Category Archives: bread

Spicy hot cocoa bread with cream glaze

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hot cocoa cake

hot cocoa cake

As you probably know by now if you’re following along at home, I’m a waitress. The interesting thing about being a waitress is that it’s not interesting at all. I come home from my work and want to talk about my day, but there’s not much to tell, really. I could relate a few gossipy stories about my co-workers, and I could tell endless stories about how perplexingly rude people can be, but nobody wants to hear that. So why am I talking about it now? Well, I just thought you’d want to hear about everybody I waited on yesterday, and exactly what they ordered. Settle in, it’ll be a long list! I’m kidding, of course, but the truth of the matter is that waiting tables can be quite poignant sometimes. As a server, you’re addressing a very basic human need, you’re watching people eat and interact with each other, and depending on your mood, people can seem wonderful, foolish, or even vaguely disheartening. Sometimes the smallest gesture can seem so beautiful and sweet. Yesterday I waited on a woman and her nearly grown son, just the two of them. I’d like to think I’ll go out with my sons someday. (And the boy paid, which, undoubtedly my boys will be doing, because I’m just a waitress, for chrissake, it’s not like I’m actually saving any money!! Waitressing – the cash will be gone in under a week, but the anxiety dreams last a lifetime!!) The mother left the table for a spell, and the boy sat at the table alone. He was quite a tall person, and he had a tiny tube of lip balm, which he applied with slight, sweet self-consciousness. And then sat and read the miniscule writing on the tube, waiting for his mother. It sounds silly, I know, but I found it moving. I wondered what this pair were doing, out and about, before they stopped for lunch. A lot of people are looking for attention when they go out to eat, which is why they complain, and tut and fuss, and send food back. One fellow who comes in nearly every week likes to talk to everybody sitting around him. If nobody will talk to him, he talks very loudly to his wife, holding forth on one subject or another, seemingly waiting for somebody to jump in and give him a bit of argument. Yesterday he spoke in his carrying voice on the subject of nuts. You can have a whole bag of nuts, he declared, and every once in a while, one of them is rancid. And you can never tell which one is rancid, but one rancid nut will put you off all nuts for a while. Isn’t it the truth, I thought. If there’s one thing waiting tables has taught me it’s that we’re all nuts. Everybody is crazy. The world is a big bag of nuts, and sometimes you get a rancid one, but mostly they’re sweet enough.

Cocoa cake - bird's eye view

Cocoa cake – bird’s eye view

Speaking of sweet!! This bread is loosely modeled on yet another recipe from Mrs. Beeton’s tome of everyday cookery. Her recipe was for a malt bread. I love malt powder, and for some reason it reminded me of hot chocolate mix I used to love as a child, which had cocoa powder and malt powder and cinnamon. A lovely combination! The bread is not too sweet, (which is why I can get away with calling it bread and not cake!) and I think this helps you to notice the taste of the cocoa, rather than just a sort of sweet chocolatey flavor. It does have chocolate chips and a sugary cream glaze (which is supposed to be like the whipped cream in your hot chocolate, of course), though, so who am I kidding? It’s a cake.

Here’s Bob Dylan’s rambling, charming Highlands. I love this exchange…

    I’m in Boston town, in some restaurant
    I got no idea what I want
    Or maybe I do but, I’m just really not sure
    Waitress comes over, nobody in the place but me and her.

    Well, it must be a holiday, there’s nobody around
    She studies me closely as I sit down
    She got a pretty face, with long white shiny legs
    I said, “Tell me what I want,” she say, “You probably want hard boiled eggs.”

    I say, “That’s right, bring me some.”
    She says, “We ain’t got any, you picked the wrong time to come.”
    Then she says, “I know you’re an artist, draw a picture of me.”
    I said, “I would if I could but I don’t do sketches from memory.”

I love Time out of Mind! As a bonus track you get Standing in the Doorway, cause I can’t stop listening to it.
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Railway buns

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Railway buns

Railway buns

We’re declaring January “Mrs Beeton month,” here at The Ordinary. We’ve been poring over her Everyday Cookery (and, incidentally, pouring over it as well! Clio and I conspired to spill a whole glass of juice over the brittle pages!) We’re particularly immersed in the cakes, buns, biscuits and pastries sections – just the thing to get us through the dreary, damp, chilly, grey, drizzly, delightful winter days. There’s a comforting consistency to the recipes…page after page of nearly the exact same ingredients in nearly the exact same proportions. Flour, fat, leavening, a bit of sugar, milk, maybe an egg. Baked, steamed, dropped, girdled, glazed. And since it says “every day” cookery, we’ve been dutifully trying something new, every single day. When I saw a recipe for “railway buns,” I fell in love right away. Railway buns! What a beautiful thought. In a rare editorial comment, Mrs Beeton tells us that “These make good sandwiches for a journey.” Of course they do! Some little bit of warmth and comfort in your pocket as you set out for your adventures!!

So your Sunday collaborative playlist is on the subject of being on a journey. Not traveling songs, exactly, but songs about that moment that you realize that you’re far from home. Maybe you’re on a train or at a station or in a motel room, in between places, and it hits you like a ton of bricks just how many miles from your home you are. How strange and different everything feels. You miss home, and can’t remember why you came out here in the first place. Are you going back, or are you traveling on? Or do you sit on a bench and take a railway bun out of your pocket to take a minute and think the situation over.

railway-biscuitsI must admit that I mis-translated this recipe, but they turned out delicious anyway. I added about half the flour that I was supposed to. So that when Mrs. Beeton said I should roll out the dough and cut it into squares, I cried, “Mrs. Beeton, you’ve steered me wrong – I can’t roll out something this soft!!” Well, it turns out it was my mistake, but it worked out well. I dropped the batter onto a baking sheet, which is my preferred lazy way to go anyway. The buns were probably a little flatter than they were meant to be, but so so good. Everybody loved them. They’re quite similar to (American) biscuits, so I made them again with baking soda and baking powder instead of yeast, just as an experiment, and they turned out tasty. Softer and richer than your average biscuit, and just the thing fresh out of the oven for yet another chilly January day. And I think they, too, would make nice sandwiches for a journey.

Here’s our far from home playlist. As ever, I’ve made it collaborative so feel free to add any song you like. It’s shaping up to be a wonderful playlist for a drizzly Sunday, hunkered down with some railway biscuits in a nest of blankets!!
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Coconut shortbread with blueberries and banana frangipane

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Banana blueberry bar cookies

Banana blueberry bar cookies

I think I was visited by three spirits of parenting last night. Not past, present, and future precisely, but maybe representing varying degrees of parenting flaws. I had three bad parenting-anxiety dreams in a row, and woke up each time feeling confused and flattened. Why? I asked myself? Why now? We’ve been spending a lot of time together lately, Isaac and Malcolm and I, with their holiday from school. Mostly it’s been very fun – we’ve gone for walks, played games, cuddled on the couch and read. But I have had a few bratty outbursts of anger, and therein lies the guilt. I yelled at a crying Isaac for letting the dog take his food. In fact, when I sprayed her with her bad-dog spray bottle (for taking the food) I sprayed him, too, which, amazingly, did nothing to quell his tears. And I cursed at Malcolm. I think that’s the one. I could tell you about five heavy bags of groceries, 3 nights of insomnia, 2 coats and children sprawled on the floor in my path, and one sassy and hurtful comment. I could tell you about how I felt so childishly hurt that I didn’t want to apologize. But there’s no excuse. I shouldn’t – I don’t – talk to anyone in the world like that, so how could I speak like that to Malcolm, my son, my friend? I did apologize, of course, but it has weighed heavily on me, and it’s coming out in my dreams. I was thinking about one of the dreams after I woke up, and maybe it is a premonition of parenting future – at least a preview of the kind of anxiety that must only get worse with time. In the dream, Malcolm and Isaac and I were exploring a cave. We were having a nice time, and they were looking forward to finding the center of the cave, which held a pool they could play in. But we got to one part that was tight and winding, we had to crawl upwards in a space not much bigger than our bodies. I’m a bit phobic about close, winding, airless spaces in real life – caves and lighthouses and crawl spaces – and apparently I am in dreams, as well, because I decided to head out of the cave. I told them to go on ahead, that I’d wait for them at the entrance. I thought about them, winding through the cave; I told myself, they’d be alright without me. Cut to: hours later, I was in a room crowded with people. I don’t know where I was or how I got there, but suddenly it dawned on me that I wasn’t waiting outside the cave for my boys. I panicked, in my dream, and woke up in my bed, in a sweat, straining my ears for the sound of the boys snoring gently in their room. But that’s what it’s going to be like going into the future, isn’t it? They’ll want to explore things on their own, and I’ll have to let them go, and I’ll think, as I did in the dream, that they probably make it home safely without me. When the boys wake up from a nightmare, I always say (like a broken record) “It was just a dream, you’re safe and warm and mommy and daddy love you.” Hopefully I’ve said it enough that they’ll always remember, even when I’m not with them on their adventures. Hopefully they’ll remember that, and not the bad-tempered moments.

Well, enough of this little dream-journal confessional. Let’s talk about cookies! We bought a bunch of adorable tiny bananas, thinking that the boys would like them. They rarely ever finish a regular-sized banana, so this seemed like a good solution. Sadly, the tiny bananas were greeted with indifference. So we had quite a few rapidly ripening bananas to dispose of. I wanted to make something different from banana bread or banana cake, for a change, and I had the idea of combining the bananas with almonds, sugar and eggs, to make a banana frangipane. Fun to say, and good to eat!! I also wanted to remake the coconut shortbread layer of the cherry chocolate cookies I’d made the other week, because I had a nagging doubt that I’d gotten a measurement wrong. So we have a layer of shortbread, a layer of good blueberry preserves, (I used bonne maman, ironically!) and a layer of banana frangipane. It turned out nice! Soft, flavorful, but not too strongly banana-y – more of a haunting fruity sweetness that goes beautifully with the almond flavor. The cookies are like a newton, maybe, in texture. Newtonian. But without the seediness.

Here’s Tom Waits with Innocent When You Dream.

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Yule cake with cranberries and chocolate chips

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Yule cake

Yule cake

MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYBODY!! Merry Christmas you beautiful old Ordinary, you! I hope everybody is making merry with their friends and family. Best, warmest, brightest wishes to everybody!

Your playlist assignment for this week is songs about peace. It could be world peace, peace of mind, a still and peaceful moment, or a song that sounds like peace to you in any way. I’ve made the playlist collaborative, so add what you like!

And as a bonus, here’s last year’s Christmas playlist, with some tracks added. It’s a doozy!!

And a recipe for yule cake. I found an old recipe in Mrs. Beeton’s cook book, and I adapted it somewhat. It’s a mild, yeasted cake, with dried cranberries, clementine zest and bittersweet chocolate chips. Not too sweet, and very Christmasy. Nice toasted with butter, actually!!

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Kale and chickpea curry with ricotta naan

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Kale and chickpea curry

Kale and chickpea curry

I love to walk to school with Isaac: it’s one of my favorite rituals of the day. He holds my hand and lags behind slightly, and Clio lunges ahead after squirrels, cats, or even any spiraling dry leaf. Clio runs in circles around us, and Isaac sings or tells jokes. His jokes are perfect, sweet and nonsensical. He told an existential one the other day that was very clever, and it went a little something like this…Q: What did the birthday say to today? A: How do you like the present? B’dum tish! Today he told a joke, and I just didn’t “get it,” because I’m quite slow sometimes. I said, “I don’t quite understand your joke.” He said, “that’s okay, it wasn’t much of a joke.” As we approach the school, we start falling in line with his friends, and they form little shifting huddles, and then they all rush, joyously, to their doorway. Clio and I stand watching them, out in doggy exile, and when Malcolm sees us he walks over, cool and slow, and Clio falls all over herself trying to give him hugs and kisses. Miss Sandra, the crossing guard, greets everybody with good cheer, and leaves us all with a “have a good day,” and you believe that she means it, that somehow the fact that she said it might actually help you to have a good day. All around the courtyard, happy excited children fly about, glowing like fireflies. They greet their friends and hug their parents goodbye. I’ve always thought that the amount of energy and love, spoken and unspoken, that radiates from a typical drop-off at our school shines so brightly it could be seen from outer space. It must be like that for every school in the country. Drop-off was emotional this morning. The children flew happily about like they always do, but the parents and teachers – and there were more of them around than usual- were quiet and thoughtful, full of concerns, and hopes, and good wishes, forming a strong web of good will and sympathy that must spread from school to school across the country and beyond.

This was a strange weekend to be at work – so grey and dreary, the restaurant was not at all busy, and I just wanted to be home, where it was warm and bright and my family scampered through the day. I thought all day, too, about making this curry. I wanted something bright and warm and comforting and flavorful. So that’s what I made. It’s got a sauce made with cashews, golden raisins and coconut (I used just plain old sweetened flaked coconut, as it happens.) And it’s got kale, potatoes and chickpeas. It had a nice texture, soft, but not mushy, and the flavor was a little sweet, a little spicy, and balanced with lemon. And these naan!! I had some ricotta left over from a tart I made the other day, and I decided to make the naan with that instead of yogurt, as is traditional. And I added an egg and some melted butter. Maybe I should stop calling them naan, as I drift farther and farther from the original recipe! They turned out so delicious, though. Tender, flavorful, simple. I couldn’t stop eating them!! None of this was hard to make, either, it was an after-work meal, after all.

ricotta naan

ricotta naan

Here’s Ombra Mai Fu, from Handel’s Xerxes. My friend Diane suggested it yesterday, and it’s so beautiful!

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Honey rosemary goat cheese bread

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Honey rosemary goat cheese bread

Honey rosemary goat cheese bread

So I’m on the facebook. I’m a bit lazy and telephonobhobic, and I like the fact that I can keep in touch with old friends from every point in my disjointed life with very little effort. And I like the vagaries of the facebook shuffle. I like the fact that disparate friends of mine will post status updates that echo each other very closely, even though they have no actual connection to each other. And I like the odd contrasts. The other day, one friend posted a meme (I believe it’s called) of an embroidered message that said, “Fuck your fascist beauty standards,” (or something close to that). And another friend posted lots of shots of half-naked conventionally beautiful young women. It struck me as very funny! Of course, at this time, I could go on and on about the objectification of women, and body image…and I probably will some day. But for now…let’s have a playlist!! A playlist of songs celebrating unconventional beauty. If you know me at all, you’ll know that I love songs on this subject, and I’ve been mentally compiling just such a playlist for years. And yet somehow, today, all I can come up with is four (brilliant) versions of My Funny Valentine, plus a handful of other songs. It will come to me eventually!! I’ve made the playlist collaborative, so add what you like!!

This bread turned out really well! I wanted something to go with a soup, but I didn’t even think of it till 5 pm, so it had to be quick. It had to be a quick bread! This bread has a bit of olive oil, a bit of honey, some rosemary and some goat cheese. It’s pleasantly ambiguous – it could be sweet or savory, however you’d like to use it! Nice with soup at dinner, nice with coffee in the morning.

Here’s that playlist! Add what you’d like!!

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Red bean and tarragon stew with fennel and artichoke hearts, and rosemary cornmeal bread

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Red bean and tarragon stew

Red bean and tarragon stew

Yesterday was a bright, cold day, with a ripple of agitation as the unseasonable warmth from the beginning of the week was blown away by the cold damp air of today. The sky was white blue, and the late afternoon produced the sort of slanting golden light that tricks you into thinking it’s warmer than it is. And on this late-fall afternoon, you could find me riding all over town, wearing Isaac’s backpack, on Malcolm’s BMX bike. Malcolm’s been home from school all week, and I wanted to pick up his homework and prescription, but I didn’t want to leave him alone too long, and I felt too lazy to haul my bike out of winter hibernation in the basement. So here I was, wheeling around town on a small, bright Tintin-blue BMX wearing a small bright serpent-green backpack. It felt good – the cold air in my lungs harsh but cleansing, the cold air washing through my stale, lack-of-sleep addled brain clearing off the cobwebs. I had this strange sensation – hard to place, familiar, but remote – something I hadn’t experienced in a while. And then it came to me…I felt cool. I felt like a cool kid. I nearly laughed, but that wouldn’t have been cool. I realized that I didn’t feel, for a moment, like a tired and anxious 43-year-old on her son’s BMX. And, of course, that realization brought it all crashing around me, because I was a tired 43-year-old on her son’s BMX. Malcolm’s back in school today, and he told me they’re having an assembly with a BMX ramp and, I assume, skillful young BMXers doing tricks. Wouldn’t it be funny if I came flying down the ramp at the assembly? Waving and shouting, “Yoo hoo, Malcolm! Yoo hoo! It’s mommy!” Heh heh. So Malcolm and I have had a nice week, it’s cold and rainy today, and I miss having him around, though, of course, I’m glad he’s glad to be back in school.

Red bean and tarragon stew

Red bean and tarragon stew

While he was sick he craved brothy foods, and this was just such a meal. It’s quite substantial and has a lot of strong flavors, but they’re all flavors that I love, that work well together. It has a bit of zing to it, which transcends the potential (pleasant) stodginess of beans and potatoes. It’s a good meal for any time of year, really…in the winter I tend to stock up on jars of artichoke hearts and roasted red peppers to relive some of that summery flavor that you can capture fresh in other seasons. I like a nice crusty bread with my stew, so I decided to make one myself. I wanted it to be chewy and dense, but not with a fine crumb. So I added some cornmeal to the mix. And I kept the dough very wet – I had to use the food processor rather than my hands to knead it. I baked it in a bowl that I’d lightly greased, and it got stuck, so I had some trouble getting it out, but it was still delicious. Just a little messy, so you had to pull it apart with your hands, but that’s not such a bad thing!! I guess you could try a non-stick loaf pan, or just mound the dough onto a greased baking sheet. I’ll try it and let you know how it goes!!

Here’s Loch Lomond’s strange and beautiful Wax and Wire, in a video showing the most amazing BMX riding courtesy of Danny MacAskill, and the most beautiful landscapes, courtesy of Scotland.

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Banana-chocolate chip-cranberry sauce cake

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Banana cranberry sauce cake

Hello, and welcome to another installment of “Claire clumsily paraphrases wikipedia in an attempt to share an artist that she loves.” David recently purchased a many-volume set of Memphis Minnie CDs. So much good music! She just kills me. She, quite literally, rocks. In the past I haven’t been able to find recordings of all her works, but I’ve read her lyrics like poetry. It’s so wonderful to be able to hear them now. Let me tell you a little something about her… She was born Lizzie Douglas, in 1893. She learned very young to play guitar and banjo, and ran away from home at thirteen to try to support herself as a musician. She landed in Memphis, Tennessee, and played in nightclubs and on the street. She travelled with Ringling Brothers circus for a while, and eventually she married and recorded with Kansas Joe McCoy. In the thirties she moved to Chicago, and formed a band with drum and bass, thus single-handedly inventing rock n roll. (What? what?) She went on to record during the forties, but her popularity and her health failed in the fifties. She died in a nursing home in 1973. Her songs are remarkable. On her gravestone it says, “The hundreds of sides Minnie recorded are the perfect material to teach us about the blues. For the blues are at once general, and particular, speaking for millions, but in a highly singular, individual voice. Listening to Minnie’s songs we hear her fantasies, her dreams, her desires, but we will hear them as if they were our own.” You do feel this way when you hear her songs! Her life was so different from mine – so wild and uncertain and vulnerable – and yet when I hear her songs I often think, “I feel that, way too.” Her words are so human and raw and honest and mysterious, all at the same time. The picture you form of her, from her songs, is of a woman who is strong and funny, empathetic but guarded, and who has been hurt and has known a lot of pain.

Here’s I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down,

I hate to see evenin’ sun go down
I hate to see evenin’ sun go down
Cause it makes me think, I’m on my last go-round

Some people take the blues, go jump overboard and drown
Some people take the blues, go jump overboard and drown
But when they gets on me, I’d rather stay ‘n go sit down

I been to the river, looked it up and down
I been to the river, looked it up and down
But when my mind never let me, to jump overboard and drown

There’s such a strange hopefulness in the lyrics, with the very blues that are bringing her down also buoying her up.

She has quite a few songs about prostitution, but I love the odd beautiful detail of Hustlin Woman’s Blues…

I stood on the corner all night long, counting the stars one by one
I stood on the corner all night long, counting the stars one by one
I didn’t make me no money, Bob, and I can’t go back home

New Dirty Dozen is a sassy, funny insult song, based on the game dirty dozens, which involves inventing increasingly hurtful insults about a person’s family, until somebody can’t take it any more and gets angry…

Come all you folks and start to walk, I’m fixing to start my dozen talk
What you’re thinking about ain’t on my mind, that stuff you got is the sorriest kind
Now you’re a sorry mistreater, robber and a cheater
Slip you in the dozens, your papa and your cousin
Your mama do the lordy lord

She has beautiful songs about rambling, about being cold and homeless, with sore feet and not enough to eat, songs about being treated cruelly by policemen and judges and doctors and boyfriends, songs about dirt dauber wasps building nests on her when she was a child, songs about superstition, even a song about President Roosevelt and a mule, she has a lovely song of admiration about Ma Rainey, she has generous songs offering shelter and food to desperate men, she has saucy, sexy songs, songs full of hunger and pain, songs full of warmth and humanity. And she plays guitar like a mother-flipper!

Here’s a small playlist of Memphis Minnie songs.

And here’s a cake that uses up leftover cranberry sauce and bananas that are past their prime. It’s rich and moist and tasty. I added chocolate chips, cause I love them, but you could easily leave them out.

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Masa harina bread

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Masa harina bread

Hello! I worked all day, and I’m discouraged and tired. I had so many things I’ve been thinking about for a while, that I wanted to say here. While it was slow at work, I was going to sit and write it all down. But I couldn’t or didn’t. Instead, I’d like to tell you about this evening, after dinner. Standing in our dark but strangely balmy backyard I watched Malcolm, wearing a skeleton shirt, playing tag with Clio, wearing her customary smoky grey ensemble, with the flashing white at paws and throat. The white bones and white patches shone. They floated and dashed in-and-out of the darkness like the sprites they are, dodging and shining. They fell in and out of the mythical quince bush. They were berserker with the pent-up energy. I love them so much. Earlier today, Malcolm said, “Every person is a superhero, every person has a superhuman strength, because we’re all living skeletons.” Which leads to one of my inexplicably favorite moments as a parent…we were sitting in the car, driving back-and-forth to-or-from a warm house during the blackout, and Isaac said, “Why did the skeleton cross the road?” Before he could fill in the punch line, Malcolm cried out, “Because he wanted to SHAKE THAT!” I can’t explain, even to myself, why that fills me with so much joy. What a ramble this is!

This masa harina bread is like a dense and flavorful cornbread. As you might remember, I’m a huge fan of masa harina. It’s like very fine corn meal, with a mysterious and lovely flavor. The batter for this bread does not give you confidence – it’s like pouring wet sand into your bread pan. And as it cooks, it’s sort of ugly and gnarled. But it’s lovely to eat. Isaac loved it to pieces. It’s quite a comforting loaf, and I seem to be stuck on comfort food this week!

And I’m OBSESSED with this song. I play it over and over. It plays itself in my head in the middle of the night. It’s so pretty and cheerful and contagious, musically. And the lyrics are so hopeless and dire, but beautiful and sometimes it seems they’re true, but this was a hopeful week, politically!

Check out the real situation:
Nation war against nation.
Where did it all begin?
When will it end?
Well, it seems like: total destruction the only solution,
And there ain’t no use: no one can stop them now.
Ain’t no use: nobody can stop them now.

Give them an inch, they take a yard;
Give them a yard, they take a mile (ooh);
Once a man and twice a child
And everything is just for a while.

It’s Bob Marley with Real Situation.

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Crispy soft cornbread pudding

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Cornbread pudding

When the power went out last september (I think it must have been during Irene, but it’s all a blur at this point) Malcolm’s first concern was making me coffee. We can smash the beans with a hammer! And boil water over the fire! Must…get…mom…her…coffee!! Ha ha! As if I was some kind of caffeine addict. Well, okay, I’m probably a tiny bit addicted to caffeine. But I’m not the only one! You should have seen this place by the third powerless day. An army of hollow-eyed zombies roamed the town fiending for coffee! The first day after the storm, I wandered the drizzly town, feeling very tired and dejected, but my friend Pat made me a cup of coffee on his gas stove, and my day instantly cheered. The second day, David braved the compromised roads to make a journey to dunkin donuts. And on day three, we made coffee in our own home. We bought ground beans, and boiled a pot of water on the grill. We grilled coffee! And tea! It seems like such a little thing, but the act of making coffee in (or just outside the door of) our own kitchen restored some small sense of normalcy, and made me feel nearly ecstatic. (Or maybe the coffee was unusually highly caffeinated.) It’s not just the caffeine, it’s the simple daily rite of grinding the beans and boiling the water. (Or lying warm in bed listening to David downstairs performing the ritual.) I eat the same thing for breakfast every day. I feed my boys at the same time, most days, and they’re fairly predictable in what they’d like to eat. David eats peanut butter and jelly for lunch almost every day. Anything can happen at dinner time, I like to experiment and make odd meals, as you know, but that cooking and scheming is part of the pattern of my days. I hadn’t realized quite how routinized we were, as a family, until this ten day spate of powerlessness. I hadn’t realized how much the food that I prepare and eat, and the patterns of preparing it and eating it were involved in my comfort and ability to function. It made me feel a little anxious. I worried about the boys getting enough healthy food, even though they probably ate as well as usual. And anxiety makes me want to bake, which, obviously, wasn’t an option. We had fun straying from our usual pattern. We grilled scrambled eggs and toast, which was absolutely delicious. We were more social than usual, and shared meals with friends – everybody bringing their rapidly spoiling food. But I never felt quite right. I had a constant queasy feeling. And I found myself craving solid comforting food – bread and cheese and potatoes. One day we went and bought cans of beans and jars of artichoke hearts and roasted red peppers, and I was actually very excited about the prospect of cooking them over the fire. But dusk came early and the evenings were chilly, and I lost my enthusiasm for standing in the drizzly yard dirtying pots and pans I didn’t have hot water to clean. So what did we eat? We ate grilled toast and grilled bagels and grilled scrambled eggs. We ate rapidly thawing veggie dogs and veggie burgers. We ate pasta at a friend’s house. I made salads with cans of chickpeas and hearty vegetables like carrots and olives and cherry tomatoes. We had a few bags of potato chips scrounged from the dark, cash-only convenience store, and ate quantities of chocolate bars left over from our cancelled halloween. Peanut butter and jelly. Crackers and peanut butter. All-in–all, we ate lots of good food. We lived comfortably. I’m so grateful to have my warm home back, and my working stove and hot water. I cooked up a storm the first day with power – and I haven’t really stopped since. But I think it’s good to shake things up sometimes. So maybe we’ll grill scrambled eggs and toast one morning, just for fun, but I’ll be glad for the hot water needed to wash the dishes after!

We didn’t eat this over the last ten days, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I was craving. It’s comforting and warm and crispy but soft and cheesy. It’s halfway between a sort of corn pudding and cornbread. If you’ve ever made semolina dumplings or roman gnocchi, it’s the same idea, as is yorkshire pudding and choux pastry. But this is made with cornmeal. So it happens to be gluten free! I made it twice in the weeks before the storm, with varying amounts of cornmeal. If you make it with the larger quantity, it’s more like a cornbread, and with the smaller quantity, it’s softer, more like a baked pudding. One time I flavored it with oregano, cayenne and sharp cheddar, and the next I used mozzarella, basil, rosemary and black olives. We ate it with spinach and chickpeas the first time, and with a saucy, tomatoe-y soup the next.

Here’s Comfort Ye from the Messiah, performed by Paul Elliot and the Acadamy of Ancient music, which is (I think) the version I grew up with. It’s so warm and calm.
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