Zuke the world

In the summer an aging housewife's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of zucchini and what the heck she's going to do with the 837 pounds of it sitting on her counter and her porch and her desk and her bed. Girls, I finally figured this one out.

You cut it all up and cook it in a big pot until it reaches the sludge stage. Add some water first so you don't have to take it back out of the big pot and pick out all the scorchy pieces on the bottom. :P

Drain it and puree it in the blender and then treat it like canned pumpkin. Or freeze it and treat it like canned pumpkin later. Or can it in your pressure canner (pressure canner only) and treat it like canned pumpkin later. The point is, treat it like canned pumpkin. Never buy canned pumpkin again.

WOW that's an ugly pie.

Not that I haven't used canned frosting

Have we really fallen so far that we must buy remedial cans of glop to make our food look like what we remember food looking like back when we ate food? There is a whole job about making sauce. And yet: Philadelphia Cooking Creme. Creme!

In case you run out of sawdust.

Canned frosting has somehow been made even more horrible. Well done, Duncan Hines.

Stillwell Angel

One thing I've never read in any article about childhood obesity is how there is some portion of the child population which is easiest simply to feed constantly rather than employ, entertain, or discipline.

Especially since bludgeoning has fallen out of fashion.

Usage you can't use: Great Grains Cranberry Almond Crunch

Recently someone gave me a box of fancy cereal. This made me very happy because I love cereal*.

But the box I did not love. I did not love it because all I could think was, Someone got paid to write this box. 

Someone got paid to write, "Less processed nutrition you can see." (But I want less processed nutrition I CAN'T see! Or MORE processed nutrition I can see! Or best of all would be MORE processed nutrition I CAN'T see!) Someone got paid to write, "Natural Flavor With Other Natural Flavor."

I blame everybody who never told me I could be a food box writer when I grew up.

*I eat cereal. Would you like to hear about my weight, my health, my sense of personal vitality, my powerful toenails, my glistening eyeballs, the penetrating insights my personal somatic functions have given me about how everyone should eat? Huh, weird.

How to eat a beast

If your husband kills a beast, or someone at your church gives you a part of one, you should eat it. Some beasts are described as tasting "gamey," an Old Icelandic term for "like socks." If you don't like the way socks taste, you can do these things to make your beast taste more "tasty" ("like those slabs of tissue you're used to").

Season it. A good spice attack covers over a multitude of socks. Ground beast responds well to a taco treatment. Ground beast can also be combined with ground pork and then sausaged by way of various ethnicities (Penzey's sausage mixes are a good idea source to get you started).

Soak it. Once I heard that you can soak beasts in milk to take out the gaminess, but I can't see wasting all that milk. I'd rather soak it in something I can turn into a sauce. A beast roast can be converted into a fine sauerbraten. You can also slice it and give it a good ginger, soy sauce, and sherry soak for a stir fry. If you're grilling, cut backstraps into steaks and marinate in lemon juice and worcestershire all day. You make the sauce while he grills (obviously this will be happening after the kids are in bed).

Soak it like crazy. My husband started corning and pastramizing beasts this winter and they are so good. You need some Morton's Tenderquick for a crazy soak.

Smoke it. More tenderquick and a smoker will get you a beast ham. They have shiny spots and everything. Smoke a roast, smoke sausage, smoke a drooled-on pillow. They'll all come out great.

Slow cook it. Italian. Korean. Stew. Time heals all toughness if you're stuck with some stringy old trophy buck somebody shot without thinking about what everything under that rack was going to taste like.

If you got sad about the poor moo-moos and cluck-clucks when you read one of those foodguilt books by a rich jerk who gets to eat and write all day, comfort yourself with some free beast whenever it comes your way.

Springerle

I have my grandma's springerle rolling pin and I feel like a jerk for not using it. I remember eating springerle when I was very little and loving it. So I really want to make it but I haven't had luck with the recipe I've got (not my grandma's--alas, that one is lost). Does anybody have a good recipe? I'm paralyzed by all the internet options and would love it if one of you internet people had a recipe with commentary.

These. I want them.

I'm waiting to be impressed

When is TV going to make cleaning up the kitchen as hip as it made cooking?

I really don't care how great this tastes. Where are my sink and counters?

Supper panic: Buy yourself a little time

Listen up, girls, because I’m going to tell you one of the great kitchen secrets that my mother shared with me shortly before my wedding.

Scene: For one reason or another (most likely one reason and another, and another…), supper plans have slipped your mind. It’s only when you remember that you’re supposed to be teaching a kid or two to tell time and you ask one of them to read the clock that you suddenly realize Dad will be home any minute…and you have no idea what’s for supper.

Now, you’ve got a few options. Here’s one that I’ve tried in several variations, but don’t necessarily recommend: As soon as your husband walks in the door, fresh from the bread-earning cares of the day, thrust the fretful baby at him, incoherently weeping and gnashing your teeth about how there’s no way you can possibly accomplish all the tasks in your day, and how he’d better peel all those brats off you RIGHT NOW OR ELSE, and anyone who wants supper can jolly well make himself a PBJ.

You might have better luck with this one: turn on the stove, and slice an onion into a pan with some butter. In a matter of seconds, the house will smell purposefully wonderful. Dad will walk in, sniff the air, and declare appreciatively: “Smells great!” That’s your cue to say, “Mmm-hmm. Now if you could just take the kids [outside, to the basement, wherever] after you’ve changed, I’ll be able to finish up in here.” Dad, feeling useful, and anticipating a good meal in reward for his labors, will cheerfully whisk the young’uns away to such activities as only fathers can pull off enthusiastically. The kids will be thrilled to have Dad to themselves. And you get a peacefully empty kitchen…and a few minutes to run to Allrecipes or CSPP cooks to figure out what on earth to do with those onions.

No, no, don't peek in the pot now. You just run along and have fun and I'll call you when it's ready.

And you thought you were hardcore

Recently I wished to express my sympathy to a church lady who had been subjected to suffering at the hands of sinful men: her doctor hassled her so long about something at a morning appointment that she missed being able to get biscuits from Hardee's. (This lady emails a report to interested parties after each of her chemo treatments. The reports are always hilarious, and usually include what she ate on the way home. She would be the best blogger ever.) She affirmed that this treatment had been egregious and went on to tell me that although Hardee's has the best biscuits, "the lard--

[here I begin nodding like the know-it-all I am, expecting a comment on the inferiority of shortening or butter to lard]

"well, you sure can tell the difference between what you get at the store and home-rendered."

Right.

Sellout.

Survival tactics

It’s travel season, and for those of us with many grubby sprogs and little grubby money, that means it’s time to go a’visitin’. I think our top vacation spots these days are Grandma’s house and your house. So look out, ‘cause here we come. ;)

We’ve been vacationing via a’visitin’ for a few years now, and have thus learned many, many interesting and useful things, each appropriate to our age and sex. Dad has learned a lot about garage organization and guns. Each child has learned a lot about dress-up or fishing ponds or sleeping bags. I, for my part, have learned perhaps the most important lesson of all: A home-bound woman’s kitchen is an extension of her; don’t touch it.

Hoo boy, this is a big deal lesson. But it is actually very difficult to enact it in real life. You know how it is: You are in a friend’s house and she is busting her tuckus trying to feed not only her own people, but yours. You stand by and watch for a time, but your conscience starts nagging you. Your friend sure is working hard, and there you stand, doing nothing. Soon, you are feeling guilty, and those guilty feelings start to out with nervous giggles and a few, “What can I do to help?” When your friend smiles at you and says that she’s got everything in hand, you try to believe her, but your guilt starts bordering on anguish. She’s working! She’s working so hard! For YOUR FAMILY! This is WRONG! You MUST WORK TOO! AAAAAAAAUGH!

And about then is when you grab a spoon and start stirring something or, even worse, a rag and start wiping down the refrigerator door. Step away from that rag, friend. It’s just not worth it.  

Nooooo, you're not.

When it comes to another home-bound woman’s kitchen, it is nearly always the best, most tactful policy to do nothing whatsoever in that kitchen. Speaking for myself, when I know people are coming to my house during meal time, I put a great deal of thought into planning exactly how, when, where, and what everyone will be eating, and then formulating a War Plan Red on how the food will be prepared. I typically expect that the visiting folk will be occupied with Other Things when it comes time to enact my plan, so I very seldom calculate in their participation. Hence, when someone, anyone, starts dancing around like gas on a skillet, wanting something to do, finding something for her to do is difficult. Trying to help someone “help me” usually pushes dinner back a good half hour, by which time everyone under the age of 10 is crying, and everyone else is standing in the kitchen door looking pathetic.

As I’ve become more competent in my kitchen, I’ve worked at including what women will be in my preparation plans, but this doesn’t always pan out. Even women who are very skilled in their own kitchens (and, likely, even more skilled than I am in mine) aren’t always able to assist in the creation of a meal around here. This is, I think, due to having what my own dear sister-in-law has referred to as a “one-butt kitchen.”  Funny how even a sprawling, state-of-the-art masterpiece-theatre kitchen usually only accommodates one home-bound butt.

Because, like I said, a home-bound woman’s kitchen is an extension of her. She knows it very, very well. A resident visitor doesn’t know it any better than she knows her friend’s unspoken thoughts. You might think you’re safe to put that spatula in the drawer full of spatulas, but what you don’t know is that spatula is only for hummus, and thus belongs in an entirely different drawer. Put it “away” and it will be lost for weeks.

Step away from that spatula, friend. No touchie the spatula. Trust me on this.

HOWEVER! Having been on both sides of those guilty feelings, I know that you absolutely must do something, or you’ll combust. Make that something one of three things:

1. Keep your friend company. If you’re not doing anything to get in her way, then it’s OK for you to be in the kitchen. Just relax over in the corner and talk to her. She likes you. And if you’re lucky, she might take pity on you and let you toss the salad or give the potatoes their spa bath.

2.  Play with the baby. Stress is a crying child in the midst of War Plan Red. Egad. When someone, anyone, everyone starts crying, deal with it. If you find the task hard because you’re too strange a stranger to whomever is crying, quietly find A Way. Be creative. Be brilliant. Be all that you can be. Your friend will love you for it all the more.

3. Find something else to do entirely. This is especially true if you are visiting a friend at the same time as someone in her family. Always, always defer the out-of-the-way corner (and always the stirring spoon) to your friend’s sister or her mother-in-law or her cousin. And it may also be necessary to bug off if the number of women who want to be in the kitchen is odd. It stinks, but it’s important to be cool with being the odd woman out. And if you’re bored as a result, find some kid who’s crying and play with him.

It is possible that after everything has been eaten and you’re sure the cooking phase is over, you might be able to help with the dishes. But even here, proceed with caution. Nothing is self-evident in the kitchen. And there is only one right way to load the dishwasher.

Of course, there are circumstances wherein you absolutely must help in the kitchen, but I think those are few and far between. Then again, I only know what I know. So, you know. Good luck, friends, and happy visitin’. :)

Full kitchen press

A few Mothers Days ago, I received a tortilla press. The white girl is strong in me. I make lousy white girl tortillas. I also learned that making tortillas turns Taco Night from one of the easier Nights into one of the harder ones. So not a whole lot of tortillas get pressed around here.

But I have zero regrets about owning this awkward and heavy piece of hardware, and this is why:

--Runzas are a million times easier now, and I married a guy from Nebraska.

--Until Grandpa gets my pneumatic pie crust press built, I use the tortilla model to train up my pie crusts in the perfectly circular way they should go. (The press is only eight inches but starting the dough there keeps it from taking the shape of some creepy un-pie-like trapezoid so it's easy to roll out the rest of the way. I also think pressing keeps the dough from getting overworked. Or maybe it overworks it. I don't know.)

--This past Laetare I used it to squash beautiful, uniform, round layers of marzipan for our simnel cake.

--Although I also avoid cracker-making on the grounds of pain-in-the-neckness, the tortilla press gets pulled out on the occasional cracker days, too.

--Lacking a juicer, I used the press to squeeze a five-year-old's weight in splendiferous grapefruits we received as a gift (that was after we ate as many as we could--thank you snowbirds!). I also managed to squeeze a "Clever girl" out of my husband for this one, which is all I'm ever really after.

So, white girls, don't rule the tortilla press out of your kitchen's life. There's so much more in the world than tortillas that needs to be flattened.

Explanatory variables

I wonder if test subjects were asked to load a dishwasher rather than idly rotating objects in space, women would perform more competitively with men in spatial reasoning?

You call this full?

Snowed in?

Make these.

Actually, make them even if you're not snowed in.

About that mess in the kitchen

You know the great and glorious mess that graces many a kitchen after the Thanksgiving feast? The perilously piled platters, scattered scraps, and greasy flotsam? And you know how everyone’s totally OK with it, because that’s just the way a kitchen looks after it’s been used to cook a bunch of food from scratch so that a lotta people can gather round the table together for prayer and feasting?

Well, as it so happens, there are quite a few days around here when I prepare a bunch of food from scratch so that a lotta people can gather round the table together for prayer and feasting. So while my kitchen disaster-zone rating might only make it up to Thanksgiving levels a couple times a year, there are days a-plenty when it registers in the red. (And given the few-and-fleeting moments in which I have two hands free lately, it’d be miraculous if the kitchen were clean even if I had fewer mouths to feed or made less from scratch.) I think I’ve said it before, but I’ve been thinking it again of late: Flylady, I do admire your initiative (even if I find your perennial perkiness daunting) and I gladly would shine my sink, every single day…if only I could find it.

This too: Our Savior graciously invites us to gather round His own table for prayer and feasting—and I don’t need to look beyond my own heart to know that the corners of the linoleum haven’t all received a proper scrubbing. Nevertheless, the Supper is wondrously nourishing, and beautifully served to all comers. Life’s messiness lurks around the edges of the table but cannot diminish the joy of the feast. Someday, oh Some Day, we will gather around that table with hearts whose creeping mildew has finally been banished forever.

And you know what? I’m thinking that even our Heavenly kitchens will feature glorious post-feast mess. So if you can find your sink today, go ahead and shine it. But if you can’t, don’t fret it. Revel instead in the present and eternal joy of the feast.

So there.

I've smelled some smelly smells in my day, but I don't know if anything beats a rotten potato.

It's getting harder and harder to remember...

...but I'm pretty sure that there was a time in my life when the centerpieces on my kitchen table weren't composed entirely of amphibians and invertebrates.

Hey lady, are you gonna eat that cricket?

Ayummayumma

Do not buy a yogurt maker! This works! In my refrigerator is living active cultural proof! I drained off some of the whey to thicken it up and so I can make this bread (HT Gauntlets).

You can make it too!

Magic Muffins

My Own Mother, angel of my postpartum kitchen, stocked our fridge with this batter, to my forever gratitude. Imagine: reasonably healthy homemade muffins that can be produced on a whim, in only the time it takes to scoop and bake ‘em! Super moist and mmmmmmm. I’d imagine that the sugar could be cut a bit, and whole wheat flour possibly swapped in for some of the white. (If someone tries that, come back and let us know how it turns out.)

6 c. bran cereal
2 c. water, boiling
1 c. oil
3 c. sugar
4 eggs, well beaten
1 quart buttermilk
3 c. raisins (optional)
5 c. flour
2 tsp. salt
5 tsp. baking soda

Mix 2 c. bran in boiling water, letting water absorb. Stir in oil. Mix remaining 4 c. bran with buttermilk and beaten eggs. Combine bran mixtures; add flour, soda, sugar, salt, and raisins. Store in airtight container in refrigerator until ready to cook. Keeps for 6 weeks in fridge. Bake in greased muffin tins for 20 min. at 400 degrees.

Regrettable foods in action

I've been going through my grandma's old recipe boxes, and wow. Wow. The following are all clipped from newspapers or magazines, and as Grandma never served them to us, I can't help wondering if she saved them just to have a good laugh on hand when she needed it. This is how it happened, Mr. Lileks. I am very curious about the Apple Float, but not curious enough to risk any perfectly good applesauce and eggs on it, so if anyone tries it please report back.

Lima Bean Loaf

2 c. cooked lima beans

1 c. whole wheat bread crumbs

2 T melted butter

1/2 c. chopped green pepper

1/4 c. chopped onion

1/2 c. chopped nuts or nut meal

1/2 c. milk or cream

2 beaten eggs

Vegetized* salt to season

Mix all ingredients well together and place in buttered loaf pan and bake in moderate oven. Baste with melted butter.

*huh?

Carrot Ring

Cook 2 pounds carrots, drain, and put through meat grinder or mash well. Add 1/4 cup butter and salt and pepper to taste. Place in greased 1-quart ring mold, set mold in pan of hot water until ready to serve. Turn out on hot platter and fill center with cooked dressed spinach, peas, or lima beans. Yield: 6 servings. Note: Add one tablespoon onion juice to ground carrots, if desired.

Apple Float for an Emergency Dessert.

The telephone has rung--you are to have guests for dinner--and your previously planned dessert was just applesauce! It's hardly "dressy" enough for those particular people, and besides, there is barely enough to serve the family without any company. You have but little time. What's to be done? Eggs are generally available. Make an apple float, suggests the bureau of home economics, out of two cups of applesauce and four egg whites. Here's how:

2 cups thick applesauce

2 egg whites

Sweeten the applesauce to taste while hot, add a litle (sic) salt, and set away to cool. Beat the egg whites very stiff, and fold the cold applesauce into them. If desired, add two or three teaspoons of lemon juice, or sprinkle a little nutmeg or cinnamon on top.

Some practical Gen-Xing on keeping it all together

My kitchen and I have come a long way. When I first started this SAHM thing, my kitchen was little more than a badly-lit set for some laughable B-rated action: breakfast snarled and clawed up the toaster in its impatience to begin; lunch slapped me together in a crumby sort of frenzy before yielding to the drippy sneers of an incorrigible supper that slumped out of the oven slightly cold in the middle; and snacks followed me around at all hours, a score of moaning undead with barely-hinged jaws that clacked restlessly as I trembled around with crackers and cheese.

Welcome to homemaking. I'm going to eat you.

It was all I could do to stumble, trapped and incompetent, from stovetop to table all day long. The struggle was too insistent and necessary for a person like me—a person whose home making IQ is well below average—to manage with ease.

But now, three years after taking up full-time homemaking, I can say with some degree of certainty that my kitchen is fine. The dishes are done! The floor is swept! I cook edible things! People vocalize yummy sounds over what I serve!

Wanna know how it happened? One freaking dead mouse under the refrigerator at a time.

But more about the dead things later. If I were savvy and svelte, I might gloss up the story of my Cinderella kitchen and sell it to you at $15 an e-copy. As it is, I’m just going to spill my secret: persistence. That’s it. I don’t have a cleaning schedule, a meal plan, a codependent crock pot, or a magical soap scraped from the left flank of a dragon. What I have is a family that needs to eat and a brain that learns from its mistakes and enough time in a day to plot the fastest route between point A and point B. I still have some distance to cover before I’m “yummo,” but I’ve got the beasts in the kitchen tamed and at my heels. Down, Dracula, you ridiculous idiot; I’m baking here.

So what’s it to you? Well, if you’re already some incarnation of Hestia, nothing. But if you’re a homemaking refugee, I’m here to tell you that if I can make my own tortillas, keep the sink from smelling bad, and do preventative scrubbing behind the refrigerator, so can you. And you really don’t need to buy a book, apron, or indulgence from that woman who insists, with probably truth, that she has it all together. So what if she has it all together? If Mrs. Together was apprenticed to a master homemaker in her childhood, if homemaking is in her blood, then her daughters are in luck but that’s about it. Or if Super Woman managed to fight off her personal household demons hour by carefully scheduled hour, then good for her; she killed her own slothfulness and ignorance with so many silver bullets. Of what use is her packaged system to you? You aren’t going to be working in her house. You knead, scrub, slice, and cry in your own house, and you are smart, strong, and sensitive enough to figure out how to keep that house in order on your terms, to your standards, using your own methods. With every failure you learn, and with every success your household becomes that much better.

Forget all those imposed ideas of Happy Home. Build your own happy home, and do it this way:*

1. Pray for strength, patience, and perspective. And when you want to dump supper directly on the floor and yell, “Good luck eating THAT! I’m going to drink a few mimosas . . .” pray again.
2. Eat. For crying out loud.
3. Take each day as it comes: break what needs breaking, boil what needs boiling, punch what needs punching, and you’ll be fine.
4. Laugh. The exercise of homemaking is really funny, when you stop to think about it. Don’t take the dust balls so personally.
5. Take it one room at a time; you don’t need to have every corner free of monsters in order to get through a day. If your kitchen is out of control, forget the kids’ closets for a year and work on the kitchen. If your laundry room gives you the creeps, forget about the basement and work on the laundry room. Take it easy, and keep your focus. The neglected rooms will still give you fits, but bide your time, examine your methods, establish your criteria, and you’ll get around to rooting out your troubles.
6. Remember that the cheapest option is the best option; i.e. don’t buy new storage bins for all that junk, get rid of the junk. Or go ahead and buy the storage bins. What do I know about it?
7. White vinegar. Wow, that stuff is versatile.

Stakes at the ready, girls—it’s time to kick some homemaking tuckus. Now that my kitchen is secure, I feel like giving some laundry the stink eye. Talk to me in another three years, and I’ll let you know how it all turns out.

*Or don't. Now send me $15.