And When All Else Fails

Thank goodness for food.

Strawberry Fig Jam, with break for Hot Dog

Phase two of what I have coined Canaganza ushered in the red period of our day: Strawberry Fig Jam cooked while sipping a Rogue dry hopped red ale.



We subbed figs for rhubarb in this stage when we failed to locate the rhubarb patch at Berkeley Bowl West, and the combination certainly made for some nice photo ops. Ruby red against plumesque purple was just a photo waiting to be taken. Then I had a little affair with the part of the recipe that instructed us to combine 10 cups of sugar with all that fruit to let it mellow for an hour. Sugar is rather photogenic, in my defense.



Cara's help was instrumental for this part because she not only chopped strawberries, but also juiced all the lemons. You may or may not know that the hero that juices the lemons is contributing the most important part to any jam making project. In the end, we maybe could have used a few more lemons for our monster batch of jam because it's a little on the saucey side. Then again, I don't really mind the saucey side.


After that we had to let it cook for what seemed an eternity, so we broke for a hot dog snack and a root beer float out back. It was exactly what the Preservation Doctor ordered, a Top Dog with everything.



And before we knew it, we were ladeling the hot jam into sterilized jars like professional jammers. Next up: Dilly Pickles.

Treasures

I hit 5 estate sales and a thrift town on Saturday with Marianne and Chad. Last weekend's scores were almost unanimously kitchen oriented, are you shocked? These were the brightest stars by far:

A good old can that still smells faintly of laurel leaves. Very orientalist, as you can see faintly from the illustrations on the side panels.

And this little book, published 1960 by Harcourt Brace & World. The I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken, drawings by Hilary Knight. Though written with sly sincerity, this book is chuckle-worthy from cover to cover and features such classics as "Bisque Quick", a bulked up version of the Campbell's original and "Homebody Beans" which boasts a handwritten notation deeming it fabulous! An excerpt for your dessert:

A parenthetical note here. It is understood that when you hate to cook, you buy already-prepared foods as often as you can. You buy frozen things and ready-mix things, as well as pizza from the pizza man and chicken pies from the chicken pie lady.

But let us amend that statement. Let us say, instead, that you buy these things as often as you dare, for right here you usually run into a problem with the basic male. The average man doesn't care much for the frozen-food department, nor for the pizza man, nor for the chicken-pie lady. He wants to see you knead that bread and tote that bale, before you go down cellar to make the soap. This is known as Woman's Burden.

But sometimes you can get around it. Say, for instance, that you are serving some good dinner rolls that you bought frozen and then merely put into the oven for a few minutes, as the directions said to. At dinner, you taste them critically. Then you say, "Darn it, I simply can't make decent rolls, and that's all there is to it!"

If you are lucky, and have been able to keep him out of the kitchen while you were removing the wrapping, he will probably say, "What's the matter with you? These taste swell."

Then you say, in a finicky sort of female voice, "I don't know--they just don't seem as light as they ought to, or something..." And the more stoutly he affirms that they're okay, the tighter the box you've got him in. Admittedly, this is underhanded, but, then, marriage is sometimes a rough game.

That Peg, sure knows how to tell it.

Brunch For One

It's not that I don't like company. But there's something really nice about having the house to yourself and still chopping some vegetables and making a substantial meal for yourself around noon on a Wednesday. Yesterday, with drizzle looming over Oakland, I put our new baby cast iron to work and make a little frittata, a la Bill Stehlin (John's dad, who has perfected this breakfast food).

Some onions cooked til brown and sticky, red pepper and spinach. Then two eggs whisked together with heavy cream, salt, pepper and a shake of sugar, a secret that makes any sort of egg dish a little bit better than it would otherwise be. This is all poured over top of the vegetables, covered and then cooked a few minutes on top of the stove until set. Then thrown into the broiler with some shredded monterey jack until brown and visibly delectable. It slid right out of that well-seasoned pan, and folded just slightly in half.

I've started to take my breakfast plate with a side of vinaigrette, in lieu of ketchup, and some buttered toast. With a little shake of some hot sauce on top, that was it. Brunch for one.

Cuisinart, dissected.

Our cuisinart is of a particular vintage, probably several decades old (its heavier than any other one I've ever handled) and doesn't have any switches or pulse-levers like newer models do. Rather, it starts whenever the components are locked in. More recently, it starts up whenever the bowl is locked in, regardless of where exactly the lid happens to be.

You can imagine this being a bit of a problem, particularly in the case of making something with flour like pie crust, say. Or something wetter like hummus. The potential for mess and danger is really infinite. So, we unscrewed the motor and took a look under the hood. I'd never speculated over what the guts of a Cuisinart might look like but here you are:

Curiosity answered. We fixed it right up with some oil on the internal switch and for now, its working like a charm.