’ll plant some exceptionally hardy bamboo and make our own paper. Weirder things have happened.

Last June, we attended Book Expo America (the BEA) at the Javits Center in New York. Enormous, at times daunting and downright bizarre, it was an education. Traditional children’s book publishing is booming. Those exhibits were packed with book buyers. Traditional publishing house booths, though fewer in number than the last time I attended a book fair, were also surrounded by eager bookstore reps, journalists and bookie mishmash. The digital booths were pretty lonely. I mean, there wasn't much to see. At this point, we are all screen savvy. You could watch War and Peace scroll down on a Kindle or Nook, with a few variations on that theme. Okay, nice.

This may be part of the future of publishing, but I very much doubt this will be its only future.

Meanwhile I had the pleasure and privilege of reading two fascinating manuscripts, one coming down to New York on the train, the other on the way back.

The first was about one person’s history with books-- paperbacks, specifically. Full of wonderful essays about book sharing friendships, his writer parents, and some of his adventures as a small publisher, the book is lovely. It’s called Paperback Island: Street Bibliography Essays, and it is by Marshall Brooks, my aforementioned, rootin’ tootin’ spouse.

Its writing, and reading (and rereading) has been most fascinating, because at the end of every reading I clamored for more material. Which he invariably greeted as very bad news, groaning, holding his head, he so wanted to be done with it. Knowing him, I knew there was a lot more he wasn’t saying. So I cajoled, soothed, stuck to my guns and didn’t back down. I knew it would be a win-win, if he could just accomplish these few tiny tweaks. We went through this four or five times, and though I don’t like to inflict pain on my beloved, the results were better and better.

How could I let him off the hook?

Of course, I couldn’t. And now the results are marvelous. Published under the Arts End Books imprint its elegant, heavily illustrated pages are very obviously a labor of love.

The other tome is The Hawley Book of the Dead, by Chrysler Szarlan, due out from Random House in the spring of 2014. It is a page turner about magic, and disappearances of all sorts, set in western Massachusetts. I read the manuscript as she was preparing same to submit to agents and editors.

 That chapter, too, has ended very happily. On reading the ms, one agent called Chrysler to announce that she had stayed up all night reading it and this was the book she had been waiting for--for five years. There followed a thrilling flurry of auctioning off audio rights, then foreign rights, country by country. Then the Trip to New York to meet her Random House marketing team for a power lunch. Now rewrites, and on it goes.

Doesn’t this all sound dynamic? It is, to be sure, amazingly fun. But it’s the harvest, and the bringing to market; not the sowing, weeding and watering—all of which can seem considerably less glamorous.

It's all in my own mind, of course, but I was feeling a bit limited by the rural slant of this blog, when what has come to interest me is creativity in all its stages, both obvious and subtle. Right now my projects are mostly literary, so I'll explore some of those with some other stuff thrown in: recipes, bird walks, experiments and digressions. I hope they amuse and stimulate your own forays.

So! Onward!

The Awful Archive

I have started working on my scrapbook again. I have 28 years of accrued stuff to go in: shopping bags full of ticket stubs, photos, kids’ drawings and school work sheets, pictures of wonderful Halloween costumes, cards….

I contemplated sending a note to Martha Stewart, asking how I might go about tackling this project. Most of the questions she gets are along the lines of how one goes about ironing tablecloths-- not the most challenging queries, in my view.

But I reconsidered. Reading some of those near miraculous looking de-cluttering articles, I realized that if one of those professional organizers got hold of me, even a really nice one, the bulk of my memorabilia would be in the garbage. Period. This has served as the first catalyst to plow into my project, because no one else in her right mind will, for me.

For anyone into cautionary tales, here’s how this situation got so terribly out of hand. In late ’83, I was working on a page of Amsterdam photos from a trip my husband and I took earlier that year. I was missing one great shot of a poffertjes* stall, and the photo was so good, and so lost, I just stopped. That was my excuse: I had to find the photo in order to proceed. But it couldn’t be found.

I then went on to do interesting work, stay happily married, find delightful friends, travel, have two great kids, move into a house we fixed up (documenting every step of the process), make stuff, move again, continue to travel a bit, make more friends, all of whom are photogenic. The kids (also photogenic) grew up, bringing home papers and drawings, having the usual milestones to celebrate and document--all of which I wanted to keep, and did—but in shopping bags.

The one thing I did keep up with, kind of, was my kids’ scrapbooks. They were--and are-- pretty good. The irony--laughable, even quite horrible--is that my children think of me as their archivist. My husband knows better, but he’s being very tactful. When my eldest graduated from college, he made some remark about making sure we got enough programs so I could put together his scrapbook. The dear, misguided innocent. This is the second catalyst: what if I got hit by a diaper truck tomorrow and they discovered the true nature of these so-called archives? They would be very disappointed, and I don’t want to let my munchkins down.

I’ve made numerous attempts to get on with my project. From time to time, I’d buy scrapbooks and a few extra leaves, thinking that I was going to actually saddle up and do something on my scrapbook, but I didn’t. I carefully stashed the books and leaves, even contemplated the fun it would be to join a scrapbooking group. No more lonesome trawling through old photos, trying to organize by making piles which very soon smush into each other alarmingly, inevitably....

But really: what an entrance that would make: everyone else with their neat little boxes and me with my wheelbarrow brimming, teetering with stuff, only to spread out over two, three tables and not be anywhere near cleaning up and going at closing time.

Needless to say, planning how to go about it has been something of a stumper.

There may be a better way to go about it, but I finally decided to use loose leaf notebooks with plastic page covers, so if (when) I find a stash of memorabilia pertaining to a section I’ve already finished, I won’t despair, but could easily insert pages as needed.

I have always kept a scrapbook— except for this unfortunate 28 year lapse-- since the age of five. My father was a great scrapbooker, and passed his enthusiasm on to me. He had beautiful big green books specially made that had spines which could expand to accommodate the bulk of memorabilia. I loved looking in them, particularly the sections pertaining to me.

The first thing I did with my own scrapbook was to paste in pictures of my cousin’s trip to the Black Forest-- the notion that the book should be about my experiences having somehow eluded me. This may be the seed of my problem—having high standards I sometimes can’t meet. Or it could have been my first successful piece of fiction: my little friends were quite impressed.

But never mind—even the most uneventful life can be dressed up with good design. It is all in the presentation. The scrapbooking industry is onto this: scalloping scissors, stickers, fancy papers can make taking out the garbage seem interesting. Which, actually, it can be: very.

I have made a small but decisive dent in this project, not by starting with that fateful picture from 1983, but with the recent past, which is fresher in my mind, a little more accessible, being better organized, in packets--and a little more exciting.

I made a scrapbook of the trip my younger son and I took to Mexico in 2010. There are only a few gaps, which I can quickly fill in with easily found digital photos. I organized the rest of the year in an accordion fie, and it should be a snap to put it together.

Famous last words, eh? It should be a snap?

In fact, I got carried away enough to organize a decade in a portable hanging file: I’ve got 2000-2011, hanging there at the ready.

And here it is, more organized than it looks.

Here also is the Poffertjes recipe, acquired years ago from Gourmet Magazine, perhaps as a way of keeping the memory alive:

1 envelope active dry yeast

1 1/2 C milk scalded

1 1/2 T butter

11/2 C flour

1 t sugar

1/4 t salt

1 egg

3/4 C dried currants

confectioners’ sugar for dusting

Dissolve yeast in 1/4 warm water with a pinch of sugar for 5 minutes.

Stir butter into scalded milk and allow to cool to lukewarm.

Sift together flour sugar and salt. Add half the milk and one egg. Beat until smooth. Add yeast and remaining milk. Again stir until smooth. Mix in the currants. Cover the bowl with a tea towel, allow to rise for 45 minutes.

When ready to cook, heat a poffertjes pan over medium heat. Brush indentations with melted butter. Put 1 T of batter into each indentation. Cook about 3 minutes per side, until they are golden. Serve immediately sprinkled with Confectioners’ sugar. Makes about 36 pancakes.

• These are amazingly delicious little Dutch pancakes, much like Danish ebelskiver.
• Also a kitten update-- 3 weeks old and walking, teeteringly.

A Cat Farm

As a child, I wanted to run a cat farm. It seemed plausible to my nine year old self. People had tree farms and dairy farms, truck farms (I think I did know that they didn’t grow trucks, but vegetables), why not a cat farm? Of course I overestimated the demand, a recurrent problem for the optimistic. I now see that a cat farm is about as likely as a dandelion farm.

But wait. Don’t I see dandelion roots selling for absurd prices dried, at the health food store? Didn’t Plains Indians value the root as a master curative and liver purifier, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles to find them? Don’t we eat the greens in salads and congratulate ourselves on our healthy eating? Yes to all.

The day of the dandelion may be here, but cats could have a longer wait.

I’m not interested in purebreds, beautiful though they are. Human fiddling has done great damage to dog breeds, creating a host of problems along with the supposedly perfect specimens of poodle and Doberman.

I like regular old cats: sculptural, elegant and grotty, utterly unrepentant about napping through a workday. Admittedly independent, they can be won over with years of kindness, and then become subtle and beguiling friends to humans.

Last summer we found ourselves without cats. Our ginger tomcat, Zeus, had had an extraordinarily lucky life. As a kitten, he gnawed through mouse cords of computers and never once hit a live wire. He slept casually in the woods when he felt like it, eluding all predators for ten years.

He was a menace to rodents and birds alike, however. When we got tired of picking up feathers and beaks off the porch, we finally got him a bell, sure that he’d slip its collar in a matter of minutes. He wore it like a medal, and made a point of jingling importantly through the house. After all, did any of us rate a bell? No sir. My son even swears that he saw Zeus in the garden stalking a bird--silently. I can only hope the last minute jingle gave the bird time enough to fly.

In the garden, Zeus was companionable, curled up in a dry fountain, he’d watch me weed with amusement. He enjoyed lounging in our bush of Persian catnip, nibbling, then sleeping off his high. He had a great time, that cat.

One night I called him in. He yowled, pitched over, righted himself, strolled over to his food dish, ate, purred, curled up on a chair, and was stone cold by morning.

We buried him with his bell, cleaned out the litter box, picked up the dish, mourned and gave the dog extra attention. This went on for months. We were aware that rodents would sooner or later decide to move into our cat-free house. Winter was coming.

Then a friend allowed as how she had some youngish cats who might need homes. I went over eagerly and met her cats, part Maine coon. They were very friendly, but resistant to being held. I fell for the mother cat, who was clearly still nursing. I was assured this cat was a mouser, and advised to get her spayed pretty soon.

We named her Minnie Mauser, and for the first couple of days, she found hidey holes in the back of closets, coming out to eat and purr. I detected a certain roll to her gait. She ate like a stevedore (though not mice—not even a raw egg) and we all suspected she was pregnant. She grew huge. We took bets on when she’d deliver.

Yesterday morning at 4:30, she came to get me in bed. I brought a box lined with an old mattress pad and put it into the nest she’d made at the back of my son’s closet. She kept climbing into my lap, purring in between pushes. I kept putting her back in the box and patting her. After lots of purring and some yelling, out popped a huge kitten, followed by another. I left her nursing and purring, wondering if that was it.

It wasn’t. My husband came down to announce that there were four living kittens and one off to the side that didn’t make it. We took out the cold kitten, gave it a quickie funeral and burial, brought a dish of milk up to Minnie, changed the mattress pad.

Here they are—all black and white, like miniature Holsteins. Could this be the beginning of my cat farm after all?

Winter Sanity Guide, Part 2

Some friends came up from Massachusetts for the weekend and commented, quite tactfully I thought, on how cozy it must feel to not be able to see out our windows, since many of them are buried by snow. Our house reminded them of an igloo, only warm.

Being very creative people themselves, they were just the tonic I needed, bringing news, great new websites to check out, vermouth and delicious homemade kimchee.

As a result of their visit, there’s one thing I’d like add to my Winter Sanity Guide-- besides playing in the snow: Creating stuff for Show and Tell.

The igloo comment reminded me of a tradition among the Canadian Inuit. Every spring Inuit artists come south from Hudson Bay, Baker Lake and other isolated points up north with the artwork they’ve made over the winter. They bring sculptures and prints to art galleries in Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa.

I’ve always loved the idea of having something to show for the challenge that is winter in the north, besides, that is, your own more or less intact self.

There must be something about being thrown back on your own resources without a lot of distraction that makes for an almost perfect creative environment. I wanted something new to show our friends.

Our friends impending visit inspired me to get going on a needle felting project I’d been considering for weeks, and to decoupage some old clogs whose first pass at decoupage had come off. (I used paper the first time, which wasn’t flexible enough to not tear where the shoe bent. This time I used cloth).

It would be nice if you could use winter as a sort of sabbatical in which to finish projects that tend to languish during the gardening months. But life doesn’t stop for a little snow and sleet. There is still work to do, school functions to attend, groceries to buy, appointments to keep. Anyway, it’s been good to elbow some of my pet projects onto my to-do list.

A recipe:

Here is a marmalade that is very easy, in-season and delicious. I got the recipe from Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess.

Pink Grapefruit Marmalade

2 pink grapefruits

juice of 2 lemons

5 C sugar

Boil the grapefruits, completely covered in water, for 2 hours. Drain, then chop as finely as you can. Try to get as many seeds out as possible (I did a couple of pulses in the food processor). The grapefruits will be very soft and juicy, the food processor captures the juices very well. Return to the pan and add the lemon juice and sugar. Boil for ten to twelve minutes, or until the mixture looks sort of flat with bubbles on the top. Nigella calls for 15 full minutes of boiling, but I’ve found that to be a little too much, resulting in a very stiff marmalade.You can test the readiness of the marmalade by dipping a cold spoon into the mixture and observing how thickly the marmalade coats the spoon. When ready, pour the mixture into 4 sterilized half pint jars.

I have not sealed my marmalade, because it gets eaten so fast, but you could pop them into a boiling water bath for 12 minutes to seal the lids for posterity.

Next to try: lemon marmalade. What if you boiled 4 lemons for 1-2 hours, checking on softness, and added, say, 4 C sugar? Wouldn’t that be interesting?

The People's House

The People’s House

You know how political parties like to raise money by sending emails offering you a chance to meet, say, Nancy Pelosi (if you’re a Democrat)? You merely have to donate $5, be entered in a raffle (along with 79,000,000 other people) to win one of two places at a reception for 500. I thought it was one of those emails and ignored it

Three days later, I got an engraved invitation in the mail, stating that the First Lady requested the pleasure of my company at a Holiday Open House at the White House.

This, the first holiday party of the season, was for volunteers. As a volunteer for Organizing for America, the issue-driven arm of the Obama campaign, mine was one of the names submitted by Vermont’s OFA coordinator. Two names from VT OFA were chosen, mine and that of another woman from Warren, VT.

When the engraved invitation came, I told my husband I could never go, being so busy and frugal. What business did I have in DC?

He wondered just how many times I thought I would be invited again TO THE WHITE HOUSE?

I smartened up, made reservations and jumped onto Amtrak. As luck would have it, the innkeeper where I was staying was also attending the party. She works in the Correspondence Office, sorting, answering and cataloguing mail. There are over a hundred volunteers handling the bags of letters that arrive daily.

It is a heart stopping moment to walk into the beautifully decorated foyer and have an officer in impeccable dress uniform say, ”Welcome to the White House”. I had to fight back tears.

There are places on earth where you can feel the presence of generations of devotion. Often they are places of worship: I’ve experienced it in churches and kivas, but this was different. This was dedication to an ideal of equality, and democracy. It was palpable walking in the door, as we checked our coats, signed holiday cards for soldiers stationed overseas, and were ushered into the party.

It is the Obamas’ mission to make this the most accessible White House in history, truly the People’s House.

There were about 500 people there-- of all races, creeds and persuasions, from every state, all having a wonderful time, taking each other’s photos, chatting up the elegant service men and women, listening to great music, eating amazing food.There were the first timers, Obama fans like me, and there were volunteers who’d seen Presidents come and go for decades.

I learned that people take vacation time to come decorate the White House for the holidays; some from across the country. One man I talked to had been coming to decorate for 30 years. He was quick to point out that he wasn’t an artist; he just climbed the ladder and positioned ornaments as directed.

The volunteers in the Correspondence Office answer the incoming mail. The favorites are from children. One little boy wrote an illustrated letter explaining how to contain the Gulf oil spill. Just pour 5 tons of superglue into the well, that would seal it. He drew a dead fish at the bottom of the page.

I met and compared notes with OFA volunteers from all over the country. I traded stories with a Texas volunteer about snowstorms and sandstorms. I now think the latter are far worse.

We got to enter rooms normally roped off during White House tours. The Blue Room, the Vermeil Room, the Red Room were all gorgeously decorated.

I found the portraits of the First Ladies more revealing than many of the Presidents’. Pat Nixon’s was wistful, quite sad. Jackie Kennedy seemed very elegant and isolated. Mamie Eisenhower was girlish, charming. Hillary Clinton was energetic and apple cheeked in a pants suit. Eleanor Roosevelt’s was the only one with multiple studies, which depicted her as the tireless worker for human dignity that she was.

The traditional gingerbread house this year was a replica of the White House frosted with white chocolate. There was even an outsize statue of Bo, the dog, and a model of the White House vegetable garden, including the bee hive.

In the crush to see and photograph Mrs. Obama, I took numerous pictures of the backs of people's heads before I finally could get a good photo of her. I did get to shake her hand and tell her that we love her in Vermont. She replied that she had to get there (well yes, she does: VT is the first state that went for Obama in 2008).

As Congress reconvenes, I wish our leaders the commitment to service, the impeccability and cooperation so evident at the White House. And I wish every American the good fortune to visit the People’s House.

Canning with my mother's ghost

Canning with my Mother’s Ghost by Stephanie Greene

The garden has been producing at such a pace that I have been canning and drying food for weeks. I figure that if Mother Nature can serve up all this bounty, the least I can do is use it.

I’ve put up jams, chutneys, relishes, diced tomatoes, and enchilada sauces. I’ve dried shallots, peaches, apples and tomatoes.

It all makes me think of my mother, Janet Greene, who wrote Putting Food By with Ruth Hertzberg and Beatrice Vaughan). She often had me chopping rhubarb for rhubarb ginger jam or stirring a vat of boiling peaches on some sweltering day when I’d have much preferred bobbing in the West River with my friends.

My mother loved murder mysteries and she loved to cook, so food preservation, with its botulistic edge of danger, united these two enthusiasms rather elegantly. She would often expound on the crafty Botulinum bacterium which lives in soil. Its spores are extremely hard to kill--merely boiling water won’t do it. Plus, they thrive in an absence of air, and in moist environments.

This was an enemy worthy of respect.

When she was working on the book, which went into four editions, we would race down to the PO and pick up her copy of the MMWR, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published by the Centers for Disease Control out of Emory University. Once home, it was read out loud. All too often there would be an account of some housewife who’d reused old mayonnaise jars (or worse, their grungy lids) to preserve tomatoes and had killed off her entire family.

This would get her going on the litany of bad practices it was her duty to scold people out of. Tepid boiling water baths, haphazard time keeping, slapdash sterilization could all send you to an early grave.

It was when I embarked on canning diced tomatoes that I really began rereading my mother’s book in earnest. I recalled her lectures about the dangers of low acid tomatoes, since acid and salt can kill bacteria unfazed by heat alone. For once, I followed her directions carefully. I even got up one morning and redid some roasted green tomato jam with more vinegar, more salt, more heat.

Nobody else could get such a bang out of a pickle, or make canning so exciting. After all, unlike reading Elmore Leonard, the next corpse could be yours.