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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 original!

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.

Off Headset (or why I started to blog)

What life looks like on headset.

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!

Guajillo Chile Enchilada Sauce

Thumbs up! Child approved dinner!

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
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Whisk in tomatoe paste. Add cumin, oregano, and chilies. Cook for a bit.
  4. Put it all in a blender and blend til smooth.
  5. Pour back into saucepan and cook until thickened.