Strawberry shortcake for my dad

Really, the ten quarts of strawberries that have taken over my kitchen are all my dad’s fault.

“Wake up Dad, let’s go DO something!”

If he didn’t plant a garden when my sisters and I were growing up, if he didn’t take us strawberry/cherry/apple picking at the U-pick orchards and fields around our town, if he didn’t spend nearly every week in summer making a fruit pie or shortcake of some kind, if he didn’t teach me how much better tomatoes and corn and strawberries taste when they’re fresh and warm from the sun, I wouldn’t be in this predicament.

My dad will shake his head (I can tell, even over the phone) and laugh at me when I tell him about the stash I brought home, but I think behind that he understands. He grew up on a farm (ask him about tractors and combines some time), he lived the whole “farm to table” “snout to tail” thing about 50 years before it was trendy. For my dad, that was just…how it was.

Nothing says love (or trust) like letting your kid hold your hand with a knife in it as you carve a pumpkin.

He gave me a taste of that life growing up with our garden. Each year, he would till a 30’x15’ plot (my dad just corrected me–it was at least twice that size, enough space for 3 rows each of 3 to 4 varieties of corn) behind our house before walking along the rows with my sisters and me, helping us plant corn, squash, tomatoes, beans, just about anything you can think of.

I want to say we would eagerly watch and wait for the little green sprouts to peek through the dirt, tending and caring for them, but I don’t think it ever occurred to us that this was something special. My sisters and I didn’t know that most people didn’t run out back for broccoli or spend Sunday picking dozens of ears of corn off their stalks. We thought it was fun to watch our dad simmer and slice “caterpillars” off the corn or mash tomatoes through the food mill, and being a good helper by funneling it all into bags for the freezer and dinner in December.

At the beginning of this year, less than two weeks after his 65^th birthday (and only a few days after my 30^th) my dad ended up in the hospital from a heart attack. Knowing that my dad came that close to not being around, that I came that close to not hearing his amused, incredulous “Christina!” when I tell him how many strawberries I bought or calling him to ask what a misfire in cylinder 4 on my car means was the most terrifying moment in my life, to be sure, and I have no doubt that it was a less than a treat for him. Want to really appreciate your dad? That’ll do it.

Dad, we have a 5K to walk in a few weeks (the only time I’ll be able to keep up with you), and you need to be around to say “I told you so” on that far-off day that I have kids who gripe that they like chicken nuggets better than my homemade whatever. I guess, given all the complaints a kid could have about their dad, the fact that I’m pretty much unable to buy tomatoes or strawberries or corn off-season and that I appreciate the finer points of a perfect strawberry shortcake means you did something right.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you and I’m really glad you’re around.

Rhubarb pie to celebrate

A year ago today I claimed this little corner of the Internet as my own. I wasn’t sure what to expect, not sure what to write, very little idea of how to take a decent picture, or even who would read what I had to say. And yet here we are, a year and 62 posts later, and I couldn’t be more thankful for everything. So here, have a slice of some birthday pie. Sorry, I forgot the candles, but I do have ice cream.

This recipe embodies everything I hoped this blog would lead to. Last year was my first encounter with rhubarb and I shared it with you; this year, I couldn’t wait for it to show up so I could really explore what I’ve been missing.

Last year, making pie crust involved muttered swears and prayers over bowls and rolling pins, with no discernible rhyme or reason to success or failure. Through some crazy experiments, including learning to render my own lard, I’ve had three pie crust successes in a row–hardly mastery, but as least my confidence has grown leaps and bounds (…I’ve just jinxed myself, haven’t I?).

As much as I’ve learned about cooking over the past year, though, the best part by far has been sharing with you and reading your comments; those connections mean everything to me, so thank you.

When it comes to this pie, it seems a crying shame to wait until strawberries appear to enjoy rhubarb. Since their seasons overlap for just a few short weeks around here, half of rhubarb season is already gone by the time summer’s opening act takes stage. Why not enjoy spring’s sweetest offering on its own merits? I think it’s earned its moment in the spotlight.

If you’re a rhubarb newbie like me, this pie is a great place to start. Rather than muddling flavors with strawberries, rhubarb stands on its own here. Its tartness is tamed with just enough sugar to make this a for-real dessert, juices are thickened simply with flour into the prettiest mauve-y pink oozy filling, cinnamon adds just enough to bring out the full range of rhubarb’s flavors.

Cheers to year two everyone–thanks for sticking around. There’s pie on the counter and ice cream in the freezer, please help yourself.

Getting deep on deep dish

If you go down a checklist of what makes a Chicagoan, I’m still an East Coast transplant. I think no hot dog is complete without ketchup. I root for the Cubs and the Sox (unless the Sox play the Indians, then it’s Cleveland pride all the way). Soda is soda, not pop. The appeal of craft beer is lost on me–or any beer for that matter, though I’m working on it. I think thin crust pizza is where it’s at.

However.

On a rare gluttonous occasion, deep dish calls. Some Chicagoans say deep dish is only for tourists who eat at Uno’s, and that the best Chicago pizza is the extra thin cracker-crust. Personally, I like both for what they are. A monstrous bread/cheese/stuff/sauce casserole, deep dish is a one-slice meal and most certainly has its appeal–when it’s good.

Cooked in pans as ancient as the Cubs last World Series appearance, the crust somehow comes out flaky and buttery and golden and crisp as the most perfect croissant, but with midwest heft. The reverse-layering of cheese/stuff/sauce goes to show Chicagoans’ ingenuity when it comes to food. It keeps the crust from getting soggy (the bane of all good pizza is a soggy crust, also why I don’t like NYC-style pizza), protects the cheese from burning, and is overall just one of those “Oh. Duh.” moments. As for the “stuff,” sorry, deep dish is not meant for just cheese and sauce. Peppers, onions, chunky mushrooms, spicy sausage, yesss.

It’s funny how the nine years I’ve lived in or around Chicago have made their mark on me. While I still like ketchup on my hot dogs, they seem naked and bland now without sport peppers, and I’m somewhat distraught that I can’t find them at a grocery store back home (poor misguided Wegman’s stock guy, your confusion made me sad). The difference between “downtown” and “the city” actually makes sense. Trying to navigate somewhere that the streets aren’t laid out in a nice, organized grid would confuse the hell out of me now. Holding a conversation about the Bears and actually following a game no longer makes me laugh out loud at its impossibility. I appreciate the unique pride (and gloveless pain) Chicago has in its 16″ softball games. And I will whole-heartedly come to Chicago’s defense if anyone tries to compare it unfavorably to any other city.

I love this city, my adopted home. I know it has its problems, which aren’t insignificant, but what city doesn’t? Its neighborhoods and lakefront, culture and history, quirks and perfections, and of course its food from pizza to farmers markets–these make Chicago great to me, especially when I can share them with you.

The problem with mediocrity

I can only plead ignorance. No one told me carrot cake was this good. True, I knew it included some of my favorite things–spices, nuts, and cream cheese frosting–but somehow every time I’ve encountered it, it’s just tasted of mass produced bleh that didn’t even seem worth trying to redeem. And so I didn’t.

I was wrong. So, so wrong.

My few run-ins with carrot cake usually went like this: a half-eaten, generic, leftover grocery store cake appears by the communal coffee pot at work and I, who should know better by now, help myself to a slice. It doesn’t taste anything like carrot, only vaguely of spices, and the frosting (which tastes nothing like cream cheese and inevitably includes tiny frosted carrots, because how else would you know what flavor this cake is supposed to be?) peels off like putty. If there are nuts at all, they are sad little crumb-sized pieces not worthy of the warning label “This product may contain nuts.”

The cake isn’t offensive, I still eat my slice, but I won’t even remember it ten minutes later, the only evidence a wadded up paper napkin and a few rouge crumbs on my desk.

And this is why mediocre food is really terrible; it’s not that the cake actually tastes bad, it’s that it’s uninspiring. It’s easy for great food to be inspirational, and bad food at least inspires me to never ever combine those ingredients again. But mediocre food? It just makes me think I wasted calories eating it. And I really hate thinking about calories.

I’m not saying all food should be drop-your-fork-and-drop-to-your-knees amazing. Shoot, for every post here I probably made a dozen average dishes or meals that weren’t worth the effort to type up, but if I’m going to eat cake, it had better be some damn good cake.

Back to the carrot cake. Last weekend I tried a sample of grocery store carrot cake mix, which was just good enough for me to say “Oh. Hey. I could make this.” (Sometimes I feel bad for grocery stores and their samples. I’m sure it’s not their intention that I taste and forgo the box in favor of making it from scratch.)

Flipping through a few cookbooks and combining bits and pieces of recipes from two of my baking bibles, I think I came up with something that is definitely better than mediocre. I may have, in fact, taken a bite of slightly warm, gooey-frosted muffin/cupcake hybrids and actually mumbled through a mouthful of delicious, “Why didn’t anyone tell me carrot cake was this good?”

This carrot cake is packed with everything I think it should be. Carrot, of course, makes its presence known in no uncertain terms; crunchy chunks of walnut will not be ignored (sorry Alton Brown, you were wrong on this count);   raisins plump up to better, juicier versions of themselves. And the spices? Let me put it this way: these cupcakes were under a heavy glass cake dome and I could still smell them every time I walked past.

And last but not least, though these are delicious without any frosting at all (dare I suggest they’re almost breakfast-worthy?), I would actually suggest doubling the frosting recipe to make sure you get a good ratio of frosting to cake–this coming from someone who generally scrapes off frosting like a picky six-year-old.

Now, of course, this discovery makes me question what other mediocre dishes I’ve eaten that could be spectacular. I think I have some more tasting to do.

Quick post for a quick meal

Get home at 8 after a busy day and getting busier with new projects (like oh, say, trying to get back to writing more than two posts a month here). Crank the oven. Grab a piece of naan (make a big batch over the weekend or use frozen). Slather with spread. Toss on a handful of vegetables. Naan in oven. Egg cooked over-easy in my favorite blue egg pan (it counts as a meal if I can put an egg on it).

Dinner and done.

The toppings really are up to your imagination, but in case you’re looking for some suggestions, the two above were: black bean spread, sliced green onions, queso fresco, over-easy egg; red pepper/eggplant spread, left over sauteed leeks, chicken sausage.

Any excuse for π

Did you know March 14 is International Pi Day? I think that is a perfectly valid reason to use your math skills and bake some delicious, sinfully easy pie!

I’ve reached the point in the year where I am quite literally dreaming about the farmers market (also dreaming that I’m having dinner with a very old Cary Grant…random). And I want pie.

With the market still at least a month away, and not bearing much pie-able fruit even then, I find myself in a conundrum. What pie fits in March? Spring is rhubarb, strawberry; summer is a glut of peach, blueberry, cherry, raspberry, whatever is overflowing the tables on any given week; fall is apple, pumpkin, pecan, sweet potato. But what pie for winter, or whatever this time of year is, this weird in-between winter-spring?

Nothing was inspiring me until I remembered reading about a coconut custard pie a few months ago. I’ve always been a die-hard fruit pie fan. Not much can drag me away from cinnamon-and-butter spiked apples layered in a crispy, flaky crust, or a juicy, oozy slice of strawberry pie cold from the fridge. Custard? Meh. It reminded me of the chocolate pudding pie we were served as dessert in grade school, which, it turns out, was so, so very wrong.

Baked custard pie, I am happy to say, is nothing like what I imagined. Since it’s baked, the filling is set and solid, nothing like a pudding or cream pie, more like flan, and the crust kept its integrity even with a liquid filling. Nothing defeats the purpose of pie more than soggy crust.

The coconut adds enough texture and coconut-y flavor so the filling is more than the sum of its very minimal parts. Plus, as the pie bakes the coconut begins to rise to the top, leaving a smooth layer of custard topped with flaky bits of coconut.

This pie is the perfect place to start if you’re a novice pie-maker. If you can stir, you can make this pie. You could use store-bought crust (though I prefer to make my own, are you surprised?) and the filling is a no-brainer. Six ingredients together in a bowl: sweetened condensed milk, regular milk, eggs, coconut, vanilla, mace (or nutmeg). That’s it. I honestly don’t know a pie recipe easier than that.

So I have pie (and π!) and am quite content until I can get my hands on some pie-able fruit.

All hail the glorious paczki

Poonchkey. Punchki. Paczki. However you want to spell it, it’s impossible to say without smiling. Just try it. I’ll wait.

The only word of Polish I know*, it’s what my mom called–and still calls–my sisters and me, her little punchkis. Growing up, I vaguely knew she didn’t make the word up, that they were kinda-sorta Polish doughnuts, but until I moved to Chicago I didn’t truly understand the cult of the paczki.

Makin’ biscuits

Did you know, if you leave green onions in your fridge for two weeks, they will grow new green onions? These are the things I learn when I don’t clean out my fridge before I go out of town. It was a pleasant surprise to come home to a bag of perfectly bright green onions with only a slightly wilty outer layer instead of, well, the alternative.

But what does accidentally growing new green onions by way of neglectful refrigerator management have to do with biscuits? Well, I need green onions to make my favorite biscuits, of course.

Most people seem to have a preference for either drop biscuits or rolled. Personally I don’t think as anything can beat the flaky layers of the rolled version (given the lengths I will go to for flaky pie dough, is it any surprise?). I have not yet had a drop biscuit that didn’t just taste…lazy.

I don’t have any good stories to tell about these other than they’re fantastic. The cornmeal in the dough and salt and pepper sprinkled over the top adds crunch, green onions add tang, the yogurt makes them tender, the butter (of course) makes them delicious.

They’re pretty adaptable little guys too–I’ve left out the onions completely, added grated cheddar, used fine cornmeal instead of medium, used buttermilk instead of the yogurt and milk, cut in circles instead of squares (don’t you know the shape makes them taste different? I’m only kind of joking…). As long as you don’t overwork the dough terribly, it’s hard to make these “wrong.”

But the for-real best thing about these? They are so good with an over-easy egg I can’t even explain. And if you happen to have a little bit of ham to sneak under the egg? …Yeah. Just make these. You won’t regret it.

Cookie Day!

Here’s a really easy riddle for you: what can you make with 6 1/2 pounds of butter, 12 pounds of flour, 29 eggs, and 3 pounds of sugar? Answer: A hell of a lot of cookies and a lot of happy friends, coworkers, and neighbors.

In case that wasn’t clue enough, this past weekend was Cookie Day (or really, Cookie Weekend), which has been an annual tradition since before I can remember. When I was growing up, my mom and her friend Connie would pick a day in December and there would be Baking-with-a-capital-B. Over the past 20 years, Cookie Day has seen 6 homes and pretty much every major life milestone–and I couldn’t be happier that I brought at least a small part of it with me when I moved to Chicago.

Lists are essential

Now, let me be clear: this is no two- or three-hour deal with one or two batches of your holiday cookie standards. I don’t say that out of some kind of misplaced pride or egotism, but to set the stage for the sheer amount of baking that is involved. During Cookie Day’s heyday, there had to have been more than 3 dozen kinds (that’s not 36 cookies, but 36 kinds of cookies) at the end of the day. And since nearly every recipe was at least doubled, if not tripled…I can’t even guess how many cookies that would be.

But oh, does it make for the best memories. There was the time trays of cookies were being shoved, hot, into trunks of cars because a) there was probably no other flat surface on which to cool them, and b) it was so late and everyone was so tired that it was unimaginable to do more than that. There was the year that we opened tins to start boxing up cooled cookies only to discover cookies leftover from the year before (thankfully well-preserved, if very stale). Or the year of the unfortunate reindeer turd cookies–at least they tasted good!–or the year of the florentine mishap.

Some things have never changed with Cookie Day with my mom and Connie: mimosas always start the day, with a break for sandwiches and chips for lunch. Someone will always choose an overly-complicated new cookie recipe for the end of the day and end up swearing up a storm. Someone will inevitably put a dough in the refrigerator to chill, thinking “Oh, I’ll remember what cookie that’s for” and will have no idea three hours later which of the now five chilled doughs belonged to which cookie.

My mom will always make butter horns, Connie will always make rugelach, my sister Laura will always decorate the “pizza” cookies, and my sister Erica will show up at the end of the day to eat the butter horns and ask what she can take (but we love her anyways). And I will always be the pecan-tassie-maker and the unwrapper of Hersey’s Kisses and chocolate balls for peanut butter blossoms and “surprise inside”s–three tasks that I now happily pass off to my unwitting, yet very patient, friends. There have to be perks to hosting my own Cookie Day, you know.

Helping hands are essential

But beyond the masses and masses of sugar and flour and butter and chocolate and nuts, I love my friends who have joined me over the past few years for the baking extravanganza, and helped me create my own version of this tradition.

Mulled wine or glogg has been the beverage of choice for the past three years, cheese and crackers for snacks. I still choose at least one overly complicated recipe, forget which cookie dough is which, and swear at midnight on Sunday that next year I’ll make two cookies and that’s all! (I’ve said that for 6 years, hasn’t happened yet.)

What are your holiday baking traditions? Any other baking over-achievers–do we need to start a support group?

Cookie Day 2012 Recap

Types of cookies: 14, plus hot chocolate mix and marshmallows

• Anise-almond biscotti
• Fig-walnut biscotti
• Peanut butter blossoms
• Thumbprints (raspberry, grape, and apple-lemon)
• Pecan tassies (a double-batch, god help me)
• Chocolate-espresso crinkles
• Rugelach
• Raspberry meringue bars
• Grasshopper bars

New this year:

• Fig-date swirls
• Pistachio-orange crescents (Cut-outs, filling, AND fussy timing? What was I thinking? They were delicious and quite popular though)
• Chocolate-orange biscotti
• Spice buttons (Never would have done the frosting and sprinkles, thank god for friends and co-bakers!)

Total number of cookies: 660, not including bar cookies or ones sacrificed for “taste-testing”

Best new recipe: Tie between adding espresso powder to my usual standard snowcap/crinkle recipe and a totally new pistachio-orange crescent (which I will never again make for Cookie Day, as they broke several of my cardinal rules, not least of which is no cutouts, complicated fillings, or overly fussy timing).

Grown-up tastes

Every year around this time, it would come in the mail. My dad would grab it from the box on his way in the house, a non-descript brown paper package, but I knew what was hiding inside by the unmistakeable handwriting on the outside, just waiting to be uncovered.

My sisters and I would tear open the wrapping to find a festive holiday tin. We’d pop open the lid and there, wrapped in layers of wax paper, still cold from their journey from Ohio to New York, were my grandma’s annual Christmas cookies.

My favorites then were a three-way tie between pecan tassies, with their layer of crunchy sugar hiding nutty, molasses-y insides; buckeyes, an Ohio specialty of a ball of peanut butter partially dipped in chocolate to resemble its namesake; and these chocolate cookies with a maraschino cherry hidden under a coating of chocolate frosting. There were other choices in the tin too, of course: soft, cakey cookies topped with sugar glaze and multi-colored sprinkles, peanut butter blossoms, maybe some pizzelles if they managed to survive the trecherous journey intact. And of course no gift of cookies from an Italian grandmother–from my Italian grandmother–would be complete without biscotti.

I never got the appeal of biscotti then. They weren’t really sweet; you risked cracking a tooth if you didn’t eat them patiently, waiting for them to soften in your mouth or a cup of coffee; they tasted…different. Anise, as I learned, an acquired taste and one not often acquired by kids who were more interested in chocolate or sugar frostings. They certainly didn’t look like a kid’s cookie–craggy oblong slices, broken up only by small flecks of aniseed, austere in the grand scheme of holiday cookies.

But my dad loved them. He would eat them on Sunday mornings with his once-weekly cup of coffee while my sisters and I made quick work of the rest of the treats. I would munch on one or two as long as I could dip them in hot chocolate, but only if all my other favorites were gone.

Since then, my tastes have grown up. Biscotti have become one of my favorite cookies for the holidays, one of the few that end up in my own private cookie stash once the rest have been gifted away. As with my issues with mass-produced muffins, these are not the biscotti you find at most coffee shops.

The licorice flavor of anise is the highlight, they’re just sweet enough for my tastes, and, while you won’t risk cracking a tooth like really traditional biscotti, they definitely have a crunch (and I personally like them best after a few days to really dry out). This time of year, they’re my favorite Sunday morning treat with a strong cup of tea–or, even better, an afternoon treat with a cup of hot mulled wine while I’m baking up more holiday goodies.