Enhanced Cake

I am about to make a nutritious cake.  It would be better to start with an organic cake mix from the food co-op, or even a made from scratch cake from a recipe, but let’s not complicate things.  I have a  spice cake mix.

First of all it calls for three eggs but I will use four.  The 1 and 1/3 cup water will be half milk.  And I will use organic olive oil.

I will mix the batter according to the directions.

To this mixture I will add one fourth cup soy flour.  Another fourth cup flour made from ground hazel nuts.  And I will add chopped peanuts and sunflower seeds.  These two ingredients make a complete protein, in the correct proportions.  I’m not sure what the proportions are but then nobody’s perfect.

I will fold in dehydrated blueberries, raisins, and perhaps other fruits to the batter.  I will bake in a deep, round, oiled pie pan, according to directions.  It will be good, and good for you.  Try it!

getting a buzz

This is another entry in my “I can’t cook” series.

I intended to make rumballs.  These are easy.  They are cookies made out of cookies.  A friend tells me that given the alcohol content, two or three of these will give you a buzz.  Anyway, I started by grinding up a cup and a half of nuts.  The recipe says pecans, which I used in addition to hazelnuts and cashews.  The next ingredient is a cup and a fourth crushed cookies, either shortbread or vanilla wafers.  I used animal crackers.  Add a half cup of powdered sugar and two tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder.  Then add two tablespoons corn syrup and one fourth cup dark rum.  Mix and roll into balls, about one tablspoon per serving.  Garnish with more powdered sugar.

I discovered that I hadn’t really used rum.  I had used brandy, rot gut liquor that barely qualified as brandy.  Actually they tasted pretty good.  And a whole lot less like old fashioned Watkins cough syrup than if I had actually used rum.

Scandinavian cookery

Scandinavian Cookie Recipes

“But Doris, towelled from the bath,
Enters padding on broad feet,
Bringing sal volatile
And a glass of brandy neat”.
T.S. Eliot
(1888-1965)  Poems.  1920

Spoken Norwegian can sound musical and lilting but the
phrase potet klub makes me cringe.    Well, I guess
potet klub sounds just as good as the English word
dumpling.   I wondered whether, when my small, white,
rural Minnesota Lutheran church planned its first
potet klub feed,   Some people might show up not
knowing that one or two dumplings (klubber?) served
with bacon on the side makes the average diner feel
like he/she is going to tip over.  I also questioned
the wisdom of calling it a feed, which brings to mind
faces chowing down at  a trough with no utensils.  But
the advertising was already on its way, and so I
turned my thoughts toward side dishes.  Let the
Norwegians take center stage but perhaps the other
Scandinavian cultures…Swedish, Danish, Finnish and
Icelandic….could be represented by lighter side
dishes:  soup, salad, bread, dessert.  (Have I
mentioned that the batter for potet klub has the heft
and consistency of wet concrete?)  My idea lost
something in the translation and it was printed in the
parish newsletter that the other item on the menu
would be Scandinavian pastries.  The word went out for
volunteer bakers.  Apparently there are five
recognized varieties of cookies:  spritz, krumkaker,
thumbprint cookies, sandbakkels, and fattigmann.
Anyway, those were the choices on the list.  I put my
name under krumkaker.

I was committed, I guess, but I had second thoughts
about krumkaker.  Everyone makes those.  It might be
fun, I thought, to research the subject of
Scandinavian cookies and bake one kind to represent
each country.  I sat down at my computer and typed
Danish cookie recipes into Google.  I found kringle,
fattigmandskager, smørfingre, fruekager, macroner, and
other suspiciously familiar sounding names.  So much
for that.  I tried Swedish cookie recipes.
Fattigmann, sandbakelser,  pepperkakor.   The
Icelandic site admitted that most of the recipes
originated in Denmark but had “acquired Icelandic
citizenship”.   The assurance that every Icelandic
homemaker bakes piparkökur for Christmas parallels the
Swedish claim to these gingerbread cookies with a
pinch of black pepper added.  (Try them with some
smörkrem.  Or try translating this:
Jòlakaka/Tebollur).

The Finnish recipes seemed more promising at first,
but giving myself a short course in basic culinary
Finnish I found a similar set of cookies based on
cream, butter, cardamom, almonds, rum, and ginger.   I
mean, piparkakut?  Talonpoikaskakut?  Finno-ugric and
Nordic languages may be worlds apart but they do
borrow from one another.  And it doesn’t take a
linguistics expert to get a picture of what a pannu
kakku looks like.  What I am trying to say, and saying
it very badly, is that it was impossible to find
recipes that were ethnically unique.

By the time I was through with research, I felt as
weary as though I had already baked and eaten all
these cookies.

Then, a memory from my childhood crept into my
consciousness.  My grandfather took a trip to visit
relatives in Sweden on the maiden voyage of the
Lusitania.  I  have inherited some of the souvenirs
from that trip.  When I was  ten years old, we (my
aunt and my mother and I) baked the cookies that were
made for him as a guest in his relatives’ homes in
Ostergotland.  We laughed and laughed, and vowed never
to make them again.   However, I have to admit those
were about the most delicious morsels I have ever
tasted.

The unique ingredient was hartshorn salt.

The name hartshorn is from a Saxon clan invited to
England by the Angles  to fight the native Picts and
Scots, after the fall of the Roman Empire.  The
hartshorn clan carried deer antlers on a pole as their
tribal emblem.  The historical significance of
hartshorn is that it is not just a deer antler but the
source of ammonia.  Another name for ammonia is
Spirits of Hartshorn.  Or, in other words.  smelling
salts.  Perhaps the early distillers of ammonia from
the scrapings of antlers were regarded as healer or
wizards for they could appear to bring the dead back
to life.  To this day there is a town named Hartshorne
in south Derbyshire, England, established upon the
land given to the Saxons by the local Angles as a
reward for their help.

Those cookies smelled strongly of home hair permanent
while baking.  It was an odor, believe it or not,
worse than lutefisk.   But were those cookies  ever
good!

Another name for the leavening agent is ammonium
bicarbonate, or baker’s ammonia.  And as smelling
salts, sal volatile.  Ammonium bicarbonate was
replaced by sodium bicarbonate in modern times but the
old recipes of many cultures, including Scandinavian,
German, Russian, Sicilian and others mention
“ammonia”, which imparts a unique crispness to the
baked product.

Creative Cooking?

I read somewhere that in these tough economic times one can save money by using ingredients on hand, rather than thinking up a recipe and then going to the store to purchase what we need. I have become better at doing this, and have come up with some unique dishes.

The other niught, I tossed cooked whole wheat penne pasta with ground hazel nuts and poppy seeds. These were topped with a commercial spaghetti sauce and parmesan. It was very good.

The vegetable I cooked was parsnips. I love parsnips, even though my taste is not shared by everyone. They are good cooked half and half with carrots, which are closely related. My New Zealander friend says both vegetables are equally popular in his country.

Parsnips have been grown for centuries, and before the introduction of the potato, were the most popular starchy root vegetable among early settlers to the North American continent, having been brought over from Europe. There are even wild parsnips that escaped from early cultivation. During Lent in medieval times, parsnips substituted for meat, even though they taste nothing like meat. They do have a satisfying, heavy quality. And having been frosted, they are slightly sweet and very delicious. Try them!

booze in my house

I’m not a social drinker. I don’t like the taste of alcohol and I don’t like the way it makes me feel. And since my peers didn’t seem to care much for me when I was young, I never got into the habit of knuckling under to peer pressure.

I do, however, have sherry in my house. I make delicious spiked trifles. I have a bottle of brandy because I intended to make a variety of Southwest cookies, which I never got around to doing.

I love rum balls, for which I need rum. I’ve misplaced the recipe but I think the other ingredients are ground nuts, crumbled up wafer-type cookies, rum, corn syrup, chocolate powder, and powdered sugar. You let the batter stand a while and then roll it into ball shapes, which are dipped in powdered sugar or coconut or whatever you like.

I guess I have to admit these taste just a little like old fashioned Watkins cough syrup.

Depression Era Sandwich Spread

I know these whole wheat buns look like somebody sat on them but that’s beside the point.  The recipe for the filling is from a cookbook gotten from the Jewel Tea man way back when.

The recipe says to mix cream cheese, chopped bell pepper, mayonnaise, and mustard together, perhaps with a bit of chopped parsley.  Spread on sandwiches or buns.

I doubt that those who were seriously challenged in a financial sense could have afforded some of the ingredients.

Tanzanian soup

This is my version of a recipe for Tanzanian soup that was in circulation a few Lents ago in Lutheran churches.  In this area, Lenten services, at least the ones I know about, tend to focus on issues of social justice, world hunger, etc.  One year there were suggested recipes for each of the weeks of Lent, featuring various world cultures.  The idea was to have a soup and sandwich supper and to encourage self examination along with a church service.  The ingredients are rice, beans, fresh tomatoes, onion, garlic, coconut milk, bell pepper, and curry powder (about a half teaspoon).  It is very good and tastes good on a cool fall evening as well as early spring.

Poet and Peasant

The apple crop is good this year.  But there is always the dilemma of what to do with all the apples.  I tried giving them away.  People would take maybe five or ten pounds.  I had better luck selling them.  If I charged, people thought they were better than if I was giving them away.  But selling apples required me to pick them.  And bending overrr or reaching up thousands of times gets old fast.  Last year we made pureed apple sauce.  It is all gone.  In a Girls Scout handbook from the ancient past, I saw a recipe called poet and peasant.  It’s quite simple.  Apples and onions are fried together.  It sounds weird.  But I’m willing to try it.

I love to make summer salads

My garden starts producing greens at about the time that the farmers’ market is in full swing and the stores have an abundance of produce. I make these salads during the winter months, too, but with purchased ingredients from the grocery store. However, there’s something special about growing and harvesting your own, or chatting with neighbors at the market while picking up their specialty and adding a little something to the local economy. I also like to share with relatives, who are extremely generous with me. I wish I were a better gardener so I could give more back. This bowl of greens includes nasturtium blossoms. Other possible green ingredients include arugula, celery, zucchini, cucumbers, bell peppers, and whatever I can find. Protein foods here include cubed sharp cheddar cheese, sliced hardboiled eggs, ground peanuts and sesame seeds (which combine to make a complete protein). New grape tomatoes are sweet and black olives add a salty tang. I make a dressing from olive oil and red wine or balsamic vinegar.

herbs

My herbs have decided to thrive this year. I have, of course, the parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Also, basil, oregano, tarragon, cilantro, chives, dill, mint, and lavender. I am not one hundred percent sure how to use all of these herbs. The most exotic herb I am growing is stevia, the sugarleaf plant.