Bakeram Yoga

It is official: staying home is the new going out according to Marie Claire.  Today, I indulged in a pedicure which my feet desperately needed.  One of my favorite parts about pedicures is all the very girly, ridiculous, outdated magazines that I would never actually buy, but I admit to really enjoying reading.  They are kinda like junk food reading.  There is no real substance (yes, veggies have all sorts of really good health benefits and surprise, surprise, men like blow jobs!).  But they are brightly colored and have lots more colors inside which draw me from page to page.  Lately these magazines have started writing many “cost saving tips” (although buying a $100 dollar skirt does not count as a “steal” in my book) amongst the rest of the articles. One of these such articles proclaimed that gone were the days of mojitos and 3 course meals and instead people were having friends over for dinner.  It then proceeded to detail a couple of recipes to make for your first dinner party.

I hope this trend continues.  I have loved dinner parties for as long as I can remember.  When I was younger, all of the major holidays had large formal dinners associated with them.  We didn’t normally have people over because we didn’t have any close family.  But they were still large productions and so much fun.  We would have a family meeting during dinner a week or two beforehand to plan the meal and then assign the dishes to each person.  Everyone in my family cooks very well so it was always quite tasty!

I was always in charge of setting the table.  It was always an elaborate procedure, but it just looked magical when it was done.  I would spend a good hour ironing the white linen tablecloth and napkins.  Linen is really hard to iron, but there was something almost meditative about it.  Then I would carefully take the tablecloth off the ironing board and lay it across the table.  I even grabbed the iron and would work on any creases it acquired in the move. Next came the silverware.  We had acquired an extra set of real silver from my father’s parents and it was so heavy and cool in your hands.  His mother was very strict on manners and I learned from her exactly how the silverware should be set and in what order in conjunction with the plates and glasses.  Once the silver was set, it was followed by the plates and then the glasses (both water and wine).  Then I would place the candelabra in the center of the table and make sure the candles were secured.  This was followed by the salt and pepper shakers (did you know that salt tarnishes silver so you should always store salt shakers sans salt?) and placement of all the serving bowls and their accompanying serving spoons. Once everything was set, I would step back to admire my handiwork and feel all nice inside.

As I have grown older, I still like throwing dinner parties.  I threw them in my studio in DC where we had to sit on the floor because I had no furniture and then more and more when I met my husband who actually owned furniture!  When we got married, we were fortunate enough to get a set of china.  I love this china probably more than is warrented for a set of plates.  Tonight we are throwing a small dinner party for some friends of Alex from work.  I have throughly enjoyed going through all the motions of getting ready for the party tonight.  The table is set and it still looks magical.  I hope this dinner party trend continues even when people can afford to eat out again. I know my friends and I will keep it up.

When I was little, I remember my mother making me a mixture of lemons and lots of honey to help soothe a really bad sore throat.  It was delicious.  There was something about the interplay between the very sour lemon and the the spoonfuls of yummy honey she would add in.  Then she would heat it up so it was nice and warm.

As I grew older I took the recipe and added hot water to make a “lemon tea” that I made for anyone that was sick or starting to feel that way.  I have been not feeling so well the last couple of days.  It started with stuffed up sinuses which progressed into a sore throat and coughing. Yesterday, the shit hit the fan and I was achy all over and didn’t want to move much. I am blaming in on too much flying. We didn’t have any lemons so Jake made me some lemon tea out of key limes.  There was lots of love in it, but the key limes just didn’t quite do the trick.  So last night he, I and Sophie headed out for our evening walk to the nearby grocery store to get some lemons.  Then he made me the tea and it was just exactly what I wanted.  For that split second that I was drinking it my throat didn’t feel like knives were tearing it apart.

Last night I tossed, turned and coughed in the way you do when you are sick.  I had crazy dreams that seemed even more real than usual.  Then about 4 a.m. in the midst of one of my coughs that was just dreadful, I had an idea.  What about if I added fresh grated ginger and mint leaves (from my very own mint plant that is going crazy) to the lemon tea?  I have read that ginger is supposed to have healing qualities and the mint it seemed would help break up the crap in my chest.  So this morning, into the small saucepan I put

• juice from one good sized lemon (the softer the skin outside the juicier they seem to be)
• about an inch of ginger grated with my dear microplane
• and a handful of mint leaves
• a coffee mug full of water
• a good drizzling of honey (I like my pretty sweet so I am very generous with the honey)

All of the amounts of these ingredients can be played with according to your tastes. Then I let it heat up and boil for a minute to get everything all mixed together. After the minute passed, I turned off the burner, put the lid on and just let the whole mixture set for a couple of minutes while I started some cinnamon buns for Easter breakfast tomorrow. Then I strained the whole mixture and am currently sipping.  It is really delicious.  The flavors seem to meld together nicely and it seeems to be forcing up the crud in my chest.  I hope everyone is feeling nice and well, but if you aren’t give this a whirl.

In the mornings I generally have chocolate whey protein powder with milk and oatmeal.  I like my oatmeal old school style so I make it with whole oats on the stove with water and a some raisins thrown in for a bit of sweet.  It is a yummy breakfast and it fills me up.  So this morning, I thought, I can cut out the milk (minus about 100 calories-yeah!) and just put the whey powder directly into the oatmeal which will make a lovely warm chocolate concoction that still has protein and and oats.

So into the pan all the ingredients went.  I added in some extra water to account for the extra dry ingredients and started cooking it.  It smelled lovely – kinda like hot chocolate cooking.  I was all excited and then I started eating it.  It tasted awful, well maybe not entirely awful, but as I worked my way through the bowl (cause I wasn’t going to waste it!) it become more and more chalky and gross in consistency.  So to all of you out there that think putting protein powder in oatmeal is a wonderful idea, I strongly recommend against it!  Now I am off to wash the taste of it out of my mouth!

I have been using the holidays as an excuse to do more than my normal amount of baking.  This year I decided that since money was a bit tight, I would bake everyone’s Christmas presents.  I started with larger batches of strawberry marmalade and salsa as the core of my gift giving and then went from there.  I made Christmas cookies, challah, and granola.  Then there was a request from one of my sisters, M, for biscotti as part of her Christmas present.  I have made biscotti in the past and have had some success with it.  So I went to my trusty pile o’ papers of recipes and hunted for a lemon walnut biscotti that I remembered making in the past.

I had just broken down and bought a microplane from Williams Sonoma (which is wonderful!!! so much easier to zest than with just a regular cheese grater.  I highly recommend it!) and so my lemon zesting was super nice and easy. I mixed all the ingredients together divided the dough up into three balls and then proceeded to smush them down into rectangular pieces to do the first baking.  I put them in the fridge for three hours and then suck them in the oven to bake.  This is where it gets tricky.  Two of the logs, as the recipe refers to them as, baked perfectly, but one didn’t.  It was slightly burnt on the bottom and hard to cut up into pieces.  Oh well, I thought, more for me to snack on with my coffee.

The next day Alex was on a coding spree for his wonderful new language called Nil and I thinking of things that I needed to do to keep myself occupied.  I started counting the biscotti and realized that I didn’t have quite enough to give out.  I started feeling creative. I liked the lemon walnut recipe, what if I were to replace the lemon parts with some chocolate chips, almonds and a bit of almond extract?  Then I would have a lovely chocolate biscotti addition too.  So into the kitchen I went.  By this time Alex was ready for a break so he helped me chop up the almonds and chocolate chips.

It is generally pretty simple to mess with a cooking recipe because there is very little chemistry involved in it.  Not so true with a baking recipe.  So I wanted to make sure that I kept the liquid to dry goods ratio the same and that I didn’t mess with any of the other ingredients too much.  So I took the recipe and subtracted out about 1/4 of cup of  flour to account for the missing lemon juice.  Then added in about 2 teaspoons of almond extract and another 2 teaspoons of vanilla to create  a good background flavor for the chocolate chips and almonds.  Then I split up the batter and smushed them into logs and stuck them into the oven.

50 minutes later out they came.  This time there was one log that was perfect and the other two were too crisp and not what I wanted.  So Alex and I further inspected the logs to see why one had done so well and the others not so much.  It appears that the thicker I made the logs, the better they did.  It also seems that the recipe isn’t really enough to split it up into three logs, so perhaps next time I made this recipe, I will only split it up into two logs.  I think also it would be advised to take out at least another 1/4 cup of flour for the chocolate almond biscotti.  We will see how the family likes them at Christmas.  Let me know if any of you make the recipe with any of the further additions and have more tweaks to it.  Thanks!

My mother has made granola for as long as I can remember.  We never ate store bought cereal unless it was our birthday and then it was a special treat.  By the time I left for college, I swore that I would never eat granola again.  I had had my limit and besides it was definitely not “cool.”  Much time has passed since I left for college and about six months ago, I decided that I would make granola again.  I rationalized it as a cost saving measure since store bought cereal cost so much for so little.  I pulled out a big baking dish and dumped in oats, wheat germ, dry milk, a bunch of nuts, honey, brown sugar, safflower oil and anything else I could find that looked like it might be good in granola. Then I dug my hands in and mixed it all together and stuck it in the oven for about 30 minutes.  I had mixed feelings about eating it.  But the next morning, my husband, Jake,  mixed it into his yogurt and fruit and it seemed to be quite good.  Then a couple of weeks later, a friend, Jane, came over and I gave her some and she loved it too.  Over the last couple of months my granola has become quite a hit which amuses me considering how much I tried to not eat it for so long!

So that is the background to my granola, the reason for this post is that I have stumbled across a tweak to the recipe that I thought I would share.  Last time I made it, I didn’t have enough brown sugar, so I added in extra honey.  The extra honey made the granola clump together and much crunchier which is how I like it.  I admit to grabbing a couple of clusters for a snack from time to time, so more crunchier clusters means more fun snacking.  Oh boy, now I sound like a cereal commercial!  Anyway, here is the recipe for your pleasure updated with the extra honey and less brown sugar update.

5 cups rolled oats (not instant)
1 cup wheat germ
1 cup sunflower or pumpkin seeds
1 cup slivered almonds
1 cup pecans
1 cup dry milk
3/4 cup honey
1/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup of safflower oil

I tend to switch out what I use for the nuts and sometimes I add sunflower seeds and sometimes I don’t.  Currently Costco sells a big jug of mixed nuts that I am loving.  It is also really good when you add raisins or dates to it after it is cooked.  Mix it all together and put it in a large pan and put it in the oven to cook at 325 for 30 minutes.  Then turn off the oven, stir the granola and just leave it in overnight to crispen up.

Happy Baking!

One of my favorite things about baking and cooking is the warm cozy feeling inside that it brings me.  At that moment all the negativity in life is brushed away and everything just feels so right and good.  My mother used to always say that she baked love into the dish and I agree that there is always a bit something extra in the food when you eat a home cooked meal.  There is such a feeling of satisfaction when I completely destroy the kitchen and then pull something warm and fragrant out of the oven.

Cooking with someone else can be even more lovely and warm.  However, it can also deteriorate quickly into a down and dirty argument about exactly how you should chop something.  It gets so vicious because cooking technique is so unique to each person.  In my family growing up we always had a one person in the kitchen at a time rule.  If there were two people, one person tended to be the head cook of sorts and the other took instructions.  I generally followed this rule.  I tended to be the head cook and I could very easily delegate to others to get a meal going.  I had a very good friend come to visit a couple of weeks ago and we had a very intense menu planned out for her birthday dinner.  At first I got really tense about making sure everything go done, but then I realized that I was being silly and I just needed to let go of certain parts of the dinner that she was working on and that everything would turn out just fine.  I could help if she needed it, but otherwise I should just assume everything would turn out wonderfully.  And you know what?  It did.  It was a wonderful meal that I got to share with close friends and that made me so warm and content that I was quite sure what to do with myself.

On October 5th, the same fateful day I bought all that candy corn, I also decided that I should buy a big bag of Halloween candy at Costco.  We recently moved into a house and I rationalized it because we needed to have candy to hand out to the kiddies that came by to trick-or-treat.  Besides, following my mother’s long tested rule, you wanted to buy Halloween candy when it was fresh.  You didn’t want it to be stale and picked over by the time you bought it. * Then for some strange reason, my husband insisted that we actually not open the bag of candy until Halloween.  What is up with that???  So while I was destroying the candy corn the rest of the candy has mocked me for the last three weeks.  Every time I run across it, it almost jumps up and in a very sing songy voice says, “nanny, nanny boo-boo, you can’t have me”  to me.

Yesterday, I was back at Costco again to pick up a few things for our Halloween party.  I grabbed my cart, walked in and flashed the door person my membership card and then I was assaulted.  Right before me was a long wall of nothing but the same large bags of Halloween candy that I bought three weeks before.  This was Costco, so believe me when I say the display was mammoth and out of control.  I didn’t know what to do, after my weeks of avoiding the candy in my own kitchen I was confronted with more candy than I knew what to do with.  I took a deep breath and marched onward gripping my shopping list in one hand.

*Of course when I was growing up, the Halloween candy always disappeared long before the trick-or-treaters ever came, and we had to buy more, but that was not the point!

Oh candy corn how I love thee, let me count the ways.  Candy corn is just freaking amazing.  I have always enjoyed it, but this Halloween season I have developed a bit of an obsession.  It is just so irresistibly good.  I love eating it in three parts to savor the flavor.  I start with the white tip, followed by the orange center, and topped off with the yellow top.  It just makes my tummy so happy!

At the beginning of the month, I went to Target and bought a bag of mellocreme pumpkins (these are super yummy too!) and a bag of little packages of candy corn for trick-or-treaters.  The candy corn made it a couple of days before I opened it just to have a bit of sweet after lunch one day.  But see the problem was, it was so good, I just couldn’t eat just one little package, I wanted more.  So over the next week I had more, and more and more until it is possible I might have made myself slightly sick.  So my husband took the remaining candy corn and stapled the bag shut on the theory that I couldn’t get into it that way.

About two nights ago, I smiled extra sweetly and got him to open the bad to get just one little package.  This worked until last night.  I was sitting on the couch watching the Daily Show and kept thinking, “mmmmm…..candy corn, you know it would be really yummy to have some now.  I have been pretty good today, it would be ok if I just had a package or two…..”  I wondered over to the candy corn very nochanlantly and picked up the bag.  I realized that he had cut a whole in the bottom of the bag in order to get it out the other night so I fished two bags out and made my way back to the couch.  My husband was typing away at his laptop and it took him a moment to realize what I had done.  Then he put his hand out and I gave him a piece too.  I finished those two bags and went for two more.  Then those were gone too.  I knew I should stop, but it was just so yummy!   So then I went back to the kitchen and decided that I was just going to finish it.  I grabbed it and took it back to the living room.  My husband looked at me and then down at my candy corn and went to grab it.  I wasn’t quite fast enough and he got it.  He was off – running into the backyard.  I chased him around to the side and finally he relented telling me “you are going to be sad tomorrow when you realize that you don’t have any left.”  He was right, I am sad, and I probably should feel guilty about it, but I don’t.  I just remember the yumminess of it all!

Thursday afternoon: I have some really good spinach and ricotta ravioli from Costco that I need a sauce for.  I have paired it with just your regular tomato pasta sauce in the past, but it just never seems to do it justice.  I need something more.  So after much thinking, I realize that what I really need is a creamy pesto sauce.  The pesto will balance out the cheese and spinach nicely and cream sauces are always nice on ravioli.  I get online and start going through my favorite recipe sites (epicurious.com, allrecipes.com, weightwatchers.com).  However, none of them yield what I am looking for and I start trying to google it.  Again nothing comes up.  Then the phone rings, it is my lovely husband suggesting that perhaps we should eat out tonight and try one of the restaurants in our cute little downtown that we haven’t been to before. Saved by the phone!

Fast forward to Saturday afternoon, I still have the ravioli sitting in the fridge and we need some dinner!  So I start madly thinking about how I could come up with my own creamy pesto sauce.  I have a basic cream sauce that I use, I wonder if……maybe if I combined the cream sauce with part of the pesto recipe I could have my very own creamy pesto sauce?  Maybe if I didn’t put in much oil at all, but instead just put basil, parmesan, garlic and pine nuts into the cuisinart with just a splash of olive oil.  Would that make enough of a paste to stir into the cream sauce?

There was only one way to find out – I needed to try it.  So I set to work.  I sent my husband out to get some basil from our basil plants and to peel some garlic.  Then I set to work on the cream sauce. I put all the ingredients in a small saucepan and then started collecting ingredients for the pesto part of the sauce.  I got out the cuisinart and put in the washed basil, pine nuts, parmesan, garlic and olive oil.  Then I ground it up into a paste.  By this time the sauce was nicely thickened and I added the pesto to the cream sauce and stirred everything together well.  I tasted it and it was almost exactly what I was looking for, except it needed a wee bit of salt.  So in went the salt and then I poured it over the ravioli and it was delicious!

So to add to the lack of creamy pesto recipes out there, here is what I did exactly.  I will warn you, I didn’t measure out most of these ingredients, I mainly cooked it by feel and taste, but I am converting it into basically what I think I used since no one out there is capable of knowing how much my “handful” is.

Combine in a small sauce pan on medium heat:

2 Tbsp. olive oil
2 Tbsp. flour
2 cups milk

Put the olive oil in first and let it warm up a bit.  Then add in the flour and mix it thoroughly into the olive oil.  Have the milk nearby and add it in as soon as the olive oil and flour are mixed together well.   Then stir the whole mixture together and let it sit on medium heat to thicken.  You can start the pesto during this time, but be sure to keep an eye on the sauce so it doesn’t burn.

Combine together in food processor:

2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 cup packed basil leaves
1/3 cup shredded parmesan cheese
1/2 cup pine nuts
4 large cloves of garlic

By this time, the cream sauce should have thickened.  You can add more flour to it make it thicker or more milk to make it not so thick.  Add in the paste of the pesto to the cream sauce and stir.  Then add in

1 tsp. salt*

Stir it all together well and then serve.

*I prefer kosher salt or the larger crystals of sea salt as it just brings out the salty flavor better.

I love pickles! Yes, I know that I said I love sweets this afternoon and I do love sweets, but I also love me some pickles.  I have been very lucky lately to have some free time to do whatever I please and my to do list includes painting and lots of baking and yoga.  One of the things on my to do list was to make pickles.  A friend of mine sent me a wonderful Washington Post article about making pickles.  On my weekly grocery shopping trip this week, I bought all the ingredients and today I made pickles!  They were fairly easy to make.  First you make a pickling brine and let it sit for about two hours.  Then you layer dill and garlic at the bottom of a sterilized mason jar, stuff it with cut up cucumbers and top it off with more dill and jalepenos.  Now the hard part begins – waiting for the week while the pickles get pickled.  I am really looking forward to opening them up and trying them.  Mmmmmmm…….