Nancy Drew Too » recipes

April is National Poetry Month

Natasha — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:37:53 +0000

I just realized this is National Poetry Month.

Favorite poets, anyone? My favorite is Mary Oliver. She captures the essence of nature and life so beautifully, so simply. I could stick one of her poems here (like anything from Why I Wake Early for example), but decided instead to share one of my own poems.

A couple of years ago I took a poetry course and had to write poems in the rule-driven structure of a particular form: ghazal, aubade, sestina. (Yeah, look them up. I didn’t know what they were, either. I majored in psych.) It was fun in a puzzle sort of way, but I certainly did not produce any literary gems.

I thought I would share the sonnet I wrote back then in honor of the fabulous Orange Oat scones I made this morning (thank you Dayner for your excellent blog recommendation of 101 Cookbooks). I used soy margarine instead of the half pound of butter (!) in the original recipe, almond milk instead of buttermilk and dried cranberries and apricots instead of currants. The 10 minutes and minor chunks of skin it took to zest an entire orange were worth it — added enough flavor that the butter was barely missed at all.

So here’s my sonnet:

Sonnet for a Carbohydrate
(with apologies to Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Loaves of bread arranged in rows
From country white to whole grain wheat.
The scent of baking fills one’s nose;
the air hangs heavy with wood hearth heat.
Baskets filled with muffins, bars,
and in the Vulcan, brownies bake.
Shimmering jellies shine in jars
near racks of tortes and chocolate cake.
Congo squares, Boston cream pie;
Oatmeal raisin, snicker-doodles.
For me to shrug would be a lie:
I love them all, I love them oodles.
Mon dieu! Oy vay! – Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the carbs too beautiful this year.

In an attempt to be ‘fair and balanced’…

Natasha — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:13:58 +0000

…I thought I’d post this picture of the seitan I made and wrote about a couple of weeks ago.

I wanted to show that delicious, healthy food can look just as unappetizing as the artery-clogger I posted on Friday. This is my seitan, right before getting sliced and tossed into a yummy stir-fry. Sorta like skinless chicken breasts, which also look pretty nasty, especially to chickens.

If anyone is interested in the recipe, leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll write it out for you. I combined a bunch of recipes, added some ingredients, forgot to add some others, and it came out great.

I do have a couple of southern vegan/vegetarian cookbooks: Cookin’ Southern Vegetarian Style and a really neat split cookbook: Hot Damn and Hell Yeah/The Dirty South Cookbook. They are both filled with tasty recipes. Big Bubba Tofu in the Trailer Park Specials section is living proof that grease and salt are not just the provenance of the meat and potatoes set.

But Southern cooking is a lot more than barbequed rodents and chicken-fried tofu. If you drive along a country road in the south you’ll pass cotton fields, tobacco barns, then a Free Will Baptist church. More cotton fields, then the Pentecostal church. Tobacco and another Baptist. And so on.

Southern cooking is covered-dish lunches and suppers at these little country churches. (I know, it’s not just a Southern thang, but since we’re here….)

I got to experience real Southern cooking and hospitality during the middle of NaNoWriMo. It was a glorious clear, warm fall day and my little church choir drove a couple of hours to sing at a tiny Universalist Church that was celebrating its 125 years as “an oasis of liberalism in a desert of orthodoxy.”

What an understatement. In the church foyer, looking like the Smith Bros. cough drop box, hung two pictures of the founding ministers, side by bearded side. One had served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, while the other had fought for the Union, indicating from the get-go “the congregation’s willingness to embrace diversity of opinion and outlook.”

After the service, we went out back where picnic tables were piled high with the most amazing assortment of dishes: fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, fried okra, fried tomatoes, succotash, Crowder peas, baked beans, mashed potatoes, hush puppies, fruit salad, collards, green beans, ham, cornbread, biscuits and gravy, all waiting to be washed down with big pitchers of sweet tea.

While we ate, the kids played hide and seek in the ancient church graveyard next to the picnic tables. Birds sang, the sun shone, leaves rustled in the breeze. Time was…timeless.

Then we moved on to the dessert table, and Lordy, Lordy!! Pecan pie, chocolate pecan pie, red devil cake, lemon squares, cherry pie, chocolate cream pie.

Yeah, I had two slices of the made-from-scratch 7-Up pound cake. It was awesome.

And that is Southern cooking. Enjoy, y’all.

The Tao of Dog Poop — plus a yummy cookie recipe (I know, they really should be separate posts)

Natasha — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:24:23 +0000

I don’t have anything brilliant to say this morning (for a change) and so I thought I’d share one of my favorite recipes with you — even though it’s NOT what I’m eating right now. Right now I’m eating an apple/cranberry/whole wheat/oat scone fresh out of the oven. Yum. Maybe I’ll write up the recipe for those and share it some other day when I don’t have anything brilliant to say.

This is NOT a picture of my own personal cookies, btw. I tried a little food photography last week when I made my own seitan. I left the pics on the digital camera and forgot about them. A couple of days later, A. was downloading pics to his computer and I heard him say in a very strange voice: “What the hell is that?” For a second there, he thought I had gone stark raving mad and plated some dog poop to photograph.

I may be crazy, but not that crazy. I don’t think so, at least. Not yet.

For the record, A. didn’t like the seitan, either.

I think there’s more to food photography than simply pointing and shooting. Perhaps there’s more to writing than simply sitting down and pushing your fingers against the keyboard as well.

Ya think? Practice, practice, and more practice. Then stand back and have someone else look at it. If your picture — or story or poem — makes someone think of dog poop, it might suggest that more practice is in order. Unless dog poop was your initial intent, in which case I have no suggestions.

Anyway, I took these cookies somewhere last week and a bunch of people actually asked me for the recipe, so here it is. It is my go-to quasi-healthy cookie recipe, and I sometimes substitute raisins and nuts for chocolate chips and cranberries. Orange extract instead of vanilla is nice sometimes. This would be lovely with macadamia nuts and white chocolate chips, I think. You can use an egg instead of the flax seed meal/water combo, but flax seed meal adds a nice nuttiness to this kind of cookie, along with some fiber and less of whatever it is that eggs have that’s bad for you.

Bon appetit!

**
Cranberry Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies – Vegan

Makes 2 to 3 dozen cookies, depending on size

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour or whole wheat flour (I use a mixture of unbleached white flour and whole wheat flour)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 cup Earth Balance or other vegan margarine
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon flax seed meal mixed with 3 tablespoons warm water (substitute for 1 egg)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 3/4 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
¾ cup dried cranberries
¾ cup semi-sweet chocolate chips (Ghirardelli semi-sweet is vegan)
fresh ground black pepper (about ½ teaspoon)

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Into a small bowl sift together flour, cinnamon, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg. In a large bowl with an electric mixer beat together margarine and sugars until light and fluffy. Throw a couple of good healthy twists from a pepper grinder into the mix. Beat in egg/egg substitute and vanilla and stir in flour mixture, oats, cranberries, and chocolate chips until combined well.

Arrange rounded tablespoons of dough about 3 inches apart on ungreased baking sheets and with moistened fingers flatten mounds into 3-inch rounds. Bake cookies in batches in middle of oven until golden, 10 to 12 minutes. Cool cookies on sheets 1 minute and transfer with a metal spatula to racks to cool completely. Cookies keep in an airtight container at room temperature 5 days (maybe — they’ve never lasted that long!) I usually freeze some in a zip-lock bag and they are pretty good thawed out, but not the same as fresh from the oven.

Vegan Cookies Invade My Cookie Jar Again

Natasha — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:25:37 +0000

Back in December, I wrote about getting a new cookbook, Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I said I would let you know what I thought after trying out some of the recipes for Christmas. Today seems like the day, since some of my writing buddies are lusting after Dunkin Donuts AND I made the Banana Oatmeal Breakfast Cookies this morning. Now, if I were Shaddy, I would accompany this post with lovely photos of my baked goods. But I’m not, so I’ll just go with words.
I’ll start with the Banana Oatmeal things, which for purely aesthetic reasons I shaped into scones rather than big lumps. They are good for breakfast, filled with bananas, whole wheat, oats, nuts, dried cranberries, etc. They’re sweetened with brown rice syrup and agave nectar, so none of that sugar high (that’s a good thing, right??), which makes them pretty expensive as well as pretty healthy. Alas, no multi-colored jimmies (that’s New England for sprinkles) on top, though. I’ll probably make them again. The recipe made a ton and I froze most of them. But they weren’t as much fun as the Christmas goodies.

As for the Christmas goodies: I made Chocolate Chip Chai Spice Shortbread, which were slightly better in theory than in practice. I think I sliced them too thick, and I also think my cardamon is too old. I also don’t think I’ll make them again, but they definitely weren’t bad. There are just too many other things to bake!

The Chocolate-Bottom Macaroon Cookies were a HUGE hit. Yummy, like baked Mounds bars. Only change I would make next time would be to double the almond extract. Kitchen Sink Chocolate Biscotti might not have a glamorous name, but they were super-delicious. I used dried cranberries, dried mango, and walnuts as my add-ins to a very deep, rich dark chocolate batter. Another keeper. Finally, Roll-and-Cut Sugar Cookies. These were also wonderful, especially with some Demerrara sugar sprinkled on top of each. I have a huge collection of cookie cutters and I tried to use most of them for these!

For years, my holiday baking involved massive amounts of butter, eggs, sugar, all that yummy stuff. But it is possible to make completely delicious goodies without most of that. Of course, I also made a big batch of pralines for some of my family — crammed with butter, brown sugar, white sugar, cream, pecans.

That’s it! One thing about finding recipes on the Internet, which I usually do, is that when I revert to a cookbook, I don’t have the 300 reviews that give me some idea of whether or not the recipe is worth trying. So if anyone reading this wonders whether this cookbook is worth buying, I say yes. I also recommend the recipes I tried. Let me know if you’ve tried anything else from it — I might try it on my next baking run!