Diane

Sally’s Recipe Box: Oatmeal Cookies

I am clearly not a food blogger which a fancy camera.

We have this index card box that is filled with recipes. The box belonged to the Husband’s mother. The recipes are a mish mash of things: papers clipped from magazines or the back of boxes, handwritten recipes in the type of neat yet indecipherable script that is no longer taught, some cards typed on a typewriter, a few even mimeographed sheets breaking away at their folds. The recipes titles often have people’s names in them: “Martha Ward’s Fudgy Icing”, “Grace’s Cole Slaw”, “Beef Stroganoff Eileen Dixon” There are a lot of Jello recipes.

I thought it might be fun to cook/bake/ assemble our way through some of these recipes. This month, we did Helen Trott’s Oatmeal Cookies. Helen was the Husband’s grandmother. I never got to meet her, but Husband said she was very nice and gentle.

The recipe was quite vague. No real directions at all. I wondered if people used to just know how to mix ingredients together to make cookies. Kind of Great British Bake Off style. And it called for Oleo. We didn’t have Oleo, so I used Crisco and butter. I actually misread the Crisco package the first time and added an extra 1/2 cup of shortening. Oops. But then I made the cookies again, as written, and I think I preferred the version with an extra 1/2 cup of Crisco. They came out more tender and spread a bit more in the baking.

The recipe also calls to “add spices, nuts, fruit, choc chips”. Not in any specific quantity. Just… you know… add them. If you want. How you want. Baker’s choice. Or in my case, kid’s choice.

So here is our recreation/ adaptation of Helen Trott’s Oatmeal cookies. I read introduction to the cookie section of King Arthur Flour baking book to figure out what order to combine the ingredients.

Helen Trott’s Oatmeal Cookies

1/2 c. shortening
1/4 c. butter
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. brown sugar
1/4 c. Water
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg
1 c flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 c. oatmeal
handful of walnuts
handful of raisins
handful (or more) or chocolate chips)

Cream together shortening, butter, sugar and brown sugar

Add water, vanilla and egg until blended

In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, oatmeal, baking soda, and salt. Add flour to shortening/butter/sugar and stir until combined.

Mix in handfuls of nuts, dried fruit, chocolate chips, as the fancy strikes

Drop rounded tablespoons of batter onto parchment lined cookie sheet.

Bake for 12-15 mins. Or 10 because I like my cookies partially raw.

The non “oops I put in an extra 1/2 c. of Crisco” version. Not as much spread, but still tasty.

So the unfortunate coda to this story. The second batch (seen above in a cookie jar made by our very talented friend Esther), fell victim to an ant invasion. It really pained my heart, but we ended up throwing the cookies out, having only eaten three or four (plus a bowl of the raw cookie dough. ‘Cause that’s how our cookie making rolls here). I’m not sure that there is really anything unhealthy with ant infested cookies, but it did wig me out a little. I’m a little ashamed of my own weakness, and wish that I could be one of those people for whom eating ant infested cookies could be no big deal.

Where the Wild Things Are

Our dog eared copy of the beloved classic.

That very night in Max’s room a forest grew and grew – and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are. – from Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

I feel as if suddenly it’s spring. Not just spring, but late spring, verging on summer. Somehow we missed spring, while sitting at home during a pandemic. The cherry blossoms (which are always an indicator here) peaked at the beginning of the stay at home orders. Usually the cherry blossoms are time marker for me, but this year, it was a blip, barely registering.

My cousin Karen has been writing daily on Facebook, each post labelled with the day number. I think if it were not for her posts and for the daily posts of other blogs I read, I would have absolutely no sense of what day it is or how deep into stay-at-home orders we are. When I’m working, the rhythm of time is pretty much defined by when in the process we are (ie. prep, rehearsal, tech, or performance) and when the next free day is. Without those markers, time seems to be particularly slippery.

Several years ago, when the eight year old was a baby, there was a knock on our door and it was our across the street neighbor with two shopping bags full of book they had our grown. In that pile was a well worn copy of Maurice Sendaks Where the Wild Things Are. These days, the three year old has been really into reading Sendaks classic are at bedtime, there is something beautifully apt about Max’s story – how our walls are now our “world all around” as we sail “in and out of weeks.” I feel as if we are living with a pack of feral creatures who root in the pantry and fridge for food when the whim strikes, leaving mess and havoc in their wake.

To be sure, part of this is my own fault – perhaps I should not have left the three year old alone with a spray bottle, two cups of water, and some water colour paints. My hopes that he would docilely create art while I showered were laughably naive. I emerged from the shower to shouts from the 8 year old trying to contain the mess, and a rainbow of water spread on the floor, while the three year old stood on his chair, the spray bottle topless and empty. There are definitely terrible eyes being rolled and terrible roars and terrible teeth being gnashed. Sometime they are mine.

Unlike Max, I have no tricks to tame the beasts. Though come to think of it, his trick seems mainly to embrace the wild rumpus, even to instigate it. Maybe I should try more of that. Perhaps that is what we can learn from the little boy in the wolf suit. That at the end of the day, once we have exhausted ourselves rumpus-ing, we just want to be where someone loves us best of all. And where dinner is hot.

Off Headset (or why I started to blog)

Last summer, when I was pregnant with our third child, I had idyllic visions of starting a blog to document my pregnancy. I had always felt that I hadn’t been as mindful about the gestating process as I wanted to be. With my first pregnancy, I was five months gone before I admitted something was going on. With my second, I was working a pretty challenging schedule (Ring Cycle, anyone?). As a result, I never really took time to savour being pregnant. So last summer, I thought, “I have time off; I am going to start a blog to document things.” But then life, children, summer schedules, and quite honestly, inhibitions got in the way, and before I knew it, it was September and the pregnancy that I wanted to savour and document was … a baby. And I was back at work. And the next show happened. Then the next show didn’t.

And so here we are. But no time like the present, right? And nothing like a pandemic induced stay at home order to give myself time to “create before you consume.”

“Off headset” is what we say at work when we take our headsets off. Like when we go to the bathroom – because you don’t want to be the person who accidentally drops their headset into the toilet, or the person who broadcasts the sound of peeing to everyone else to hear. And at the end of the day, I say, “Off headset” as I am powering off my beltpack, and hanging up my headset – the signal that I’m are no longer available over headset, that rehearsal is over for me,and that I’m switching gears.

Life in opera can be all consuming. The long hours and middling pay means that one really needs to believe and love what one does to make a life of it. The intense rehearsals, monumental achievements, warm colleagues with crazy stories – these things tend to take up all my time and energy when I’m in production. Doubly so when I travel for gigs; when I’m in a new city, work can easily become the whole world, because throwing yourself into an show is the path of least resistance. But there is always a part of me that says, “This isn’t the sum of me! This sitting in rehearsal, solving other people’s problems, swapping horror stories during lighting sessions…. I have a life outside of this.”

So in that vein, I thought I’d create a space for myself to explore/write about things that occupy me when I am off headset – food, books, articles, thoughts, family, things that make me smile, think, and contemplate.

Books Read in April 2020

I seem to have a slight survivalist bent to my reading last month. I also finally read Lord of the Flies in March, fulfilling a long held promise to someone. That was not cheery. In truth, the reading selections were probably not pandemic related since the books have been on my TBR pile for a while. But there is something about these books that did speak to the current situation – about making do, and finding peace in what you have available to you. Libby (the e-book borrowing app from the library) has a cool feature where it tells you how long you’ve spent reading a book, and predicts how long it will take you to finish it. I find the data fascinating, but also motivating; if Libby tells me I only have 3 more hours left to finish a book, I’m more likely to make time to read. Here’s what I managed to finish in April:

Secondhand by Adam Minter – 9 hr, 2 mins. Minter follows the life and economics of the second hand industry – from the sorting process at thrift stores to where our discarded stuff goes after that. He delves into how people in other countries in Asia and Africa take our cast offs and find use and life for our used stuff, often refurbishing or repairing it along the way. The realization that most of what we send to Goodwill will ultimately end up in a poorer nation is sobering. Also, I didn’t think about it, but there is less of a market for used winter clothes because clothes that don’t sell at thrift stores go to countries that don’t really experience winter. Minter also veered off into some of the myths that increase trash in our lives – specifically that car seats expire.

Educated by Tara Westover – 8 h 32 mins. On a lot of “best of” lists a couple of years ago. It was often gruesome and uncomfortable to read- a lot of people gaslighting each other and just not being nice. One quote I loved, though, was about her life in Paris: “My life there was entirely new, and as near to cliche as I could make it.” I thought it an ironic statement – that she had gotten away from her survivalist family, but still had to make her own life.

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser – 19 hrs. Another book about people striving to create an independent life from very little. I loved reading the Little House books when I was younger, though I realize they are a little controversial now. In the book, it is clear that Wilder loved her childhood, and in a way, the Ingalls’ poverty was what allowed her to see the country and understand the world. The story about how Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane came to collaborate on writing the books is also something I found fascinating to read. Fraser writes, “In years to come, [Wilder] and Lane would cling fast to this notion of ‘truth’ which reflected not objective reality but something closer to felt experience.” The subsequent fallout of the battles concerning the ownership of the Little House legacy made me sad, though.

Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid – Audiobook. This book worked quite well as an audi book. I’m not sure that I would have liked it as much if I had read the hard copy, but I love audio books of books with slightly different narrative formats. The women seemed trapped in their roles, and I couldn’t tell if that was a product of the era in which the book was set, or weak plotting.

The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choski – 6 hrs, 20 mins. YA Fantasy novel – not my usual genre, but the eight year old has been listening to one of her books and I wanted to check out something else by this author because her use of South East Asian mythology appealed to me. The writing was beautiful, dense and evocative.

Definitely one of my biggest months for finishing books in a while. We’ll see what next month brings!

Life skills for kids

Life Skills Bucket aka cleaning supplies. — Life Skills Bucket!

This morning, the 8 year old made herself breakfast – a fried egg and cheese breakfast sandwich. The husband has been teaching her how to do this for about a year now. It’s an ongoing process – first he started by teaching her how to toast the English muffins or bagels. Then how to spread the cream cheese or butter. Since last fall he has been working with her on how to perfectly fry an egg. (Hopefully the next step is how to throw out the eggshells. But I have to remind myself that it’s a long term adulting goal here.) We still turn on the stove for her, though in moments of enthusiasm she has done it herself – which causes me a mixture of pride and panic.

What struck me this morning, though, was how comfortable she has become with making this humble breakfast sandwich. There was a time, quite recently, when spreading the cream cheese would lead to a meltdown. But this morning, she moved quite confidently from one step to the other: butter in pan, English muffins in toaster oven, crack egg into a dish, then gently slip it into the pan, cook just so, layer a slice of cheese on top, cover to melt the cheese then slip it on to the buttered English muffin. I watched her do it, and I thought, “Huh, she’s learning some life skills!”

I’ve been trying to teach some life skills during this quarantine period – to the eight year old, at least. We are still covering basic survival instincts with the three year old and the baby. So far with the eight year old we’ve done: hand sewing (blanket stitch and whipstich), cleaning the bathroom, using [ctrl] + [x] and [ctrl] + [v]. I’ve also started on a long held goal to teach her how to write in cursive. Not really a life skill in this day and age, but there is something orderly and elegant about it that makes me sad it isn’t taught anymore. On the list also is touch typing. It boggles me that the kids spend so much time on computers in school, yet no one is teaching them how to touch type. Every time I watch my kid hunt and peck, I want to scream.

She also, of her own accord wants to learn to crochet, and has other cooking/baking things on her agenda. I do worry that the life skills on our list skew towards domestic arts and stereotypical feminine crafts. Though perhaps this skewing is more a societal construct than my own, and on the list should also be “Resist the Patriarchy (while not being a slob)”. I did throw, “Use a power tool” onto the list, just to balance things out.

A couple summers ago, I came across this list of Life Skills from the Edit Your Life Podcast, and it hits a lot of the things that I hope my child(ren) can learn. Replacing the toilet paper roll is a big one for me. I think we have that one down. Actually there are a couple things on this list that I haven’t mastered yet (“Identify freezer burn.” is one…. Though I tend to be pretty forgiving of stuff in the freezer, so perhaps that one isn’t necessary.)

Some thoughts/ tips I had about teaching my kids life skills:

Be patient – Often I get frustrated because I think, “I can do this in 5 seconds!”, but then I have to remember that I’ve had 40 years to figure things out. I do give myself a lot of “time outs” to scream into my pillow when things get irrevocably tangled or slow.

Lower your standards – The bathroom is now my daughter’s responsibility. It definitely doesn’t get as clean as when I do it, or when our cleaner does it. But I think that at least she is doing it. For me, a lot of the value is in the doing and getting done. First of all it means that I don’t have to do it, and second of all, it means that it becomes a doable task for her, which I think is empowering.

Make it routine – Once I teach the kid how to do something, there is a reasonable expectation from me that I will have her do it again. I think a lot of adulting is developing good habits (still working on that myself!) – so I want her to learn that things that will serve her again and again. So we clean every weekend. When school was in session, she would pack her own lunch and make her own breakfast. I think that is the “life” part of “life skills”.

The three year old vacuuming. Imperfectly. But it’s a start.

Guajillo Chile Enchilada Sauce

We’ve been meal planning pretty strictly these days, mostly because it helps save on trips to the grocery store. On Saturday morning, I’ll take stock of what needs to be eaten, and what we have in the fridge, freezer and pantry, and then make a list for the Husband to take to the store. (Incidentally, he was wondering if he should have a handle – like DLH for Dear Loving Husband. The jury is still out on that one. I mean, I feel like anonymity is sort of futile. It’s a developing process, I guess.) I don’t particularly feel like we are spending less on groceries – actually I feel like we are spending more. But we aren’t eating out as much, and I find meal planning calming. For someone who is paid to plan, I probably don’t do enough of it in real life.

This week I had some blue corn tortillas to use up. I had impulsively added them to our Hungry Harvest order (“Ooh! they’re blue!”), but there weren’t quite enough for me to make tacos for the whole family, so they sat in the fridge for a while. I remember reading about migas in a book and that sounded like a tasty frugal way to use them up. When I started googling, however, I came across a recipe for chilaquiles brunch casserole on the ever tasty Smitten Kitchen website, and I was sold.

Often when I meal plan, I’m pretty diligent about reading recipes to make sure I put the ingredients I need on to the Husband’s list. Not this time. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I assumed that I could just whip up the necessary enchilada sauce from tomatoes and I-don’t-know-what. So I didn’t quite have the necessary ingredients to make any one of the enchilada sauces that came up in my search. But…. I realized I could probably make something up by combining different elements from separate recipes. And then, I came across this recipe and it called for guajillo chilies, and I got very excited.

You see, the Husband likes to buy me random things from specialty grocery stores. “I don’t know what you do with it,” he’ll say presenting the mystery item to me, “but it looked interesting. I know you’ll figure it out!” Some time ago, he had bought me a bag of dried guajillo chilies, which had been languishing in our basement pantry ever since. Now, I love using things up out of the basement pantry. There is something very satisfying about it – like “We have back up reserves! And we can use it!” Never mind that currently our back up reserves is stocked with, in addition to rice and flour, Welch’s fruit snacks and Oreos. Pandemic panic buying at it’s finest.

So I gleefully liberated the guajillo chilies from the basement and improvised this enchilada sauce. And it was pretty tasty! In fact, the whole casserole was a definite hit. I am blessed with kids who are remarkably good eaters, but I always have a bit of trepidation when serving new food – kids are fickle and who knows when they will suddenly develop limited palettes?

Here’s the recipe. I am by no means a recipe writer, so it is not terribly precise. I’m definitely of the taste as you go school, and I think this combination of ingredients is pretty forgiving?

GUAJILLO CHILI ENCHILADA SAUCE

8 Guajillo Chilis
2 cups broth (I used 2 cups water with Penzy’s veggie stock paste)
2 large cloves garlic
1 onion
2 tablespoons tomatoe paste
1 teaspoon cumin
1 tablespoon dried oregano

Heat guajillo chilies and unpeeled garlic in a skillet until they are warm and slightly soft. Remove chilies, cut open, discarding stems and seeds. Soak in hot water for 30-ish minutes. Toast garlic until it is soft and roasted.
Heat broth in a saucepan. Dice onion and add it to broth. Squeeze the toasted garlic in as well. Bring to a boil and simmer until onion is soft.
Whisk in tomatoe paste. Add cumin, oregano, and chilies. Cook for a bit.
Put it all in a blender and blend til smooth.
Pour back into saucepan and cook until thickened.

Weekend: Different but Same

I’ve been pondering what makes a weekend these days. When I am working, the weekends usually mean just Sunday since I often have rehearsals or shows on Saturday. And then there are the other typical weekend activities – lessons for the kids, batch cooking, birthday parties, trip downtown to a museum, sometimes even a day trip, football in front of a tv or with friends, social gatherings, church. These are often activities the Husband takes on, ref: stage managers work on Saturdays. (Sometimes I work on Sundays too, but usually I get one or the other off.)

Needless to say most of these activities are now frowned upon. But we did do some “weekend” type things these past two days. We celebrated birthdays: We drove by the houses of two friends whose kids had birthdays this week. We brought noisemakers and percussion instruments and yelled and sang happy birthday and then visited for a little bit – us sitting in our cars, and them standing in their driveway or on their sidewalks.

I took the kids on a walk down our local trail. The County has closed the road next to the trail to traffic on weekends so people can walk on the road, making social distancing along the trail more practical. It had just rained and there were plenty of puddles and mud. “We went on a muddy walk!” the three year old declared.

Husband made a big batch of chili. I get to batch bake/cook during the week, so Saturday was his day in the kitchen.

We went to church – which now means gathering in the basement for the livestream of 9am Mass. We actually “went” twice because there were technical difficulties the first time, so we streamed other services in the morning. But then we decided that we liked the atmosphere of our home church best, and we came back at 2pm when the Church had everything worked out.

We didn’t go out to the theatre, but we did stream the first half of Twelfth Night from London’s National Theatre. Despite working in the arts, I don’t see a whole lot of theatre, so I’ve been loving this series of performances. There is a flexibility and agility to theatre – both the performances and the technical aspects – that I don’t get to necessarily experience in my own work.

We cleaned. I’ve been trying to get the eight year old to clean. She now does bathrooms and windows. Somewhat imperfectly and slowly, but it’s a start. The slowness might be tied to the fact that she gets to listen to an audiobook while she cleans. Then also, on her own, she cleaned her room, including sweeping and vacuuming. When I exclaimed my surprise and delight, she said, “Well, when there is nothing else to do, you can always clean.” Not really my philosophy, but I’m glad it’s hers.

So I guess any one of these things can be done each day, but the weekend was marked by doing all of them. And also the fact that my husband didn’t work. That was nice too. We have certainly been having a lot of family time during the week these days, but I have to say as nebulous as a “weekend” is right now, it still brings on a different quality of family time.

I Baked a Cake

This week the baby turned 7 months old. So I baked a cake. The slimmest of excuses to bake a cake, but I think little things are worth celebrating these days. And cakes are worth baking. I’ve been looking through my collection of cooking magazines – Bon Appetit, Cook’s Illustrated, Saveur, Gourmet, stretching back ten years. I would like to cook from them more, partly in an effort to cull the ones that have no future with us, as they do take up quite a bit of space. Anyhow, I found a recipe for yellow cake with chocolate frosting in Cook’s Illustrated that was surprisingly unfussy. While I love the tenacity and scientific bent of Cooks Illustrated, sometimes I find the results aren’t worth that extra step or ingredient they like to throw in. Tastes are perhaps a little more subjective than their authoritarian voice allows. The cake turned out beautifully.

And while the oven was hot, I finished making at batch of Fig Newtons. (King Arthur Flour Cookbook)

So it was a full day in the kitchen. A full-messy-mountain of dirty dishes-batter on the floor-there are no plates leftover for dinner kind of day. I had many more of these days when this isolation thing started. Days where the kitchen was never clean and I went through 5 lbs of flour in one week. But lately we haven’t been able find flour in the store, so I’ve pulled back on the baking a little. And, really, maybe I only have the energy to be up to my elbows in dishes a couple days a week, rather than every day of the week.

So far in quarantine baking, I’ve made: Sourdough bread (lots of this), Chocolate Walnut Scones, Mrs. Field’s Chocolate Chip Cookies (really a huge amount of chocolate barely held together with a little dough), granola bars, and granola, empanadas, dinner rolls for Easter, and lots of pizza dough for our Friday night pizza/movie tradition.

It seems very cliched to panic bake during these times, but we do like our carbs here. Even the baby, who, despite my saying that she was too young for cake (never mind that I baked it for her), did manage to sneak a nibble from my mom’s plate.

Hello world!

Day 38 and I’m starting something new.