Guests Merry With Your Cheer

My sister and her family are coming to visit this weekend. Among the routine logistical back-and-forths, the plans have involved a long Facebook thread about what we'll eat while they're here and where we'll buy it and how it will be prepared and whether or not I'll bother pleasing anyone but the two of us.

This kind of selfishness will surprise no one who knows me even a little bit well. It also has some precedent when applied to my sister and myself. We're the duo that, once upon a time, flew clear across the country to visit with our father's sisters and spent the entire long weekend with them eating pancakes at this very specific place and having dessert at that very specific place and so on (that we were young at the time and somewhat in their care comforts me in that it means we come by our obsessions honestly). Among other memories, I carry with me the yogurt and berries we ate at some posh hotel (the only breakfast we could afford), the peach daiquiris our grandmother served (it was the last time I saw her before her death less than two months later), the picnic lunch our aunt packed for the plane ride back to Philadelphia (shrimp & cream cheese spread on mini bagels which lasted until we just barely cleared the runway in San Francisco).

Some years after that trip we sat together in our parents' kitchen with the man that she would soon marry. Why we were there and our parents were not I don't recall, but I do remember what we ate. Brie and roasted garlic (hey, it was the 90s), a pesto made with half spinach and half basil (it shrunk in the micro), smoked salmon. That my future brother-in-law loves my sister was abundantly evident because knowing him better now I can say that there's no way on earth we'd get away with putting that array of foodstuffs on the table these days.

She'd like to do a bit of canning while they're visiting so I'm hoping to cue up some brandied blueberries or blackberries. That's an easy choice because we won't need to monitor a jelling point or whatever and can thus accommodate the distractions our collected five children will no doubt visit upon us. We'll also visit the local farm market, the merits of which she's listened to me extol for years now. I'll buy a couple chickens to grill and maybe some peaches to make into soup. Friday night I'll grill some cheese (yes! it's true - man, I love this stuff) and wrap bacon around jalapeños from the plants out by the old stone wall. We'll open the olives that are already marinating and the red onions I mixed up earlier this evening. Collectively, they'll be the perfect foils for a hot, humid Philadelphia summer evening.

When my sister comes to town.

There's a Lesson Here Somewhere

If one is of a mind to do a bit of canning and looks around online for help and resources, it does not take long before one realizes the broad spectrum of humanity that takes a like-minded interest. You’ve got your homemaking traditionalists, your survivalists, your back-to-the-landers, some latter-day hippies and crunchies, gardeners experiencing scope creep, foodies (who overlap, but do not totally align, with slow foodies), locavores (ditto), organic-interested activists, and so on. Oh, and hobbyists. I think that last one is mine, although I have much in common with most – if not all – of the others and it helps to understand that there are no hard lines in between and that many of us move in and out of various canning circles as we go about our business.

Anyway, my point is that many of us come to the canning thing with something of an agenda beyond getting through the winter. And, like opinions on canning safety, there are divergent viewpoints on the value of other methods of “putting food by”. Some folks include drying in their repertoire (I dabble – dried cherries are an awfully nice thing to have around but can’t for the life of me understand the appeal of, say, ostrich jerky) and many canners also keep a freezer. Some folks love their freezer (or dehydrator) and cannot imagine why on earth someone like me would stand in summer’s heat over vats of boiling water. For me, striking the right balance between frozen, canned and dried items is a particular pleasure, akin to solving an only-slightly complex puzzle the rewards for having done so give on.

One of the many displays of canned goods on offer at the Monticello gift shop. Yes, I take pictures of canned goods displays. I can't be the only one. Oh, I am?

I keep a separate freezer that when spring rolls around is nigh on empty but begins to fill again as the growing season marches on. Except when we’re away on vacation and a massive summer storm runs through town, downing trees and power lines and we don’t have electricity for four days and my sister-in-law (who is lovely and wonderful in every way) does her level best to save everything but in the end the entire business is a loss. You ken that I’m not speaking hypothetically about this, yes? We returned home, with many frantic phone calls and texts in between, to find it all gone – the meats and berries and grains and soups and…all of it. So we’re starting from scratch (ha!) just as summer begins to – pardon me for this one – heat up, harvest-wise.

Canning I’ll still do as I have a standing order for dilly beans and I have a few wants of my own, but I think this is a great opportunity to re-examine the freezer and its prospective contents. More beef is definitely out – we likely wouldn’t have finished what we still had for quite some time anyway what with the allergies and all. More chicken? Fish? We’ve got a bead on a source for responsible salmon (as opposed to the kind that drinks all your whiskey and then steals your car keys?) so that might be doable.

The path remains to be discovered. There are a lot of open questions to address regarding our changing palates, energy use, how and what we want to eat and what’s available to us from which to choose. While we work through the issues, I’m more grateful than ever that we’ve kept our toolbox, so to speak, well-populated. In my work, I deal in a concept called “business continuity,” an idea that turns the negative connotations of redundancy and multiple back-ups on their heads and recasts them as necessary components of the organizational ecology. If I’ve learned nothing else this week, I realize that I’ve brought the concept home in a way that I hadn’t quite realized. This summer, more glass jars and freezer bags. I've got a system to back up!

By Any Other Name

While a great many ugly realities may be laid squarely at the feet of economic globalization there is one positive for which I am of late unrelentingly grateful. My workplace, populated as it is by an extraordinary collection of émigrés to the U.S., has provided me a number of escape routes for dealing with Brainiac’s allergy situation and his attendant sudden inability to eat darn near anything. When my colleagues and I are not breaking into spontaneous choruses of We Are the World after staff meetings, we’re sharing lunch and recipes. It’s not at all unusual these days for a man born in China to show up in the cafeteria with homemade pierogie or, say, for me to bring extras of my latest batch of pho to pass around. Of course, in the way of multiculti knowledge share, we each add our own special touch to whatever dish is on offer. I regularly scandalize my Indian-born colleagues with my insistence on preparing chana masala in a slow cooker and those pierogie are more often accompanied by a bit of lime pickle rather than fried onions and sour cream.


I’m not making as much pho these days what with the whole beef-free thing going on and all. There have been frustratingly large numbers of other dishes that are also no longer on the family menu and I confess that it’s been getting me a bit down. (Someday I will tell you about the tears – copious – that resulted from the salad I now call the Chickpeas of Death.) In sharing my misery, loving company as it does, with co-workers the other day I realized that I already had access to all the knowledge I needed for dealing with the challenge of feeding my husband in this, our new normal. Knowing that most cultures do not eat the volumes of beef, pork and wheat to which we’d become accustomed, I merely had to make the leap from the abstract to the personal. So I did what anyone in that situation would do…I dug my spoon into a friend’s wheat-free, soy-free, and meat-free lunch, declared it delicious, and demanded the recipe.

Which is how I came to be buying a large sack of sabudana - known to me as tapioca – at my favorite Indian grocery. The dish shared with me at lunch that day turned out to be 100% allergen-free (at least for Braniac – given the presence of peanuts your mileage will seriously vary on this point and may actually come to a screeching halt) and amazingly delicious for someone whose only exposure to tapioca was via puddings from a long-ago childhood. As with the aforementioned peirogie and chana masala, I expected that I would not follow the directions precisely but would likely filter them through my own culinary baggage/heritage. Even executed in my own Western-style kitchen, I expected deliciousness and just the thing for feeding to a man who is tiring of borders, culinarily-speaking.


This is not my sabudana*. This is what my sabudana was supposed to resemble - little individual grains of chewy, nutty, spicy goodness. What actually appeared in my pan to was translucent, gelatinous, quivery, alien, and not generally good looking. We all agreed the taste was excellent but...no one could bring themselves to eat all that much of it. I texted news of the failure to the friend who gave me the recipe in the first place and she diagnosed too much water, too much oil and too-coarsely ground peanuts. So, put us down as work to be done.

In the meantime, I'll be in the conference room, working on my very best Cyndi Lauper impression.

* (This is not my picture and I don't know from where it came originally. If it's yours, let me know and I'll take it down or give credit, whichever you prefer.)

The Way to His Heart

Over the years of my parenting I’ve been asked from time to time how it came to pass that my children will sit at a dinner table and discuss their feelings on the kale vs. chard debate or with what trinket did I bribe the Boy to loudly, and in ear shot of his football team, remind me to buy extra beets at the farm market. I’m always pleased and proud to be asked because it was always one of my goals to raise my little humans into big humans who have broad palates, the ability to conduct at least rudimentary cooking operations, and an appreciation for what has cringingly become known as “real food”. I like that, more or less, this is exactly what they’re becoming. Sure, there’s a bit of strangeness going on in what we have come to refer to as The Cheese Rules. And the Girl’s assertion that she is a “half part [sic] vegetarian” who likes cheeseburgers, bacon, shrimp, and pork lo mein but that's it is, I admit, I bit odd. She’s only six and we forgive her a few eccentricities.

I cling to success in this area largely because many of my other parenting goals (see also: screen time, cheerful tidiness, and WebKinz purchases) have gone unrealized. Even as I pat myself on the back, though, I know the truth is that I have been lucky. My family is food-secure, I’ve always had a (more or less) well-appointed kitchen at hand, my children were born and remained allergy-free, and we adhere to no religion-based dietary mandates. It’s not that hard with such advantages in place to raise kids who appreciate a broad menu. You might say it’s been a piece of organic, whole-wheat, fair trade, ever-so-slow, artisanal, shade-grown cake.


For those who are at this very moment reaching for kebab skewers and their little Marsha voodoo dolls, try to contain your glee when I share that the glorious run of household food simplicity has come to a screeching halt. A wheat-free, dairy-free, beef-free, soy-free, legume-free, pork- and tomato-free halt more specifically. And not because of the kids. It’s my all grown-up and heretofore presumed to be food allergy deficient husband who has thrown a wrench into the kitchen works.

Although the verdict is that these allergies are "probably" not fatal, it's not a risk I am willing to take. Provisioning and cooking for my loved ones is among my primary pleasures and I'd really, you know, rather not kill them. I’m learning new techniques, new ingredients (Teff? those Ethiopians are on to something!), and new recipes while he adapts to a future that will be somewhat lower than expected in burgers, Scotch, and salsa. A number of my easy weeknight standby dinners – chana masala or stir-fry, for example - are, quite literally, off the table. There will not be as many canned tomato products this year, but darn skippy we're upping the applesauce. Meanwhile I'm taking another looksee through Fancy Pantry for as yet untried sauces and condiments to liven up our revised roster of available foodstuffs.

Things just got a bit more interesting. If you need me, I'll be in the kitchen working out a decent chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Thy Kindness Freezes

Not long ago I mentioned to a pal that I like to include cleaning out my freezer as one of my spring household re-boot chores. She seemed startled by the admission, as well she might since I am not known around town for my housekeeping prowess. The words “casual” or “breezy” could be applied in this regard and I have not the slightest grounds to argue. Anyway, apparently freezer sorting wasn’t on her spring tidying list (perhaps because her freezer never gets out of order in the first place) but she was a trooper in listening to my recitation of the reasons why I do what I do: the inevitable forgotten package of snow peas, now more grayish than green, the three utterly shriveled and now unusable bananas which had originally been intended for pancakes, a bag of last springs asparagus trimming that I was 100% sure would end up as soup. Well. They’re all gone now and me and my freezer feel lighter than air and ready to take on the next year’s gleanings.

The only thing I couldn’t reconcile, I told her, was a lone bag of cranberries left over from the fall. One bag really isn’t enough to play with in any kind of fun way but, as far as I knew, the cranberries would keep a while longer. Keep or toss, I wanted to know. While my meager tendencies toward thrift and orderliness battled, she calmly walked to her own freezer, took out a package of cranberries and held it up as an offering. “Want them?” she asked. “I won’t use them and will just keep them until they need to be thrown away.” Score! (Aside: this is why you should always share the minutiae of your life with friends and internet. You never know when someone will give you a bag of cranberries in response.)


Two bags of cranberries is enough to make a smallish amount of very delicious chutney, which can be canned or refrozen in a labeled and dated container so you know what it is when the memory of having made it inevitably fades (which it will, even for you young and chippy types). Even more fun, a perfectly lovely chutney can be made with the little bits of whatever else you encounter during freezer cleaning. A cup of raisins? Check. A few tablespoons of candied ginger? Oh, my, yes, yes, yes double check. Some chopped jalapeno? I didn’t, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t.


And that’s one reason I adore making chutneys. There are no real requirements, no chemical reaction to prompt and pray for, virtually no rules outside of minding your sugar and acidity in the event you plan water bath processing. My recipe originally came from my dear college friend Kate, with whom I now speak only twice a decade or so but for whom I would gladly and with no questions asked traverse the world if she called out of the blue and requested it of me, and she in turn learned it from someone named Sabra. That’s what it says at the top of the dot-matrix printed page (hello, old Mac SE and your adorable double-floppy arrangement!), “Sabra’s Cranberry Chutney”. Sabra’s version tends toward the more tangy and sweet, while over the years I’ve cut the vinegar and ancillary fruit but upped the spice and citrus. That’s the way of chutney, friends, and I recommend it heartily.


This time I used those two bags of berries, the juice of the last orange (no more oranges until winter comes again – this last one wasn’t looking to hot but was just fine for juice), some raisins, chopped candied ginger, two cups or so of sugar, and about a half cup of leftover rioja from the night before for an added peppery kick. Cranberries cook down easily and thicken well. Too well in this case, so I added another half cup of o.j. on the back end and called it good. If I wanted to be more authentic I’d have added some vinegar or something pickled, but I’m not totally wedded to authenticity here and I like the final product so that’s that.


Now, as I said, this didn’t make a lot – three cups, maybe. It can be canned and processed in a hot water bath, if you’d like and, if I went that route, I’d have done it in quarter pints and processed just in a largish saucepan - no need to fire up the ginormous canning kettle for such a wee bit of processing. I’d say fifteen minutes after return to full boil ought to do it and there you go. For my part, I placed two well-marked freezer containers back into my newly cleaned and tidy freezer to await use.


And what use might that be?