Baked a cake

That was the main focus of my afternoon after piano lesson today. We're having a departmental lunch tomorrow and I offered to do a cake. And of course, I always enjoy doing stuff from scratch, so I baked a cake from one of my older cookbooks.

It's called "Dinette spice cake." The recipe came from the Betty Crocker Cooking For Two cookbook I have. I have no idea if this book is still in print or not - mine is actually a vintage 1958 copy, the little spiral bound version. I got it from my mom, who somehow wound up with two copies. (I think she said at least one was a wedding gift; I think the big-format one, which she still has, was the wedding gift).

If the book is no longer in print, it should be brought back. It's an excellent "basic" cookbook for people wanting to make small quantities. (And extra fun: it is the one with the somewhat-famous illustrations by Charles Harper, a well-known midcentury artist, who is enjoying sort of a posthumous renaissance right now).

The food in it is fairly plain, but as I've said before: I like plain food. It's the book where I got my recipe for Senate bean soup, it's the book that supplied the brownie recipe that my mother *always* used when my brother and I were growing up. It has good sections on how to do the basic preparations of meat and vegetables, and "how much should I buy for two," and what a small kitchen really needs in the way of tools.

It also has an interesting "recipes from foreign lands" section at the end (some being more authentic than others; the German menu seems to be one of the least spurious-sounding to me. And they classify Hawaii as a "foreign land," well, I guess it kind of was, seeing as the book came out before it was actually a state.)

Anyway, I doubled the "Dinette Cake" recipe, and used the "spice cake" variation of it.



However, one change: the original recipe (for an 8 by 8 pan) called for 1/2 teaspoon of cloves - which would be a whole teaspoon in my doubling. That's way too much cloves! If you had a toothache, it might be good, but otherwise, it would put your mouth to sleep.

So instead, I put in the requested amount of cinnamon (for the doubled recipe) and then just added 1 teaspoon of the Penzey's "Cake Spice" (which has some cloves in it, also cinnamon, nutmeg, and star anise).

It smelled fantastic while baking and came out looking very nice (see above), so I hope it tastes as good as it looks.

(One other change: the order of adding ingredients seemed strange. It told you to mix all the dry ingredients - sugar and flour and leavening and spices - and then mix in the shortening, then add the eggs, and finally add the milk. That seemed to me like it might promise a tough cake (too much mixing once the flour is in is bad), so I defaulted to my standard cake procedure: cream shortening and sugar first, then add eggs and vanilla, then combine the dry ingredients and add alternately with milk. The batter came out very light textured and the cake rose well, so I think I may have made a good decision there.)

I also did the recommended frosting - called "easy penuche frosting." It's reminiscent of a cooked caramel frosting my mother used to make. That took some doing; you have to boil together the butter, brown sugar, and milk, and then wait for-ev-er while it cools (and DO NOT stick a knuckle into the still-hot mixture to test. Sugar syrup burns.)

But I finally got it cooled, beaten with the powdered sugar, and got the cake frosted.



I tried a bit of the leftover frosting and it is extremely sweet. I hope putting a thin layer on top of a fairly plain cake will tone down the sweetness.

(I once said I wasn't crazy about frosting cakes. Part of that is that I'm just not that fond of making frosting, but the other part is most non-fiddly (i.e., not 7-minute boiled) frostings are excessively sweet to my taste. I said that this frosting was reminiscent of a caramel frosting my mother used to make but I do not remember it as being so sweet. Then again, maybe when I was a child, extremely sweet things appealed to me more than they do now).

(Incidentally, I love the seven-minute boiled frosting - I think some people call it "seafoam" but I know that as a boiled frosting made with brown sugar - it is about my favorite frosting but it's such a pain to make, especially with just one person to work on it, so I never do it. My mother used to make a wonderful cake where she'd make a plain white cake, then frost it with the seven minute frosting into which she had added ground-up raisins).

I enjoy baking from scratch but rarely have the time to do it, unless I have somewhere to take the finished product. I think it would be interesting to go back through the various "vintage" cookbooks (I own quite a few and I think my university library has a few) and extract some of the unusual old recipes and bake them up just to see what they're like. And blog on them. (Though the blogosphere being what it is, I'm sure there's already someone out there already cooking their way through vintage cookbooks, probably even more impressively-vintage cookbooks than the ones I own).

And also, there'd be the problem of finding enough people willing to eat up the results, especially for the larger cakes or batches of cookies.

One thing I want to make some time is a recipe called "Bishop's Bread" that is in several of my older cookbooks (I think the Settlement House cookbook has one variation. It's kind of a shortbread sort of thing, with nuts and fruit in it.

I went home for lunch. I had a not-quite ploughman's lunch (not quite because I don't drink beer and I don't think my late-afternoon students would appreciate my having eaten a whole raw onion)

But I did have some cheese. Ilchester smoked applewood cheddar, to be exact.

I do think it is the very best cheese in the world. And I am not alone in that assertion. (N.B.: Again, scantily clad ads. I guess it's a "lad's site.")

The Kroger's in Sherman has a decent cheese counter - some Swiss and German cheeses, some French cheeses, and lots of British or Irish cheeses (it seems to me there's a not-inconsequential expat British population in North Texas).

So I've been expanding my cheese palate. I tend to avoid the French cheese, as it's mostly the veiny kind, and frankly, bleu cheese scares me a little, allergy-wise. (I react badly to miso, I might react badly to the mold in cheese. And yes, that's what makes bleu cheese bleu. Also Stilton. And Maytag.) The German and Swiss cheeses are fine, but my real love is for the various British and Irish cheddars and kins-to-cheddar.

And the Applewood cheese - best ever. None of the bitterness that some cheddars have as an aftertaste, a wonderful smoky flavor redolent of really good bacon (but without the stomach-upsetting properties of bacon for me), a lovely texture. Just good cheese. I don't eat a LOT at a time, but with really good cheese, a small amount is just perfect.

So I had the other serving of egg-and-lemon soup I made this weekend. (One of the easiest soups in the world: you heat up a couple cups of chicken broth, dump in 1/3 cup cooked rice, then while that heats, you beat an egg with a tablespoon of lemon juice until the egg is frothy. The only tricky step is that you have to 'temper' the egg by slowly adding the warm-but-not-boiling soup to it, and being sure to stir well when you add the egg mixture back to the soup. And not let it boil after you've put the egg in). But egg-and-lemon soup is delicious and it's one of the things I tolerate well when my stomach's iffy.

So I had my soup and cheese and an apple and some milk. And I had jam butty for dessert. (I also have a jar of Branston pickle (actually Crosse and Blackwell's is the brand) on the shelf- another hallmark of the ploughman's lunch, but I didn't open it yet; I'm waiting for my tum to be less iffy.)

I like the name "jam butty." It's not anything fancy - just plain old bread (I used some kind of rustic white bread from the store) buttered and with jam spread on it. It's supposedly a common dessert that people in Cornwall and other parts of south Britain ate if they didn't have the funds for a "proper" dessert. But it's good, and probably more nutritious and filling than a lot of desserts are.

I'm also contemplating another food to try when I've got more energy to cook (and my stomach's back 100% to where it should be - my mom and I were talking last week about rutabaga and it occurred to me that I can sub it for carrots in things. (I have a mild food intolerance to carrots - I can eat small amounts, like would be in a serving of Branston pickle, but to eat a normal serving, I'd be kind of in distress the next day). And from there, I was looking at a recipe I have for beef stew (which calls for carrots) and thought how I could sub rutabaga in there.

And then I thought: I could make pasty stew. (no, not pasty like paste, pasty like pasty, the food)

(Incidentally, "pasty" is pronounced "pass-tee," with a short a. Not like the, ahem, burlesque undergarment).

Pasties are one of those things that you might not know if you don't live somewhere with a large Cornish/Welsh population. They are a big thing in the U.P. (it is kind of a mascot of sorts up there).

It's essentially a beef hash inside a pastry crust. Traditionally, the crust is more "strong" and less "short" than pie pastry (these things were carried as lunch by miners), but most people now make something rather like pie crust to wrap them.

They are probably the sort of thing that, badly made, are one of the things that give British cuisine its bad reputation, but I do love them (at least when they're made properly). They're very much a "winter" food.

The "traditional" recipe (according to my family, and of course, isn't the PROPER tradition whatever a person's family did?) uses diced (NOT ground) roast beef, potatoes, some onion (but not too much), salt and pepper, and very importantly, rutabaga.

Oh, there are pasty recipes that claim you can use carrots, but they're not the same. It has to be rutabaga.

So anyway, I thought: I could make a pasty-flavored stew: stew meat is not that far off from the beef you put in pasties. And then potatoes, and onion, and some parsley (some pasty recipes call for it). And rutabagas. And if I wanted to simulate the crust, I could float dumplings on the top. Or even bake rounds of pie paste and set a round on top of the bowl of soup when it was served.

It's an idea I like. (I never make pasties for myself; they seem like too much work. And I'm not very good at making pie paste.)

Pasties were also apparently known as "tiddy oggies." And there's a belief that in Cornwall, some were baked half-and-half - with a meat mixture in half the pasty, and jam or fruit in the other half. That seems unappealing to me; I'd rather go without any kind of dessert-like substance than have gooey fruit juice leak into the meat and potatoes side.

(I also don't like the modern innovation of sweet pasties; that's a pie, not a pasty).

One thing I never talked about on here was getting my order from Penzeys' Spices.

I found out about them through my parents. Back in January (I think it was) my dad started going to a new cardiologist (the one he had had retired). The new cardiologist has some of the same health issues as my dad does, and he suggested to my dad that going on a low-salt diet would help, because it had helped him tremendously.

(One of the things that kind of surprises me is that no one pushed this before - my dad has taken low doses of blood pressure medications for probably 12 years now. I know, they don't think the salt --> high blood pressure connection is quite as tight as they once did, but still)

So my dad decided to try it. Now, some women, upon hearing that, would throw up their hands and go, "That's it. I can't cook for you any more" but my mother is an intelligent, compassionate, and resourceful woman, so she said, "Well, this is going to be a challenge, but let's see what we can do to make good food that's low in salt."

Somehow they found the Penzeys' catalog. Penzeys is a general spice company but one of the things they do is make a number of herb-spice blends that are salt free. (And they very helpfully have a little symbol in their catalog indicating which are). So they ordered a bunch from them and were very happy.

The last couple times I was up visiting I got to try some of the dishes made with the spices and I agreed they were good - some of the blends on offer are "Bavarian Spice" (which is good on pork or turkey cutlets but which I also think would be good in bean soup), "Mural of Flavor" (which is just a good general spice combo - good on vegetables, good on meat, good in soup), and "Tuscan Sunset" (as you might guess, a northern Italian blend).

So I ordered some from them - got some Bavarian Spice and Mural of Flavor to use for myself, plus a few other things.

One of the things I got was the Brady Street cheese sprinkle. Now, this is NOT low-salt, but I figure I've got at least ten more years (maybe more than that, if I take after my mom physiologically) that I can eat salt.

It's advertised as being a simple way to make garlic bread and after using it the way I used it tonight, I think it would make superior garlic bread.

What I did, was take some fresh garden tomatoes, cut them in half, put some Panko breadcrumbs on them, a little olive oil, and then sprinkled the cheese sprinkle over the whole thing. Then I baked them in a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes.

Oh, man, Oh, they were GOOD. They were I'm-going-to-make-that-AGAIN-tomorrow-night good. The cheese sprinkle was the perfect topping.

It's funny, but I tend to be proudest of and happiest with the very simple dishes that I make that turn out well - I'm more pleased when I can take a couple ingredients and one dish and combine them and have something tasty than I am with the big production-dishes where I'm making a separate sauce and stir frying some things and steaming others and I wind up using nearly every pan I own. And I don't think it's just the fact of my having more to clean up afterwards with the production-dishes; I think it's that I see it as fundamentally more of a challenge to do something good out of a few ingredients - that something good and simple is more difficult to achieve than something good and complex.

The Penzeys' catalog is fun to look at. Or at least fun if you're a cook like me who likes to have all kinds of different seasonings on hand. (Seriously - I do not have a spice "rack," I have a spice "shelf" and even then they don't all fit on the cabinet shelf I have designated for them). There's so much different stuff, some of it stuff (like some of the Asian and Indian spices) that I've never even heard of, much less eaten. And the blends are interesting (and of the ones I've tried, good).

They also have a few other things. Like Raspberry Enlightenment, which has the most wonderfully redonkulous label ever.

Wait a minute...I can show you.



1968 called! They want their graphic design back!

(Wow, it was hard to get a clear photo. If you can't read that, it says "Turn on your food" Hahahahahaha. I wonder how many people of my generation are really familiar with that meaning of "turn on" - not "turn on" as in "turn against" [though if some of the anti-obesity crusaders had their way, we probably would be turned against many foods]. I also like the "sorceress" on the label.)

Seriously, this sounds like a good product, all irony aside. It supposedly can be used to make a raspberry vinaigrette dressing, or, with different ingredients, a not-too-sweet sauce for ice cream. And that idea intrigues me - that it's so widely useful. (Raspberry vinaigrette is my favorite salad dressing but it can be hard to find one that's not too vinegary). I'm also thinking it might be a good base for a marinade for chicken or even shrimp.

I just generally enjoy cooking - I especially enjoy trying new things and making up my own recipes, so it's nice to have another source of seasonings. And as I've said many times before, I LOVE mail-ordering stuff, I love being able to look forward to something coming for me in the mail, I love being able to get stuff I need without having to drive all over Creation to find it. So Penzeys' is a place I'm keeping in my bookmarks (tho' I guess I will be getting their print catalog now as well, which is also nice, because they put recipes in it). And it makes me happy that they exist.

When I was a kid, a new food product came out. It was a truly amazing thing and something my brother and I (mostly unsuccessfully) begged for at the store.

Magic Shell.

For those of you outside the culinary influences of the U.S., or who come from stricter food backgrounds than I (as I said, we mostly unsuccessfully begged for it, but sometimes we got it. And one of my grandmas would buy it for us), Magic Shell is an ice cream topping that, kind of the reverse of hot fudge (which melts the ice cream on contact), hardens upon contact with ice cream.

I was thinking about it not too long ago, and contemplating what kind of horrific esterified trans fats must have been in it to make it behave that way - some kind of lipid that is an oil at room temperature, but not too far below it, hardens into a solid-like substance.

Well, it turns out it's not some kind of lab-created thing, and although it's saturated fat, it's apparently not trans: it's coconut oil.

here is a recipe for your very own, homemade version of Magic Shell.

I will admit, I'd probably not eat this today - I remember, as I hit adolescence, Magic Shell seemed to lose something - there was the oddly slimy mouthfeel and (as the foodblogger notes) that weird, slightly artificial flavor imparted by the coconut oil. These days I'd probably be more likely to either melt some chocolate with butter and milk and make a sort of hot fudge mix, or buy a decent brand of hot fudge (most of the grocery-store ones, though, rely too heavily on corn syrup for their sweetness, and yes, I can taste a difference).

But maybe some of you might like to make this for your kids. Or maybe you aren't bothered by the feel of coconut oil in your food.

Thank you all for the kind comments on my post about the whole "but is it ART?" thing.

Again, I think part of the crux of the problem - both in terms of how I feel about what I do craft-wise and what I do research and teaching-wise, is that I'm surrounded by so many talented people that I begin to feel kind of second-best.

But anyway. I cleaned my house this evening and that helped (both the simple activity and the fact that my house is now clean).

*****

I have a lot of cookbooks. I've been accumulating cookbooks for many, many years. (Most of them were purchased in the last 10 years or so).

But I've had some since I was a child.



These are the first two cookbooks I ever had. (I think I also had a cookbook put out by - was it "Humpty Dumpty"? One of the children's magazines? But I don't have that one any more).

The Winnie-the-Pooh cookbook was given to me in 1974 - there's an inscription from the friends of my family who gave it to me for Christmas. (So, I've had the book longer than some of you lot reading this have been alive.)

The Mickey Mouse cookbook was bought for me by my dad...I think I remember him getting it at "Best" (it was one of those warehouse-showroom type places: they'd have like one appliance or one tv out on the sales floor, and you had the salesman fill out a tag for you, and then you went and picked it up...they also did have some things, like books, just out for sale. I remember "Best" best because they had that lady-in-the-rain lamp. Those of you of a certain age (were around in the 70s) might remember those - a lady, vaguely Greek-statue in style, in the center of a sort of column. There were these "tracks" of nylon filament around the outside and it looked like raindrops ran down them. I was always intrigued by those but also secretly thought they were a little tacky. I'm not describing it very well but I don't know the real name so I can't search for a picture. But they were pretty ubiquitous 30 or more years ago, and not very long ago I saw one in a steakhouse in Iowa.)

Anyway, he bought the book for me because I liked to cook.

I liked to cook because my mom liked to cook. And when I expressed a desire for an "Easy Bake" oven, she asked me if I wouldn't rather learn to use the real oven.

So I did.

The Mickey Mouse cookbook looks, well, a little Mickey Mouse, but it's got some halfway decent basic recipes. Unlike some "beginner's" cookbooks, there's very little reliance on mixes or pre-prepared things. It actually could teach a kid to cook.

And I still like and still use the recipe for oven-fried chicken sometimes.



One thing I like about the book - and realize now as an adult was a good teaching-thing - is that a lot of the basic recipes come with a bunch of different variations. Like, different things you can add to pancakes or to salad or different ways of preparing cupcakes, as shown here. (Of course, there's the gimmick that each "variation" is tied to a character: hence, the seven dwarfs have seven varieties of cupcakes, one for each dwarf.)

Another thing that I realize is perhaps a bit unusual for a cookbook - even in the 70s and maybe especially for a Disney-themed cookbook - is that male characters are shown cooking in roughly equal proportions to female. So, Robin Hood has his recipes, just as Maid Marian does.

And some of the recipes are just kind of endearing.



This is one of my favorites: Piglet's Pizza Muffins. (We made these a lot when I was a kid. I do them a little differently now, one big change being that it's best to toast the muffins a bit first).

But the caption or "blurb" at the top of the recipe was endearing to me as a child: "Something like this can be awfully cheering when you're feeling Very Small and rather sad about it." Of course! Very Small Pizzas for a Very Small Animal.

There are a few odd things about the book. I always found this picture unsettling:



How did Donald get long hair? Why is it that weird auburn color? This picture kind of disturbed me as a child. (And I think now: Why not show one of the Princesses tying back her own hair, or getting a ladies' maid to help her? Or, for that matter, why not Captain Hook? He had long hair naturally.

Donald here just looks like some very weird hippie duck.

The Pooh cookbook is less photogenic - basically, it's recipes with reproductions of Shephard's line drawings from the original books, and quotations that more or less fit the recipes. I also used the book less as a child - the recipes were fussier, and often called for ingredients (like radishes) that I did not like.

I think the book was published here, but many of the recipes have a British feel - the cookies are less sweet and gooey, they are more dry and "biscuit" (in the British sense) like. And there are recipes for cucumber sandwiches and other things like that.

I do plan sometime to try the pea-bean soup in the book (now that I've established that as an adult, I like beans in pretty much any form; I would only eat green beans, and then grudgingly, as a child). I'd also like to try Cottleston Pie, which is basically a quiche (but with a less-rich crust), but it serves 8 so I'm trying to figure out how to halve it and what kind of size pan I'd need to use.

So, these are the books I learned to cook from (with help and guidance from my mother, of course). I've always liked cooking - I suppose that's because my mother did. I think you can get turned off of doing something if you have a parent or other role model who doesn't like it or doesn't value it - or maybe not totally turned off, but I think you're less likely to take to it.

And it helped to have fun books as a child. I baked the cake in the Disney book a lot - upon reflection, my mother was quite indulgent to let me use the kitchen (usually making a mess in the process) as much as I did. In the Disney book, on the page with the cake recipe, I have written in my childish hand the substitution you make if you don't have cake flour and have to use regular flour instead. (I thought I had also written "start with flour, end with flour" which was another piece of cake-baking advice I learned early on - when you add the flour and liquid alternately - but I guess I never wrote that down).

Yummy!

This isn't so much a recipe, as it's a general idea.

The other night, I made Scalloped Tomatoes for One (which would also serve Two if you ate it as a side dish rather than a main dish). It took four small heirloom tomatoes (three Arkansas Traveler and one of some yellow variety I forget the name of...they were the ones I had ripe at the time. I had to cut part of one of the Arkansas Travelers off because a bird decided to investigate the tomato and left a peck-hole in it. With maybe five to six intact tomatoes, you could make two separate servings).

First, you dip the tomatoes in boiling water for 30 seconds and then slip the skins off (I never believed this would work so well until I tried it - it really does work amazingly well).

Then, cut the tomatoes into 1/4" to 1/2" thick slices. Get a small ramekin or other ovenproof dish. (The one I used is maybe 3" across and 2" deep). I didn't grease it and it didn't seem to need it.

Then, you take some Panko breadcrumbs, some butter (or nondairy substitute if you want to make this vegan). Layer tomatoes, breadcrumbs, butter, and sprinkle each layer gently with salt and white pepper. (Don't use very much butter; I think I only put it on two of the three layers of breadcrumbs and even then only a little.)

Keep layering until you use up the tomatoes or the ramekin fills up. If you want, put a little cheese over the top.* I used some white cheddar I had left over.

Put it in a preheated 350* oven for between 15 and 20 minutes. I like this better than the "typical" scallop, which uses toasted bread (and many of the recipes add milk, which makes sort of a runny mess.)

(*Or non-dairy vegan equivalent. If it's a cheese or non-cheese that burns easily, you might wait until the tomatoes are half-baked before adding it).

You might be able to do this with some other veggies - possibly eggplant (as long as you soak it in salt water first to draw out the bitter), maybe summer squash.

But it was yummy with tomatoes.

I did a couple of things already this weekend. (Well, I also mowed the lawn, and changed my clothes -it's very humid here - and went grocery shopping and then swept up the pecan catkins that have fallen all over everything, and changed my clothes again, and changed the air filter in my house).

I also made baked pretzels:



The recipe is from that bread book I was talking about earlier.

They didn't get as brown as I anticipated but they are done through. (Maybe they overcooked them for the photo in the book, or something.) These are just baked, not boiled first (like typical soft pretzels are, or at least typical American soft pretzels - I don't know about the authentic German way of making them).

You glaze them with water with salt and a tiny bit of sugar dissolved in it to (try) to make the sea salt stick. I think if I do them again I'm going to cut back on the salt in the glaze, or leave the sea salt off altogether (it doesn't stick very well) - they come out extremely salty (or at least extremely salty for my taste; I tend to like things much less salty than most people).But they are good, nice and chewy - the recipe has a little rye flour in it.

Maybe the saltiness is because they are described (in the book) as being typically served with beer. Maybe all that salt is to get you to drink more beer, or maybe the salt stuff just tastes better with a beer on the side. I'm not a beer drinker so I don't know...

I had forgotten how good it feels to knead bread. (I had mostly been making stuff in my bread machine). It's a very "centering" kind of motion - it's repetitive and uses a lot of muscles, and it also seems to me that it's something you almost have a "genetic memory" of - my mother bakes bread and her mother baked bread and her mother before her baked bread - probably back all the way to a point where either the families didn't have a means of cooking bread (and let the village baker do it) or back to some tribal state where kneaded bread wasn't a common foodstuff.

Kneading feels like a very ancient motion to me. It's kind of like knitting in its way. I think I want to make more bread this summer. It's enjoyable* and the bread that results is a lot better than store bread.

(*I was going to say "it's fun" but it's really more than that - it's satisfying, and kind of self-reassuring in a way - like, "if you know how to bake bread you will be able to take care of yourself, no matter what happens.")

I also finished another wee amigurumi. This is the smallest one I've ever made, and if I do say so myself, one of the cutest:



It's the Tiny Striped Turtle! (The name of mine is Tessa). If you want one of your own, you can find the pattern at Crochetville; it's written by someone with the screen-name KristieMN.

Tessa is sitting on my newest bookcase, the one that houses (some of) my collection of mystery novels. She's about 3" long by 2" tall and is made out of small bits of two colors of wool-ease.

Here's another picture, showing just how adorably tiny she is:



I'm really tickled with how she came out.

And a couple of comment responses:

Jennifer, I think the red wasps are just predators and not parasitoids (it would be cooler if they were parasitoids). I've seen them carrying off caterpillars before (actually tomato hornworms so I wasn't too upset about that!) I'm hopeful the caterpillars may make it to pupa stage because the dill hasn't flowered yet, and it's often the flowers that seem to attract the red wasps (and it strikes me that I could cut the flowering heads off before they got started to help prevent that). I also haven't seen as many of the wasps right now; I think it's because it's such a wet year.

I also looked up the hungry hungry hippos game - the colors are pink, yellow, orange, and green, as dragonkitter said (I was remembering a blue hippo but it seems there are only four in the game). I might make myself a hippo off of that pattern I linked to...I think I have some yellow yarn that's not too far off of Hungry Hungry Hippo yellow. (I'd really like to make an orange one but I haven't any sherbet-orange yarn and I don't feel like venturing out to try to find some).

I'm really digging making all the knitted and crocheted toys. Part of it is that it's nearly instant gratification - things work up so fast. But there's also something - I'm not quite sure what it is - the satisfaction of making something that's kind of sculptural and 3-D - about it that pleases me.

I have yarn ahead to do another one of those monsters. I think Olaf needs a sister or maybe a cousin. (I think this one I'm going to make more true to pattern, and give just one big eye and do the funny embroidered mouth-with-teeth).

I did up through the armhole decreases on the back of the Kenobi jacket last night. Couldn't quite bring myself to stay up to finish the back.

I also have been working on another pair of socks - using the Lichen Ribbed Sock pattern from "Vintage Knitting Socks." I'm using a Steinbach Wolle sportweight (because they're 60 st socks, and from experience, 60-st socks are NOT big enough for me when made out of sockweight yarn. I've done the heel turn on them - it's called a "Welsh heel" and I've never seen it before.

It's kind of weird.

I'm not sure I'd use it again. It involves four decrease points on the flap, and has yarnovers at the start of each row (which, yes, leave small holes...just one of the reasons I tend to avoid the true shortrow (non-flapped) heel is because of the funky little holes*).

(*And yes, I know there are techniques that allow one to do an "hourglass" or "no-flap" shortrow heel without the holes. But those kinds of heels fit my foot badly so that's the real reason I don't use them. Which is also why I've never done toe-up socks; most of the patterns I've seen have that kind of heel. And I tend to feel: why make socks if they're going to fit you imperfectly?)

The Welsh heel is also "not perfectly smooth" (as even the original Weldon's instructions indicated). I think I like the v-heel or the French heel that I typically use better.

Still, it's kind of fun to try different ways of doing things, and the 3x1 rib looks good with the stripe pattern of the yarn. (it is an odd combination of colors: blue-grey, yellow, pale green, pink, and sort of a light reddish brown.)

****

And speaking of veggie cooking and cookbooks: another cookbook I've been looking at is called the "More with Less" cookbook. This is one I "liberated" from my mother's cookbook collection (well, actually, she GAVE it to me...she saw me looking at it one day and said, "I never make anything from that any more, would you like it?"). It's a cookbook produced by a Mennonite group. I tend to respect the Mennonites because they are a group (or at least the individual Mennonites I have known) who tend to really THINK about their convictions and whether the way they live their lives is bearing those convictions out...they are concerned about hunger and justice and the impact they are having on the environment. Hence, there are a lot of vegetarian recipes in the book, and also a lot of recipes that are fairly economical.

The main reason I wanted the cookbook is that it has a bunch of good looking granola recipes in it (and even a recipe for homemade Grape Nuts). There are also a lot of homemade breads. But it also has many good vegetarian recipes, and a few recipes from other nations (There's an East Indian Vegetarian dinner menu, for example).

There are some things I don't agree with, for example, the argument that one person makes that essentially boils down to "cake is sinful because it doesn't really add food value to the diet but still costs resources" but most of the stuff, I can get behind.

And there are also soap recipes in there, and a simple paste recipe to use for children (it has oil of cloves in it as a preservative...I think THAT is probably the evocative paste-smell I remember from my childhood).

I wish I had more time to bake bread and stuff. But when you get home at 4 pm (or even later some days) and need to be in bed by 9 in order to get enough sleep, and you also have to fit the time to cook dinner in there, it's hard.

I didn't really do anything yesterday - other than teach, go to W.'s funeral, and go to the last German class.

So today I'm going to talk about one of the cookbooks I own.

I enjoy cookbooks. I have a huge number of them and I'm always on the lookout for more. Many of my cookbooks are older or "vintage" - I think I said somewhere that one of my minor life goals was to collect a complete set of the 1960s "Farm Journal" cookbooks. (And the Farm Journal County Fair cookbook is pretty much my go-to book for basic baked goods).

But I've been looking again at one I bought, I think, shortly after I bought my house.

It's a version of the The Settlement Cookbook. It's a book my mom had and used a lot and seemed to be a good "basic" cookbook.

(Yes, it's subtitled - and even my more modern version is - "The Way to a Man's Heart," which I openly admit I find oogy. But it's a good cookbook).

It was written by volunteers at the Settlement House in Milwaukee. Settlement Houses were aimed at helping new immigrants assimilate. Because of the populace (I presume) that the Milwaukee Settlement House served, the cookbook has a lot of German, Eastern European, and Eastern European Jewish dishes in it. (or those choices may partly reflect the ethnicities of the women who compiled it - note the names on the title page of the old edition. By the time my edition was printed, only Mrs. Kander's name was still being used). (More on the Milwaukee Settlement House. And I think it's interesting how the investment of Mrs. Kander and her friends paid off - the men who ran the Settlement House wouldn't give them the $18 needed for the printing, but they managed, and the proceeds from the book wound up funding a community center.)

It's amazingly full of recipes. For example, there are some 20 different types of pancakes - from buttermilk hotcakes to crepes Suzette to Dutch babies to pancakes made with matzo meal.

There are very simple recipes - aimed at new cooks, or perhaps at women who know well how to cook but are living under "reduced circumstances" and who would find it overwhelming to try to cook as they had before they left the Old Country.

But there are also very complex, advanced, and rather obscure recipes. I particularly love the sections on cakes and pastries. There's a recipe for Dobos Torte (which anyone who's received the Swiss Colony catalog has probably seen - except I bet the homemade variety is a lot better). There's something called Himmel Torte that I'd love to try making, if I could only find the 7" by 11" pans it calls for: three layers of what is basically a sponge cake, topped by a merengue of whipped egg whites mixed with spices and nuts, then, when the layers cool each is topped with raspberry jam and a sort of creme Anglaise (the recipe is on that "more about the Settlement House" page I linked to above)

Many of those recipes are far more complex than most people would make today. I'd like to try some of them just to see what they're like, but also to say I made them. (Perhaps, if reading a novel "allows the characters to live" for a period of time while you are reading it, making a recipe from an old cookbook allows it to "live"?)

There's also several chapters on preserving food - there are instructions on how to pickle just about any vegetable out there: beets, and radishes, and cabbage, and it tells how to make mustard pickle and picalilli. And there are three recipes for pickled green beans: plain pickled beans, dilled beans, and "sweet" pickled beans ("sweet" not so much in the sense of there being sugar in the recipe, but to set it apart from the dilled beans. The Sweet beans have a cinnamon stick and cloves mixed in the brine. If I get a good yield of beans from the garden this year I may try making those).

There are also lots of basic instructions. I think a while back (maybe even a whole year!) I was ranting about the dumbing-down of cooking - of the way some manufacturers or publishers were figuring no one knew what "cream" or "braise" meant any more and so were dropping those words from recipes. Well, right in the front of the Settlement Cookbook there is a glossary - aimed, I suppose, both at new cooks who don't know the lingo as well as experienced cooks who may just be learning English.

There are also "practical" chapters with advice on feeding babies (some of that may be out of date: I'm not sure I'd want to give a young baby tomato dishes, both because of the potential for developing allergies as well as the potential for the acidity causing diaper rash), cooking for people on bland, liquid, or other restricted diets.

There are also lots of meatless recipes: I do not know if that was a legacy of one of the World Wars, or if some of the Settlement House folks came from cultures with larger vegetarian populations (I mean, pre-1970s or so) than the U.S., or if it was part of the idea of having kosher recipes - that way, if you had a meatless soup you could incorporate it into a "milk" meal. But there are quite a few (well, some of them use chicken stock but you could always sub veggie stock). There's a black bean soup among the meatless recipes I want to try.

There are also, scattered through the book, recipes using matzo meal, or recipes designated as being OK for Passover (there's also a Passover dinner menu, complete with a recipe for haroset, at the beginning of the book, in the menu section). I wonder how many other "general" cookbooks have that?

I love looking through the book because it has so many recipes that I haven't seen anywhere else. They have, for example, an entire chapter on sandwiches you can make - ideas for making "salads" of leftover meat, or ways you can combine cheese and other foods, or even vegetable-based sandwiches.

And there are wonderful "named" recipes. If I have one complaint about the book, it is that the recipes that have an evocative name have no commentary explaining that name. For example, there is a "Milwaukee sandwich" (chicken and Roquefort cheese, served hot with parsley) but no indication of why it is so called. So for things like the Bishop's bread and the Shrewsbury cakes, you have to look elsewhere if you want them explained (and I do. I like to know why a recipe is called what it is. I like to know, for example, if some recipe goes back to the 1600s or something. It makes it more interesting to me.) That said - if they explained all the recipes there probably wouldn't be room for so many, so I'm willing to forgo the explanations.

There are also chapters on "how to do" things - even including things like "how to light a coal stove" and "how to pasturize raw cow's milk." (I think there are also instructions on how to purify water for drinking and make simple soap).

The edition of the book I have was printed in 1965; the most recent "edition" date given is 1954. But in the introduction the editor comments that the older recipes have been left in, and the information on how to do things (like build a campfire and light a coal stove) have been retained - because, the editor realized rightly - they are hard to find elsewhere. (And I am happy of that. I may never need to know how to make soap, but if I did, it is important to have the instructions. And, I would observe, important to have them in book form: if I am HAVING to make my own lye soap as a survival-type thing, doubtless the Internet - and very possibly electricity - would not be available). (I wonder if the most recent edition of the book has retained that information. I hope so.)

I don't really keep a list of "desert island" books - for one thing, it's too hard for me to decide - and for another, I guess, I tend to go very practical and say, "I'd like a book on edible vs. poisonous plants of the place where I was going to be stranded, and maybe a book on boat-building, and maybe one on navigating by starlight." But I do think this book would make the cut - both for the practical information but also for the wealth of recipes that I could read, and dream about cooking once I got back to civilization.

(Incidentally, if you are interested in cookbooks, Feeding America is worth a visit - it has scans of historic cookbooks and links to old recipes from the Detroit Free Press, and a video tour of cooking-related collections.)

the recipe I'm going to try out tonight. Mmm, crab and portobellos....