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Slattern in the city
There’s fun to be had in SOME kitchens, Sweetie. Courtesy montrealsimon.blogspot.com
I don’t claim to have cornered the market on slattern-dom, and I certainly didn’t invent it. I have, however, done my level best to elevate the art form over the past twenty years or so, and as I look back on the cluttered landscape of middling meals, drunken dinner parties and neglected housekeeping that has been my life, it occurs to me that none of this could have been so easily accomplished outside the urban jungle. Let me explain.
First of all, the urban environment is easy on the domestic tippler. Let’s say it’s five o’clock and you and a couple of pals have been having a friendly chat over a bottle of vodka for the past few hours. You realize you were supposed to pick up your kids from soccer practice, but getting behind the wheel is no longer an option. No need to endanger the driving public, disturb your better half or give up your parking space — just call a livery service and send a car to pick them up. After three or four instances of this, most city teens will learn to take a twenty from your purse before leaving the house, store the car service number in their phones and call the ride themselves after waiting around for an hour or so. Kids these days!
Happy Thanksgiving: Embrace the can
Cranberry sauce as God intended
In these, the final precious moments of calm before the storm, I am taking on the ultimate Thanksgiving taboo. And I’m not talking about what happened in the powder room last year after Uncle Fred found the cooking sherry and Vaseline even after I hid them behind the sofa, grotesquely fascinating though that story most certainly is. In this case, the love that dare not speak its name involves your guests and cranberry sauce.
Let’s all just come clean, shall we? Of course we should prefer homemade cranberry sauce, and every year I make some interesting version of it – with apricots and toasted almonds, orange marmalade and Grand Marnier, or some such – which arrives at the table looking festive and appetizing, then sits right there for the entire meal. Eventually some sympathetic soul, usually me, makes a token gesture and takes a spoonful, but let’s be honest, ninety-five percent of the stuff just loiters in the bowl until the meal is over and it’s scraped down the dispose-all.
courtesy freshcutcook.blogspot.com
When it comes to fruity sides, what really moves is the peeling-free, heavily-sugared Ocean Spray from the can. Everybody loves it, and the only real question is whether you prefer a middle slice or the one that comes imprinted with the bottom of the can. I like the end.
So listen, save yourself some trouble this year and just go with the flow. Shove the bag of cranberries in the freezer (they keep forever) and dust off the can opener. The sanity you save may be your own.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Sunday Morning Pancakes: Of buttermilk and hangovers
Has this ever happened to you? It’s Sunday morning and you wake up with a yen for pancakes. Perhaps you overindulged the night before and need a little bulk to face the day. Or maybe you overindulged then picked a fight with your husband and are feeling just a tad guilty. It may even be that your in-laws are visiting and you’d rather cook than discuss the Sunday papers, your “drinking problem” or how you can be such a bitch to their golden boy who is also the perfect husband. Maybe it’s all three, not that I’d know much about that. Anyhoo, whatever the reason, it is safe to say that when we crave pancakes (or white cake, or biscuits, or whatever) it’s best that the monkey be fed. For everyone.
So as I was saying, there you are on Sunday morning, all ready to whip up a batch of the best when you realize the recipe calls for half a cup of buttermilk, which of course you do not have. I for one don’t even know what buttermilk is, nor do I care enough to bother to find out, and I certainly wouldn’t waste valuable cold storage space – space that is required to keep champagne at the ready and at least one bottle of white in reserve – on buttermilk, which only comes in quarts and will have to be located and thrown out in three months after I’ve forgotten all about it and it’s gone rancid and is stinking up the kitchen.
Now I know what you’re thinking – there’s no buttermilk in the instructions on the Aunt Jemima box. I thought we understood each other on the issue of baking mixes by now. Well all I can say is once you’ve had scratch pancakes, which are about the easiest thing in the world to make, you will never go back to the nasty, grainy, plastic ones from the box, no matter how kindly and reassuring the face under the headscarf may be. And I’m not even going to get into buckwheat pancakes. Why in the name of all that’s holy would anyone eat those?
Here’s the good news: there is no need to have buttermilk on hand, or go out searching for it at odd hours while trying to conceal your pajamas under your trench coat, as long as you keep powdered buttermilk on hand. Oh yes, it comes in powdered form, just like the dry milk you use in bread machine recipes. Saco makes it, and there’s even an organic version available from the good folks at Organic Valley. You can order it online, it never goes bad and you keep it in the pantry.
Alternatively, you can substitute either of the following for a cup of buttermilk:
- For each cup of buttermilk, pour a tablespoon of white vinegar or lemon juice into a one-cup measure and fill with milk, then let it sit for ten minutes or so.
- Drop a heaping tablespoon or so of plain yogurt into a one-cup measure and fill with milk. Mix and use immediately.
For those of you who can’t be bothered with any of the above, here’s my no-buttermilk recipe. Although buttermilk pancakes are best, the regular milk version is still head and shoulders above anything from a mix. This recipe is utterly foolproof and goes a long way toward getting those pesky in-laws off your back happily fed on a Sunday morning.
No Panic Pancakes (makes about 10 smallish pancakes)
In a bowl, mix:
- 1 cup all purpose flour (don’t even think about whole wheat)
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon salt
Add:
- 1 beaten egg
- 1 cup milk (whole is best, low fat will do, skim only in an emergency)
- 2 tablespoons vegetable or canola oil (or use melted butter, which I prefer). Almond oil is also nice for a slightly nutty flavor.
Stir until just blended and still a little lumpy, then cook on a hot, oiled griddle as usual.
A note on additives: If you’re adding fruit, and this is important, don’t add it to the batter in the bowl. Instead, sprinkle each pancake with the fruit (or chocolate chips, which are delicious with bananas or strawberries, btw) right after you pour the batter on the griddle, then flip.
And now, for those of you who have hung on to the bitter end, a little John Malkovich to go with your flapjacks.
No. Box. Brownies. EVER!!
I feel about brownies from a mix much the same as Joan Crawford, at least as rendered by Faye Dunaway, did about cheap closet accessories. I loathe them. Ok, OK, I hear you. You’re scratching your head, your brow is furrowed and you say to yourself in a perplexed way, “But I thought she said use a mix for pie crust.”
“It’s HARDER to bake from scratch,” you whine. “What’s up with this crazy bitch anyway? Why can’t she make up her mind?”
It’s all about cost/benefit. Pie crust is hard to make and can easily go wrong, way way wrong. I have found one mix that almost never fails and tastes pretty good, so I use it.
Brownies, however, are a different story. Why? It is ridiculously easy to make de-licious, fudgy brownies if you use my recipe. They always, ALWAYS come out right and they taste infinitely better than that crap in a box, and I don’t care if it’s made with fancy Italian chocolate. Still gross.
I found this recipe in an issue of Ladies Home Journal at Grammie Sue’s house about 25 years ago, and it has never failed me. By happy coincidence, it comes from the queen of all movie stars, and my all time favorite actress, Katharine Hepburn. The magazine featured an interview with her, which explains why I picked it up in the first place, as I was really more of a Spy magazine girl at the time. Oh shit, who am I kidding, on the odd occasions I could get my ass off a barstool, all I ever bothered to read was National Lampoon at that point in my life. Spy was too highbrow. Anyways, what the LHJ interview lacked in dirt on Kate and Spenc-ah, it more than made up for with this fabulous recipe. Hundreds of satisfied dinner guests and half a dozen voluntary sugar comas can’t be wrong!
Hepburn’s Brownies
Melt over low heat:
- 1 stick unsalted butter (1/2 cup)
- 2 squares (or 2 ounces) unsweetened chocolate, best you can find, though Baker’s brand is fine
In a bowl, whisk:
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup sugar
- ½ teaspoon vanilla extract (pure, not that nasty imitation stuff – might as well use a mix if that’s all you’ve got. For variety, you can substitute pure almond extract for the vanilla. Party on!)
Once the butter and chocolate are melted, slowly add the mixture to the egg mixture, whisking all the time. DO NOT just dump the hot chocolate in all at once, no matter how much you want to. You could end up with scrambled eggs.
After that’s mixed, add:
- ¼ cup flour (no more!)
- ¼ tsp salt (do not omit this! Sweetness unbalanced by salt is not worth the calories.)
Stir it until it’s blended, then dump the batter into a greased and floured, square baking dish (8” x 8” or so). Scrape the leftover batter into the pan or into your mouth. At this point do I have to tell you which I’d choose?
Bake at 325 degrees for 30-40 minutes depending on your oven. Mine runs a little hot and I dislike overcooked baked goods, so I do about 30 minutes.
And listen, Christina, if you invite me over for dessert and serve these brownies with walnuts, I can’t be held responsible for my actions. I have been known travel with an axe from time to time. It won’t be you I’m mad at, of course, it’ll be the nuts.
You can make pie, and you should
As mentioned, I feel strongly about pie for cultural reasons. If you can’t make it, find a decent bakery where you can buy one. To my way of thinking there aren’t many. Usually a manufactured crust (the kind you see in the freezer at the grocery store) is a dead giveaway that the product will suck. So is a big blocky rim on the pie or anything that looks like this.
So dry it makes me choke just looking at it.
As I’ve said, making pie crust from a mix is not hard. You just follow the directions on the box and fill the damn thing with fruit, sugar, flour and butter and shove it in the oven. But a few tricks are worth pointing out:
You can mix the dough with a fork. If I’m feeling particularly lazy, and I usually am, I use the electric mixer (for me, the Kitchenaid stand mixer is a gift from God) for about 15 seconds, just until the dough comes together.
Recipes always tell you to chill the dough before rolling it out, but if you leave it in the fridge for more than about 10 minutes it gets too hard to roll. Just saying.
For pumpkin pie, do not, I repeat DO NOT, bake the shell before filling it. That’s just crazy and the rim will burn before the filling is set. Speaking of which, never use anything but canned pumpkin. Fresh pumpkin pie is stringy and dealing with a whole pumpkin is a giant pain in the ass from start (lugging it home, cutting it up, seeding it, removing all that stringy stuff) to finish (Do I have enough puree? Too much? What is all this stringy crap in my pie? Eww). It is always disappointing, especially if you spent a whole freaking day making it when you could have just opened the damned can (always use plain puree and add your own spices, eggs, etc.) and caught up on Project Runway while it baked.
Making a prebaked shell for one crust pie gives me fits. The crusts always collapse or they shrink and become unusable, or the recipe calls for pie weights (what?) or tells you to fill the thing with dried beans while you bake it. Screw that. Just avoid them. Make a graham cracker crust (or use ginger snaps) or chuck the whole project and make brownies instead.
You can crimp the top and bottom crusts with a fork if you must, but I think this looks gross and it always burns because the crust is too thin. Plus the crust bonds with the pie plate and makes it really hard to cut and serve. See?
Ugly, overdone crimped edge. Yuck.
Better to use your thumb to pinch the edge between your index and middle fingers. It’s a tad Martha, but it looks so much nicer and the pieces hold together better. Look.
Nicely crimped and properly vented.
Apple pie: For the love of God, use only Macintosh or Rome apples. Any guest who requests a slice of cheddar for his pie should be asked to leave. Enough said.
Fill ‘er up: Go on, mound the fruit up high. There is nothing worse than a skimpy layer of filling. See top photo.
Lattice top pies: What are you on, crack?
Kitchen Slattern 