What's for Pudding?

Most meals in the Elliott/Dolan household of my childhood ended with an aura of defeat, followed by cries of “What’s for pudding?” This would confuse any poor non-family members who happened to be present, who had already been confused enough by whatever my mother had put on the table, whether it had been a heap of ungarnished shredded carrots, a pile of baguette cubes with a side of olive oil, or an inconsistently microwaved TV dinner. “What’s for pudding?” must have seemed syntactically jarring, and the thought of being forced to accept a pudding cup in a flavor that my mother found “interesting” was probably almost too much for our pitiable, uninitiated tablemates.

They needn’t have been so worried. “Pudding” is just what the English call the dessert course, and there never was any. Every Christmas, however, my mother would buy a packaged Christmas pudding, a tough, dense dome of dried fruits and stickiness. Years of store-bought Christmas puddings convinced me that I didn’t like them, but my grandmother’s homemade pudding, flambéed and doused in brandy butter, was a real revelation. This year I wanted to try making one myself, and I thought persimmon would be a nice seasonal flavoring. Little did I know, steamed persimmon pudding cake is actually a traditional American dessert, therefore (I thought) perfect for our cross-cultural British-American vegetarian Christmas.

Steaming a cake on the stove is actually no more difficult than baking it, and because my attempt succeeded so well, I’m convinced it’s foolproof. The batter is fairly typical, moistened by persimmon puree and lightly spiced with ginger and cinnamon. I folded in walnuts and raisins at the end, and poured it into a buttered Pyrex dish fitted with a lid. I raised the dish off the bottom of a large pot using the cylindrical part of a jar lid, and then filled the pot with water to halfway up the side of the Pyrex dish. The water should have been added before the dish, since some of it got in through the top, but it didn’t make much of a difference – remember, the whole thing is eventually inverted onto a plate anyway. The pudding took a little over two hours to steam and was ready to be taken out and cooled just before we sat down to dinner. Forty-five minutes later it came out of the dish without incident, a caramel brown color and deliciously moist. It is lovely with heavy cream or ice cream, but we were very fortunate to be able to dunk it in Rob’s homemade eggnog.

The only problem with this pudding was that there weren't nearly enough leftovers. Next time I’ll use a bigger dish, maybe for a fig and honey version. You can find the recipe for the original here.

[Other highlights of our vegetarian Christmas included a stuffed turban squash topped with a forest of romanesco. Unfortunately all of the pictures of it turned out a bit blurry, and don't capture the prismatic spikiness of romanesco.]

Dinosaur Cookies

My earliest career plan was to be a paleontologist when I grew up. That was at about age three, and I’ve changed my mind several times since, most recently upon learning that Sahadi’s was looking for a “full-time cheese person.” But my childhood interest in dinosaurs was rekindled the other week when my current interest in food led me to some stegosaurus-shaped cookie cutters. After coveting them for a few weeks, I was delighted to receive not just a stegosaurus but an entire menagerie of prehistoric creature cut-outs as an early Christmas present.

The problem with cut-out cookies is that while their shapes can be unique and exciting, their flavors usually are not. There’s nothing objectionable about sugar cookies, but they’re never memorable, and if I’m going to make dozens of anything, as one tends to when undertaking a batch of cookies, they had better have a taste that keeps you coming back for more.

Six species of dinosaurs are represented in the set I have, and I took a reasonably scientific approach to using them: as long as each species is consistent, no one can prove what they should look (or taste) like. The stegosaurus, I decided, had a chestnutty brown hide flecked with black specks. This effect was achieved with a buttery dough flavored with coffee grounds. The triceratops, meanwhile, was a golden color with granite-grey freckles (presumably for camouflaging in the mineral-rich rocks prevalent at the time), which I recreated with an orange zest and earl grey tea cookie recipe. It’s also as realistic a conjecture as any that all dinosaurs had vibrant metallic eyes, which conveniently resembled sugar dragées.

Both of the recipes I used had said to roll the dough into a log, chill it, and slice it into rounds, but I was willing to risk going the cookie cutter route. It took some experimentation to find the temperature at which the cookies could be easily cut without either sticking to the cutters or breaking apart, but the effort was worth the reward of non-bland cut-out cookies. The flavors turned out even better than expected, especially the stegosauruses – I added cocoa and black pepper to the original recipe and substituted coffee horchata for the Kahlúa that was called for, and result was an ideal balance of bitter and sweet.

After baking and cooling I had a sizeable Jurassic population. It’s on its way to extinction due to human consumption, but the remaining members look quite happy in the habitat I constructed for them out of the latest Monterey Market produce run.

Original recipes can be found here and here.

Solution to Winter #2: Patience

Dishes that take several hours are never at the top of my list of Things to Make Soon, but because slow-cooking is the sometimes the only way to achieve a certain depth of flavor, they're often at the top of my list of Things to Eat Soon. Fortunately for me, I happen to have a very patient boyfriend, who fortunately happens to have a slow-cooker.

I've been campaigning for beef stew for a few weeks, my technique varying from subtle hints ("So, what are you doing Sunday or Monday or Wednesday night?") to outright demands ("You have to make it before I leave for California on Thursday"). He reported that the process itself, unlike me, was not very demanding at all: place cubes of meat, potatoes, and carrots in the crock pot in the morning, turn it on, go to work, come home to a very stewy apartment. Easy enough for me to consider trying it myself sometime – but it doesn’t bode well that my impatience manifested itself that evening even though I wasn’t doing any of the slow-cooking. I missed the bus, and even though dinner was six hours in the making, I couldn’t stand the idea of waiting ten minutes for the next one to come. Instead, I took off down Atlantic at a furious pace, noticeably frustrated and inelegantly jostling a cast iron skillet, a bottle of wine, and three large oranges. The bus caught up with me seven blocks later, two stops from the apartment, and I got on. Clearly, I’m not cut out for waiting of any kind.

When I finally arrived and put down my bag, I was ready for a hearty meal. I came ready to contribute to it, of course, since I had been so adamant that the stew be prepared for me. I quickly stirred together some cornbread batter, poured it into the skillet and stuck it in the oven, all of which took about four minutes. I then turned to the task of mulling wine, which I’ve heard is how the Finns survive this part of the year – keep a thermos of this stuff on you at all times, and you won’t care how long it’s been since you’ve seen the sun or felt anything in your fingertips. One bottle of Two-Buck Chuck went into a pot along with a halved orange, a few tablespoons of sugar, and some spices from a packet purchased at Canned Foods over a year ago, the pot was placed over low heat, and I stared at it, willing it to hurry up and get steamy.

About half an hour later, everything was piping hot and ready to eat. Piping hot, actually, is too hot to be consumed, but naturally I refused to wait for it to cool down, and I now have severe burns on the inside of my mouth. But the stew was delicious: nothing complicated, just the flavors of tender beef and root vegetables falling apart all over each other in a satisfying mush. Beef stew is the wool sweater of foods – practical and classic, and something your grandmother would suggest. Although a seared steak or a crisp raw carrot are perfect for certain circumstances, there’s no way to achieve the richness that results when their tastes and nutrients mingle and get to know each other without allowing them some time.

I’m hoping that reflecting on this meal will teach me the virtue of patience, because it seems like the only solution to winter may be to just wait it out. It must take more reflection than I’ve had time for, though, since I’m getting on a plane to California tonight.

Solution to Winter #1: Layering

Well, it finally happened, as I suppose it had to. It got cold. We enjoyed an exceptionally mild fall this year, one that lasted so long that I actually started to appreciate the briskness of a 58 degree day that some (weirdos) are so excited about. Usually when the temperature dips below 75 I turn against the environment entirely, seeing any kind of "sweater weather" as a mocking reminder of what is to come. But this year I had time to acclimatize, get to know and understand the fall, and take back my previous dismissal of it.

None of that matters now. It looks like the real cold weather is descending, with the knifey chill that characterizes Real Winter. Last March I swore that I would not tolerate another winter, and declared a plan to move to Argentina in January and beat the system. However, January is fast approaching and I have no tickets booked; it seems the plan will need to be revised. And because I know that with East Coast weather you don't get anything for free, I'm anticipating that the crippling cold will last a while, and I don't expect to go outside without feeling like I'm being stabbed until late June.

So, how to prepare for the worst? I've already dragged boxes of coats and hats from under my bed, and replaced them with swimsuits and inappropriate shoes. It's now time to consider the transition to make in the kitchen. My summer moratorium on warm foods of any kind ended several months ago, but now I'm looking for things that are truly enduringly warm, that act as internal space heaters hours after consumption when you've been forced to leave the warm cocoon of the kitchen. My first solution is what you get when you apply the logic of winter attire to cooking: lasagna.

A description of any well-constructed lasagna sounds like a bed you might want to jump into, and Chase did a very good job constructing one last night. The layers of ground turkey stewed with tomatoes and spinach were made very cozy by pillowy pockets of ricotta and frilly pasta scarves. It was the best comfort food possible on a rainy day - when it came out of the oven bubbling, we were comforted by the knowledge that the heat from the lava-like cheese would keep radiating in our stomachs until at least the next afternoon.

Last night's dessert was also based on the concept of layering, and additionally on the principle of a “whiskey jacket,” although I used rum because it tastes much better. I bought a bag of excitingly affordable pfeffernüse cookies a few weeks ago in the hope that they would taste like mini-lebkuchen, but unfortunately they did not, and instead were unpleasantly stale and chewy. But since they were spiced very nicely with lots of anise, and the only problem was texture, I decided they should be put to use in some kind of liquid-soaked dessert. Because of its alcoholic sting and abundance of raisins, I never liked the elaborate trifle that my grandmother would make every Christmas, but now that my taste buds have matured I enjoy the memory of it retroactively, and the idea of a moist and gingery pfeffernüsse version seemed promising.

Of course, I inevitably simplified things. A food semanticist would probably refuse to call my creation a trifle; it would qualify as a parfait at best. Lacking a trifle dish and the desire to make anything as complicated as custard, I crumbled pfeffernüsse in the bottom of a reusable take-out container and sprinkled them with a few tablespoons of rum. Then I chopped two pears and simmered them in some orange juice and another splash rum, and poured the fruit over the cookies. The dish went in the fridge to cool while we ate lasagna, and when decided to move on from savory things I took it out and topped it with whipped cream (yes, from a can) and a dusting of nutmeg. The pfeffernüsse had melted into a velvety pudding consistency, and their flavor tasted even better without the distracting staleness. Their Christmas-y spices paired perfectly with the pears and cream, and the bite from the rum balanced the sweetness of the rest of the ingredients.

If every night of winter involved such festive spices and dense, cheesy casseroles, the whole thing might be tolerable. Last night certainly gave me the hope and motivation to keep thinking of Solutions to Winter.