Catching Up, With Cake

I’ve been living at the center of the tornado that is student life for the past few months, and this blog has been silent because I haven’t managed to write anything that totally self-obsessed. Anything that isn't focused, that is, on questions about the nature of the self, the nature of our idea of the self, or the nature of what selves can do and how we should treat them, as asked and answered by David Hume, G.E. Anscombe, Sydney Shoemaker, Christine Korsgaard, and plenty of others. I've taken occasional breaks for thinking about Aristotle’s account of bravery. I then try to exemplify that virtue when I return to self-consciousness.

It’s unfortunate that I haven’t been posting, because this student life does not include a diet of instant ramen and dinner-cereal. Far from it. This is Berkeley, after all, and there’s no reason, excuse, or even feasible method for avoiding noteworthy food. And I’ve been experimenting with new things a fair amount – baking, braising, and freezing all sorts of substances. I’m going to try to catch up on the documentation over winter break, and of course I’ll be making countless new dishes to force on all the people who plan to come to town for the holidays.

But before I return to term papering, here’s a recipe to start off with. It’s one of a number of birthday desserts that I’ve made this semester, and the second one to include alcohol as a key ingredient. I find that people appreciate this on their birthdays. It was inspired by this year’s Anchor Steam Christmas Ale, a rich and spicy beer that could count as a dessert on its own. Upon my first sip, I immediately pronounced that it tasted exactly like cake, and promised to make it into one. Most things, after all, are improved by transformation into cake form.

Chocolate Birthday Beer Cake

1 box Trader Joe’s chocolate cake mix

Whatever else it lists on the back of the box, minus the water

Anchor Steam Christmas Ale

2 tsp cinnamon

Follow the directions on the box, but replace the water with an equal quantity of beer, and add the cinnamon. I didn’t frost it, because I didn’t have time to make frosting, and because I like cake better than frosting – especially this cake. But it would be excellent with some whipped cream. Or plain cream.

May Flowers

I’ve been hoping that recent April showers will bring some May flowers. The April flowers have been lovely, but it’s always good to have more.

I’ve been trying to think in general about how to celebrate the advent of May; I participated in some memorable Maypole events as a kid which piqued my interest in all things pagan, and I would kick myself every year for failing to wake up at dawn and wash my face in morning dew collected from some nearby shrubbery. I don’t think New York has any morning dew – and even if it does I’m certainly not getting it anywhere near my eyes – so I’ve had to come up with alternative plans.

Many May Day traditions involve the bounty of flowers that appears at this time of year, so as a small preliminary celebration I decided to bake something florally-inspired. There’s been a jar of lavender sugar sitting untouched in the cupboard for several months now, and spring seemed like the perfect excuse to test it out. Though some people find them too “soapy,” I’ve always liked flowery flavors – candied rose petals, jasmine tea, the violet ice cream they sell at the Jardin de Luxembourg. I was hoping that the lavender sugar would infuse a batch of cornmeal cookies with a substantial perfume.

The final result was less dramatic than I had envisioned, but the cookies turned out pretty damn good nonetheless. I increased the ratio of cornmeal to regular flour to ensure a satisfying gritty crunch, and the buttery flavor of corn (and ten tablespoons of butter) was complimented by lemon zest and a subtle background of lavender. What surprised me most was the texture: I’ve gotten used to baking dense, shortbread-like cookies, and the addition of an egg created the perfect degree of tenderness for pairing with a cup of coffee.

Lemon-Lavender Cornmeal Cookies

¾ cup unsalted butter, softened
¾ cup sugar (I used half lavender sugar and half regular sugar, but using all lavender sugar would probably be excellent)
zest of half a lemon
1 egg
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt

Beat together butter, sugar, and lemon zest until very creamy. Add egg and beat until well-mixed. Combine dry ingredients in a bowl, and slowly add to butter mixture. Form dough into a log and wrap with wax paper or plastic wrap; chill for at least an hour. Slice into ¼-inch rounds and bake on parchment paper at 350 F for 10-15 minutes, until edges are just beginning to turn golden. Remove from baking sheet to cool.

Cheese Cake

Today I made a cheese cake. Not a cheesecake, but a cheese cake. A cheese-like cake. A cake that looks like cheese.

There was an occasion for this cake. It was Mike’s birthday, and his 23^rd year needed to be celebrated in some suitably sophisticated way. And just in time, the perfect plan dawned on me: a cake designed to look like a wheel of brie.

A little back-story: Mike came home from work a few weeks ago with a nine-pound wheel of brie in his backpack. His employer, it turned out, had decided that cheese was now an acceptable form of remuneration for his hard work. I’ve never seen myself in the film industry, but the pay scale does seem attractive.

Nine pounds of brie was almost more than our refrigerator could handle, but we dutifully (and happily) whittled away at the wheel at an impressive pace. Even with our enthusiasm for brie and crackers, brie sandwiches, brie quesadillas, and just plain brie, it’s taken almost a month to get down to the last wedge, and I don’t think any of us will be running out to buy more for a while. So I figured that coming home to something that looked like another huge wheel of brie would make an impression.

For the cake, I used a simple recipe for carrot cake, omitting the pecans in the original and adding coconut instead. Since I didn’t have a round cake pan, I had to do a little engineering to create a circular cake. After baking the cake in a rectangular sheet pan and letting it cool, I inverted it onto a wooden board and used a paper plate as a template to cut out two semi-circles. After sliding them into place, I covered the cake with cream cheese frosting and adorned the top with some customized and very convincing cheese labels, carefully Photoshopped by Chase. A bunch of grapes on the side of the cutting board completed the effect.

I was thrilled that the final product turned out so realistically cheesy, but I didn’t expect to have discovered such a deliciously moist carrot cake. I’ll be going back to this recipe for all kinds of occasions in the future, for trompe-l’oeil purposes and otherwise.

Carrot Cake

4 eggs

1 ¼ cups vegetable oil

3 cups grated carrot

1 ½ cups sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 cup shredded unsweetened coconut

Preheat oven to 350F, and grease and flour a 9 X 13 inch baking pan. Beat eggs, sugar,vegetable oil, and vanilla together. Mix in flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Stir in carrots and coconut. Pour into baking pan, and bake for 40-50 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

For frosting: beat together 1/2 cup butter, 8 ounces cream cheese (both at room temperature), 4 cups confectioners sugar, and one teaspoon vanilla or other flavoring.

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.

Conquering Fears: Bread, Beer, Mayonnaise

A good portion of the country spent the last week preoccupied with tradition as matriarchs, patriarchs, and hosts of all types faced the task of assembling whatever traditions their friends and family require for Thanksgiving. In kitchens from coast to coast, families re-executed perfected recipes for pumpkin pie, followed turkey basting methods passed down for generations, mashed potatoes to the exact lumpiness preferred by the diners present. As with all annual family gatherings, Thanksgiving comes with the spirit of repeating the tried and true, perhaps rearranging the seating at the kids’ table but not changing much else.

But for those of us who don’t go home for the family event and choose to create our own Thanksgiving in our new surroundings, the week involved stressing out over how to do these traditional things by ourselves for the first time. Making sweet potato casserole that doesn’t result in crippling disappointment when compared to memories of Mom’s Perfect Potato Pie can be daunting, to say nothing of the prospect of being responsible for 15 to 20 pounds of poultry tasting good (and not poisoning your closest friends). This was not my first Thanksgiving away from home, but with a few under my belt I dared to try out some of the more intimidating recipes from my favorite childhood Thanksgivings, and conquering fears of difficult recipes turned out to be a theme of the weekend.

This year I was determined to make potato rolls. If I were to make a list of the Best Things I Have Ever Eaten, a lot of those things would have come through the Katovich kitchen on some of the most memorable Thanksgivings of my childhood, and their famous potato rolls would be somewhere close to the top. After last year’s Thanksgiving, I can attest that even though the kitchen has been transplanted in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the potato rolls are just as good. I knew I would be staying in New York this year, but I just couldn’t go more than a year without those rolls, so I begged for the recipe. I was excited when Lisa kindly supplied it, but quickly worried after reading it – it was a two-day process more complicated than my usual three-to-five-ingredient culinary undertakings. And, most terrifyingly, it involved yeast.

But like I said, I had to have those rolls. There were some tense moments surrounding the addition of the yeast (I was extremely unsure of how to tell whether an organism invisible to the naked eye is alive or dead), and there was a considerable amount of hard work. Pushing two large Idaho potatoes through a fine sieve with the back of a ladle in the absence of a potato ricer was not easy, nor was incorporating the required eight and a half cups of flour into the dough. My sister and I felt the kneading in our forearms the next day, but the relief of finding that the dough had risen successfully was comfort enough. The rest of the process was fairly enjoyable: after cutting and shaping the rolls and leaving them for a second rise, we had 48 little corkscrews of dough as silky and light as babies’ fists. The apartment filled with the smell of yeast and rosemary as they baked, and we were proud parents of two warm bags of potato pillows as we carried them in our (sore) arms to Thanksgiving dinner.

On Saturday, Chase and his roommate tackled an even more laborious yeast project: home-brewed beer. Chase made a very successful batch of Weizen a few weeks ago, but an oatmeal stout recipe seemed appropriate for the season this time. Like making bread, beer brewing is not as impossible as it seems before you try it, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Large amounts of water must be boiled, then an enormous bag of grain needs to leach its carbohydrative goodness into that water, different kinds of hops are added at different times, and everything has to be totally sterilized the whole time. The oatmeal stout ingredients produced a vat of opaque black liquid, which we decided “smelled like breakfast,” and is now gurgling vigorously in an upstairs closet. For the next few weeks Chase will agonize over what kinds of bacteria or mis-measurements could have sabotaged his production, but with some luck we will be able to drink the stuff by Christmas.

After witnessing such bravery in brewing, I felt confident enough this afternoon to attempt homemade mayonnaise, which I had been meaning to do for months. Making mayonnaise has scared a lot of people, myself included, I think because of the issue of turning a raw egg in to something edible, and because “emulsification” is such a long word that one assumes the chemistry behind it must be complicated. But it turns out that this daunting recipe as easy as TV chefs always told us it was. I used a food processor (I thought one strenuous culinary task was enough for one weekend) and roughly followed the recipe in How To Cook Everything. I wanted it to use it as a dipping sauce for vegetables rather than a spread, so I kept it fairly thin and added flavor with lemon juice, garlic, and a very peppery olive oil, but in the future I might try a milder and more spreadable version. I imagine this could be done by using more of a regular olive oil and blending it for longer. Of course, I have to get through this jar first, but it shouldn’t be too hard since this stuff seems to work well on everything. Paula Deen always said to put mayonnaise on grilled cheese sandwiches, and I’m glad I had this mayonnaise on hand for the grilled cheddar and fennel pita sandwiches I made for lunch. It was just as good for dipping fennel slices into as I waited impatiently for the cheese to melt. I’ll try it out with asparagus tonight, and maybe mix in a little basil to see what that does.

So the moral of these three stories is, I suppose, dare to do it yourself: search out the secrets to the basics (beer, bread, and mayonnaise being among the most elemental of life’s ingredients) and make an attempt to master them. There will be risks – you may murder an entire population of microorganisms and be punished with flat potato crackers, or inflict food poisoning on yourself and others – but these are worth the potential reward.

The potato roll recipe is classified, but here’s how to make a nice pungent mayonnaise:

One egg
½ cup olive oil plus a few tablespoons (I used the cheapest kind they sell at Trader Joe’s – I think it says “Trader Giotto’s”)
¼ cup very grassy extra virgin olive oil (I used the Extra Virgin California Estate Olive Oil from Trader Joe’s)
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Dash of cayenne
Dash of salt and pepper
One clove of garlic, minced

Put ¼ cup of the plainer olive oil in a food processor with the rest of the non-oil ingredients and blend to mix. Then, with the processor running, add the rest of the olive oil in a very slow stream. Taste, adjust seasoning, and add extra olive oil to desired thickness.

Chinese Five-Spice Brownies

It is widely acknowledged that Chinatown in any city has a distinct smell. Or several, rather: most people would say fish, pet store musk, and, well, sewage come to mind. New York Times olfactory journalist Jason Logan also reports “clay, crabs…and pickled cement.” Those are the outdoor smells, but upon entering any Chinese foodstuffs shop one is confronted with another pungent combination of a million different spices and dried mushrooms, vegetables, and fruits. Plastic bins and ceramic urns nearly overflow with unrecognizable fungi or all-too-recognizable dried fish, shelves stocked with boxes and bottles seem as if they’re about to topple onto you at any minute, and the space seems as filled with scent as it is stocked with goods. Chinese five-spice powder combines the most memorable of those fragrances and the flavors they belong to: typical recipes include star anise, clove, nutmeg, cinnamon (or cassia, a close relative), and peppercorns. Chinese chefs strive to find the perfect balance of the spices involved, and the result is a single coherent flavor with a distinctive earthy depth, and a smell that evokes the memory of every tiny Chinese corner store you’ve ever set foot in.

Five-spice is usually used in savory dishes, but I had used it in a molasses ginger cake with excellent results, and I had read about it being added to chocolate cake recipes. Chocolate is uncontroversially great, but it is easily made even better by pairing it with other flavors. Italians figured out that combining it with espresso magically makes chocolate more chocolatey, Mexicans have created sophisticated hot chocolate by pairing it with cinnamon and complex savory sauces by mixing chocolate and chili peppers. I wanted to see if the Chinese culinary tradition could have something to say about chocolate – but I wanted it to be a quick and relatively effortless test, so I turned to boxed brownie mix.

This experiment was supposed to be about the five-spice powder, but I couldn’t help testing another variable. I’d heard that yogurt can replace the oil and water in boxed mix recipes, and I had a large tub of plain yogurt with an approaching expiration date. So I mixed the yogurt, eggs, and brownie mix together, added five-spice until its taste was sufficiently present (several taste tests were necessary, but it ended up being a teaspoon and a half), and sprinkled in some flax seeds (thanks to Chase I’ve discovered that they’re good in everything, especially strawberry chocolate chip milkshakes).

These brownies are more cakey than fudgey, but I suppose that was determined by the kind of mix we bought (Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate). The yogurt seemed to work, although I’m more of a supporter of Rob Ammirati’s “Add an Additional Stick of Butter to Whatever the Box Says” method of brownie making. But these brownies are not the kind that satisfy a typical gooey-chocolate-thing craving. They are much more interesting – more like an exciting spice cake, the smoothness of chocolate enhanced by a backdrop of exotic smoky flavor. Perhaps not best for a brownie craving, but perfect for a day when you want to go to Chinatown (or China?) but can only make it to Key Food.

Rye à l’Ikea, or Bread From a Box

Since the advent of Ikea, everything you could ever need can be carried home in a cardboard box. I didn’t realize until my last trip that this extends to authentic Swedish rye bread.

I’m not opposed to the idea of Ikea as a food purveyor, and here’s an interesting fact: the Ikea Café in Red Hook is at the top of the list when you search for Brooklyn restaurants by customer rating on Menupages. While I’m sure this is not reflective of any real truth, I will say that Ikea has some good selections and has probably provided millions with their first taste of lingonberry jam and meatballs. I’ve had less mass-produced versions of some amazing dishes at Fika, a Swedish café in midtown, thanks to the generosity of my good friend who works there (theirs are not exactly “Ikea prices”), and I’ve found that the Swedes have figured out how to make food that is rich and satisfying without being stodgy, as I often find German food to be.

Shortly after that Ikea trip, I had another very Swedish day at the Midsummer Festival in Battery Park. The festival was truly idyllic: as we entered we were each handed a bunch of flowers on long stalks, and taught by a jovial blond woman how to fashion them into head garlands with ivy and twine. The lawns were flooded with flowery heads, and an epic tug-of-war game was orchestrated for the kids. People everywhere were lounging beside impressive picnics of potato salad, fresh fruit, and pickled herring on crisp rye bread. The vendors’ offerings looked extremely similar to what people had brought from home – an encouraging sign that it was authentic and carefully produced. We tried korv, a hot dog topped with skagen (shrimp salad with lemon and dill) and fried onions. The skagen was a perfect example of the Swedish talent of balancing richness with acidity (and, of course, incorporating seafood). A cold bottle of lingonberry Kristal was a welcome refreshment after a hot day of trekking through New York. We wore our flower wreaths on the subway home and enjoyed the attention they drew, and I wished that summer solstice happened more times each year.

After that afternoon, I was eager to produce some Swedish stuff in my own kitchen, and extremely curious about how successful the shake-and-pour process can be in producing satisfactory rye bread. Most of us have found that assembling the contents of Ikea boxes is not as universally foolproof as they want you to think, so I had a feeling the bread might not turn out to be exactly as advertised. But thankfully, this ended up being a relatively painless project. The 45 seconds of “vigorous shaking” after pouring the water into the carton were more strenuous than I had anticipated – a heavy, glutinous mass forms fairly quickly inside the container, but it’s important to keep agitating it to make sure that all of the dry mix gets incorporated. Then there’s the question of getting the goop out of the carton and into the loaf pan: a little daunting, but by hitting the sides and end of the box I was able to get most of it out.

After an hour in the oven, the dough (it looked more like batter, actually) had turned into a hot, dense block of oats and rye. The outside was very crunchy, but the inside stayed moist and somewhat chewy. It’s an incredibly hearty bread – not very useful for sandwiches, but delicious with butter and other spreads. It has a rich, nutty flavor that doesn’t really need anything added to make it an interesting snack.

So, bread from a box is a success, overall. Once again, the Swedes bring us good quality with easy assemblage.

Cast-Iron Cooking

Cast-iron cookware smacks of history and tradition. A heavy black skillet always adds a pioneer aesthetic to any kitchen, whether it’s a real heirloom or a recent purchase. And then there’s the fact that it has to be seasoned and carefully maintained: since you can’t use harsh modern soaps, everything that ever goes into a cast-iron skillet seems to add something of itself to the pan – metaphorically, not literally, of course.

I recently acquired a cast-iron skillet, my very first and one that I plan to use for years and pass on to future generations, and I wanted its inaugural dish to be something that reflected the Southwestern roots of the person who gave it to me. I also wanted the dish to be something incredibly tasty, so I decided on skillet cornbread. Research revealed a lot of internet ranting about the rule that authentic Southern cornbread must not contain sugar under any circumstances; fine with me. I also noticed a tradition of using buttermilk; even better. I wanted my first attempt to be fairly plain: a test of a basic template that I could embellish in the future. But because I can’t resist a little embellishment, and because Chase has done an impressive job of doubling the size of his herb plants, I decided this baptismal cornbread would be seasoned with sage. (However, versions studded with cheese, jalapenos, chestnuts, and caramelized onions are sure to ensue).

I used stone-ground cornmeal, and followed a simple recipe from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything (but omitted the sugar to please the Southerners). It would have been even more authentic if I had had some lard or bacon grease on hand, but the melted butter bubbling in the skillet was an appetizing substitute. The whole process could not have been easier, and will therefore be repeated many times: whisk an egg with some buttermilk, mix gently with the dry ingredients and whatever add-ins you’re using, then pour into the butter-coated skillet and bake for about 30 minutes.

The result had an airy texture but was full of dense, corny flavor, with a rustic coarseness from the cornmeal and an earthy perfume from the sage. The searing hot surface of the pan created a lacy crust of crackly cornmeal. It was perfect on the side of a bowl of “Austin-style” black beans seasoned with chipotles in adobo and lime. It was also perfect crumbled over the top of said beans, and as a utensil for wiping up the last of the spicy sauce a few minutes later. And I imagine it will be perfect with butter and honey as a midmorning, afternoon, (and/)or evening snack.

So the verdict on cast-iron cookware is certainly a positive one. This skillet could crush all of my flimsy K-Mart non-stick pans in any kind of cook-off – both literally and metaphorically.

Skillet Cornbread with Sage

1 ½ cups coarse-ground cornmeal
½ all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
1 ¼ cups buttermilk
1 egg
4-5 sage leaves, chopped
2 tablespoons butter

Preheat the oven to 375 F. In a large bowl, mix together the cornmeal, flour, salt, baking powder and chopped sage. In another bowl, whisk the egg with the buttermilk, then add to the dry ingredients and stir until combined (I used a spatula for this, but I think a whisk would do it more efficiently). Melt the butter in the skillet, and swirl it around to coat the sides. Pour the batter into the skillet and even it out with a spatula. Bake it for 30 minutes, until the edges are golden brown and pulling away from the sides.

Flapjacks

My mother never baked anything until several years after I moved out of the house. With the exception of a few school picnics for which she created some very damp meringues, her food production was limited to one-step “dishes” like grated carrots, frozen TV dinners, and toast. But for some reason, with both of her children away at college, she has become a mass-producer of all kinds of homemade jams, cakes, and ice creams.

When it comes to baked goods, my mother has mainly stuck to her English roots, with butter-infused recipes that my grandmother has always made expertly. But although my mother has come to embrace culinary projects with multiple steps and ingredients, she is still reluctant to actually follow recipes, even when they are right in front of her. This is why each batch of one of her signature dishes, oat cookies called flapjacks in England (nothing like the pancakes we Americans associate with that name), turns out radically differently.

Flapjacks are a bar cookie (although in England they’re “biscuits,” of course), typically made with rolled oats, butter, brown sugar, and sometimes a sticky binder like honey or golden syrup. Beyond that, people often add nuts, dried fruits, or chocolate, and they can be made crispier, stickier, or chewier depending on your preference. We tend to mix in whatever cereal needs to be finished, for a crunchier effect. If you cook like my mother, you can achieve all these effects in turn just by “following” a single recipe.

A word of warning: the combination of fat and sugar in these cookies creates a flavor that speaks to our evolutionarily encoded desire for, well, fat and sugar, and they can be so addictive that you find yourself totally incapable of not eating an entire plate of them. You start to feel like you have ingested a stick of butter (and you’re probably well on your way), but if there are more flapjacks in front of you, or even in a tin on the top shelf that’s meant for a party tomorrow, you simply can’t say no. I’ve seen it happen many times – my mother will offer around a plate of seemingly innocent oat bars, and suddenly people don’t know what’s happening to them. I call it Flapjack Madness.

My mother’s recipe follows, with my interpretation of her personal techniques in parentheses.

English Flapjacks

4 oz butter

2 oz rolled oats

2 oz. self-raising flour (my mother uses pancake mix)

4 oz. brown sugar

1 tbsp. molasses or golden syrup

3 oz. any kind of crushed corn flakes or cereal (whatever cereal people haven’t been eating fast enough)

2-3 oz. raisins and/or sultanas

2-3 oz. nuts (walnuts, almonds, pecans, hazelnuts) to taste

Melt the butter and mix with molasses and sugar. (Perhaps it doesn’t seem buttery enough. Add a few more tablespoons.) Stir in rest of ingredients. (Forget whether you’ve added the flour. It should be obvious, but somehow…it isn’t. Oh well, nothing wrong with them being extra buttery. Add some more cereal just in case; no one likes this kind for breakfast anyway.) Spread in greased square 9-inch pan. The trick is to spread it thinly enough to get crisp without disintegrating into crumbs. (But don’t worry about it too much, crumbs are still edible.)

Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes. (Or take them out when you suddenly remember you put them in before doing several loads of laundry, after you realize you have no idea what time you started anyway.) Score into squares about 5 minutes after taking out of the oven. (Observe results. Are they crunchy? syrupy? oozing with butter and golden syrup? Don’t dwell on how the choices you made on this particular occasion might have affected the outcome. Then you’d learn something to apply to the next batch, and that would make life less interesting. Just eat them.)