Cooking / Baking

Food Therapy

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment
Peanut butter and Jam--mood enhancing drugs.

Peanut butter and Jam–mood enhancing drugs.

My latest novel, The Anti-Mage, virtually wrote itself. Vastly better than previous novels, this book is saleable, I’m sure.

As the rejections pile up, though, I begin to doubt. I doubt the book’s merits, my wisdom in making this leap of faith to writing, and my fundamental value as a human being. Did I make a huge mistake in shutting down my science outreach business in order to write? Have I made myself nothing more than a chauffeur, gardener and cook for my family? Have I fallen into the stay at home mom role I have striven all my life to avoid? These questions haunt me more with every rejection, with every day I troll the Internet for new agents to approach.

Despair, like the cat curled up under my desk, lurks at my feet. It raises its head now and again to stare malevolently at me, dismissing my efforts to be something as nothing but bothersome noise.

I know there is nothing for it but to soldier on. Decisions have been made, and cannot be undone. I must carry on as though I have faith in my books and myself. And so I resort to food therapy.

No, I don’t go on a chocolate binge—I know it will leave me feeling worse than I started—but I choose food that makes me happy. It could be comfort food, like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. It could be food that is pretty, like a salad sprinkled with bright nasturtium flowers. It could be food that takes skill to make, like tortillas. Or it could be food that I know will make my family happy, like spaghetti with tofu meatballs. Whatever the food is, I choose it to make me feel better about myself and my lot in life.

Does it help?

Well, a plate of food is never going to sell a book, no matter how pretty or comforting it is, but it does make it easier to manage the daily grind of criticism and rejection. To be able to step away from work and focus on something as simple and fundamental to life as food can be a profoundly centring activity.

And a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt, either.

Poached Pears

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

DSC_0008 copyWe have a surfeit of pears at the moment—big gorgeous ones from the Lincoln University research plots—so I made poached pears for dessert. It may be the first time I’ve made poached pears, and I was surprised at how quick and easy it was to make this elegant dessert. The kids declared them delicious, and I will certainly make them again.

Combine in a large measuring cup:

1 ¼ c. sugar

Enough water to make 4 cups of sugar solution

Stir until the sugar dissolves, and then pour the sugar solution into a medium saucepan. Add:

1 cinnamon stick

4 whole cloves

3 cardamom pods

2 chunks of candied ginger

Bring to a boil. While the sugar solution is heating, peel and core four large pears, leaving the stems intact. Simmer the pears in the sugar solution for about 10 minutes, turning them gently every few minutes. When the pears are soft, but not disintegrating, cover the pan and allow to cool to room temperature. Serve with a few spoonfuls of the poaching liquid poured over them.

Mother’s Day

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

DSC_0006 copyHappy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there!

I have difficulty with Mother’s Day, and so I’m glad that my family allows me to observe it as I wish, by forgetting the day entirely. The ‘traditional’ breakfast in bed for Mom on Mother’s Day would just about kill me. I’d have to stay in bed two to three hours longer than usual in order for them to bring breakfast to me there, and the thought of eating in bed is completely unappealing; bed is not a place for food. More than that, I always make a cooked breakfast on Sunday mornings. I do it because I enjoy it. I do it because that way I get exactly what I’m craving every Sunday morning (though I do occasionally take requests). Why would I give that up for Mother’s Day?

And doing my chores for me, so I can sit around and eat bonbons all day? Are you kidding? If I have to sit still more than twenty minutes I go stir crazy. That wouldn’t do at all for Mother’s Day.

So this morning, we had lemon blueberry muffins. In a nod to the day, I made up the batter last night, so all I had to do was scoop it into the muffin tin and throw it into the oven this morning.

I also cleaned the house yesterday, so I could do outdoor chores today, which I vastly prefer to scrubbing the toilet. Much better to do work I want to do, that to do nothing at all!

So, however you like to spend your day—eating bonbons or digging ditches—I hope you enjoyed your day!

Carrots

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

DSC_0037smI eat them almost every night in dinner, and usually with lunch, and often in between meals, too. Nothing satisfies my munchies like the sweet juicy crunch of a carrot. I know I’d automatically reach for cake over carrots, if I could get it, but cake is like riding the crest of a big wave on your boogie board—a thrill while it lasts, but pretty soon you’re going to be washed up on the sand. Cake’s sugar crash can be brutal, but carrots are both satisfying and sustaining.

I could go on about carrots’ nutritional values—how they contain lots of vitamin A, C, and K, how they are low in calories and high in fibre. But frankly, I don’t care. They are delicious and satisfy my snacking cravings; who cares about the rest?

I grow a lot of carrots, but never enough to get us through the year. My favourite variety is Touchon, a sweet orange carrot that grows beautifully in my garden. I also plant Purple Dragon, Solar Yellow, and Nutri-Red, just for fun and variety.

I love braised carrots, roasted carrots, grilled carrots, carrots in soup, carrots in my macaroni and cheese, and carrots in salad. But mostly I love carrot sticks, eaten any time of day or night, whenever I’m feeling a little peckish.

 

Not Yo Mamma’s Mac and Cheese

/ Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

DSC_0005 copyGrowing up, I remember macaroni and cheese as something that was bright orange and came out of a box. Of course, I loved it. But as an adult, I have a hard time serving that sort of stuff to my family.

So, I started making mac and cheese using Joy of Cooking’s Baked Macaroni recipe, but there’s not much in it—it’s good, but not terribly interesting or nutritious. I began tinkering, and came up with Not Yo Mamma’s Mac and Cheese. My kids, of course, point out that it is their mamma’s mac and cheese, but the name stuck anyway.

This recipe makes a generous meal for our family of four, with lots of leftovers for lunch the next day.

500 g package elbow macaroni

2 large carrots, diced

1 ½ cups fresh or frozen peas (thawed if frozen)

1 ½ cups fresh or frozen corn (thawed if frozen)

1 onion, diced

2 stalks celery, diced

¼ cup chopped fresh parsley

1 ½ cups grated cheese (pick your favourite)

3 eggs

1 cup milk

bread crumbs

butter

salt and pepper to taste

Cook the macaroni. While macaroni is boiling, boil the carrots until just tender. Sauté the onion and celery in olive oil or butter until the onion is translucent. Add vegetables and cook just a few minutes longer, until everything is warm through. Mix in the parsley, and salt and pepper to taste.

Scald the milk, and beat in the eggs.

In a well-buttered casserole dish, layer macaroni, vegetables, and cheese, ending with a layer of cheese. Pour the egg mixture over the top. Sprinkle generously with bread crumbs and dot with butter. Bake at 190°C (375°F) for 30 minutes, until the egg is firm in the centre.

 

Salad Junkie

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

salad greens2 smLots of parents fret about their teenagers’ eating habits. Given the freedom and a little pocket money, most teens make bad food choices. I can’t judge—I was one of those teens once, splurging on chocolate and Coca-Cola every chance I got. My son is no different, though his vices tend toward the salty side—chips and cheesy breads.

But I don’t worry. He thinks I’ll reprimand him for the empty chip bag that comes home in his lunchbox (he didn’t get them from home…), but I know that his real weakness is salad.

Yep, salad. With a homemade vinaigrette, and plenty of dark, nutty lettuces and spinach. Maybe some nasturtium flowers for colour and a little zing…

He eyes the salad bowl after everyone has had seconds, waiting to see if his sister will fight him for what’s left. She often does, and I would, too, except that my parental instinct is to let them gorge on salad. Rarely is there anything left when the table is cleared.

How did it happen, this salad craving? I have no idea, except that our salads aren’t iceberg lettuce and an anaemic slice of greenhouse tomato. They have flavour and colour. The kids know the names of all the varieties of lettuce I plant, and they enjoy the range of “extras” we add, like nasturtium, salad burnet, and parsley.

“I like that drunk lady,” my son said one day after polishing off the salad greens, “It’s so…succulent.” He was referring to Drunken Woman Fringed Head—one of our reliable year-round lettuces (but that won’t stop me from using the quote as blackmail someday). How can a kid not like lettuce with a name like that?

So, let them have a few chips and some chocolate. I know that they’ll come home and stuff themselves with salad. That’s serious junk food!

Renovation reminiscing

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments
DSC_0002 sm

Stripping the old…

I love my kitchen, but it wasn’t always so. When we moved into our house, the kitchen was appalling. What little cabinetry was there was obviously taken from some other kitchen—it didn’t particularly fit the space, and had clearly been cobbled together. In the spaces between cabinets, crude wooden shelves had been tacked up. A tiny sink and an ancient electric range (with a bare wire inside that regularly electrocuted mice) completed the kitchen’s amenities. The kitchen had obviously been built as a lean-to many years ago. Later, the roof had been lifted somewhat to improve the space. Still, that part of the house is well over 100 years old, and little real repair work had ever been done to it. The floor had dangerously soft patches, where you felt that the only thing between you and the ground was a 50 year-old sheet of linoleum. The walls behind the cabinets were largely unlined, and in the winter, cold wind poured through the cracks, chilling everything in the cabinets. The previous owners had weather stripped the cabinet doors in an unsuccessful attempt to reduce the freezing gales whipping across the kitchen floor. Mice scampered in and out through myriad holes in the floor and walls.

Something drastic had to be done.

Enjoying the new.

Enjoying the new.

We set up the toaster and an electric hot plate in the living room and completely gutted the kitchen. Two weeks of hard work, and the room had a new floor, new walls, new cabinetry, a big double sink, and (the big splurge) a beautiful 5-burner gas range. The hideous, unusable space had been transformed. We use the kitchen so heavily that, five years on, we can begin to see wear and tear on things, but I still love the space. It was worth every blister to create it!

Blood, Sweat and Tears

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

DSC_0005 copyWell…OK, mostly blood today. You know how, every once it a while you’re doing something and think, “Man, this is really dumb. I could get seriously hurt,” but you keep doing it anyway? Yep. That was me, preparing pumpkins for stuffed pumpkins. Some of them had relatively thin flesh, and I could quickly saw a neat hole in the top. Others were thicker, and the knife had a tendency to bind in the flesh. Next thing I knew, I was plunging the knife into my thumb instead of the pumpkin. Serves me right. Not like I didn’t know it could (probably would) happen.

As I grabbed a tea towel and wrapped it around the thumb, I was reminded of another slip of the knife many years ago. I was working at a food booth at the PA Renaissance Faire, and was slicing onions for onion rings. The onion slipped, and my knife sliced deep into my finger. I reached for a towel and wrapped it around my finger, then started toward the first aide tent. Unfortunately, I fainted half way there (two c-sections and a lot of injuries later, and I’m not so queasy about blood). By good fortune, the cutest guy at the Faire found me, picked me up and carried me the rest of the way to the first aide tent. Later, he sang a humorous, impromptu song about the incident, but alas, I never spoke to him again.

I was more fortunate today. Though I didn’t faint, the cutest guy in the house fetched me a bandage and finished cooking dinner for me.

Catching dinner when we can

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Tomorrow is Anzac Day, and the stores will be closed.

This caused us some confusion today, because we all get Monday off, as Anzac Day has been “Mondayised”, so we assumed that stores would be closed only on Monday. We had planned to pick up the remaining materials for our big shed project tomorrow morning, so we could work on it over the long weekend.

Thankfully, Ian picked up the rental trailer this afternoon, so when, at 5.15 pm he realised he couldn’t pick up building materials in the morning, he was able to make the trek to town with the trailer before the store closed.

Meanwhile, I was doing my usual Friday afternoon routine, running our daughter to clarinet lessons, then two different band rehearsals.

All of us missed dinner. My daughter and I ate cheese sandwiches and carrots in the back of the car, and Ian and our son grabbed some crackers, and made egg sandwiches when they got home just before 8 pm. They were still eating when my daughter and I got home.

I know for some families, that’s a normal day, but we do our best to eat a proper dinner, together as a family every day. It’s unusual to have such a crazy un-meal, and it always makes the day seem incomplete, not to have that time all together as a family.

It’s good to have these days, though. They remind me of how blessed we are to be able to sit down together almost every day to share a meal and each other’s company.