Tag: cooking

Not Perfect

~ Katherine ~ 2 Comments

My favorite day of the year is tomorrow and I am coming down with a cold.  I’m at the kitchen table trying to clear the fog from my aching head while next to me steam is rising from a hot cup of tea with honey and lemon.  Another dose of Sudafed waits for me until after I’ve eaten a piece of pumpkin bread.  The baking and cooking is done – one apple pie, one pumpkin, cranberry sauce, pumpkin bread (2 loaves; one to eat now and one to share tomorrow) and pumpkin-corn bread.  This is the holiday that kicks off the baking season for me and for so many others, I’m sure.  I’m already thinking about Christmas cookies.  January and February, I have determined, will be devoted to baking bread and making pizza crust.

Just this week I feel like I got over my fear (rather lack of self-confidence) when it comes to making pie crust.  After reading a few books on Julia Child and then watching an old episode on PBS where she showed her viewers the French technique for buttery, flaky crust, I decided the reason why I like her so much is because she was clearly having fun baking and cooking.  Even her recipes didn’t always come out perfect, but her belief was we become better cooks/bakers when we learn how to fix our mistakes.  And she never apologized to her dinner guests when the meal hadn’t quite turned out as she had hoped.

With the official start of the holiday season, I propose we drop the word “perfect” from our vocabulary.  Instead how about the “mindful” pie crust, cookie dough, bread dough etc.  Rather than trying to achieve perfection, we give what we are working on our full attention.  Use our hands to blend, to knead and to feel how the dough changes and to know when it’s ready…to know it in your bones.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

The Laundry Can Wait

~ Katherine ~ 7 Comments

ImageI am frozen.  I thought I was getting so much time now that my three children are all in school all day.  But I am drowning in goals I’ve set for myself.  Writing goals, cooking and baking goals, volunteering goals.  My kitchen is a mess.  There are dirty dishes in the sink.  Deadlines are swimming like sharks around me.  So much laundry and dust.  New recipes are pinned to the refrigerator.

In the meantime, I’ve made zucchini muffins, eggplant parmigiana, giamobotta (pronounced jum-bought if you are from Jersey) with peppers, onions, garlic, tomatoes and eggplant – all from the Farmers’ Market – all during my private afternoons and all of which my family won’t even taste.

I learned how to make a proper roux and bechamel sauce thanks to Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and from there made a deliciously creamy homemade macaroni and cheese with aged Wisconsin cheddar and smoked gouda (thumbs up from my middle child and from my husband. Although Tang, as I will lovingly refer to my man from here on out, shook his head saying that dirtying three pots for mac n cheese is too much work.  He also added up the cost to make sure it wasn’t cheaper just to buy a couple of boxes of Kraft.  It wasn’t.).

I am writing a food memoir and am working with a teacher/author at the University of Wisconsin through a memoir writing course.  Is this too much personal information for a blog?  I don’t know.  But I will say that I have decided to Go Big or Go Home – to take the Big risks when it comes to criticism or worse, indifference.  I am setting out to either make it as a writer or Fail Big.

And if I don’t succeed?  Then I’m going out in a Blaze of Glory.  Nothing small anymore.

I want fireworks.  I want everyone to know me as the girl who keeps trying, who may be a little crazy and that’s fine with me, because no one ever remembers the girl who always got her laundry done.

A Change in the Weather and Summer Pasta

~ Katherine ~ Leave a comment

There is still a good month left to this summer.  We are finally getting rain in this part of the Midwest.  Thunder and lightning wake me in the middle of the night.  Thunder roars differently out here, I think.  Something with big meaty fists pounds our roof and then rolls away slowly, clumsily over its knuckles, glaring at me over its fat shoulder.

It snorts-Take that, Jersey Girl.

Lightning is fantastic in the big, big sky.   In an instant and without warning, white fills my eyelids like a camera’s flash, transports me right out of a dream and back into the blackness of 3 am.  Hopefully all this rain hasn’t come too late for the farmers who are relying on their corn crops.  After living here now for two years and reading the local papers, this is what I think about.  Maybe the farmers actually sleep better to the sounds of a storm.

Amid all the heavy roar and sharp cracks outside my window, I begin to drift off again.  There’s an old farm house out here somewhere waiting for me.   There’s a hot, orange sun beginning to set over a field, a wrap-around porch painted white wearing pots of lush ferns like earrings, a brightly-colored woven hammock sways gently in the corner.  And just outside a squeaky front gate, there’s a country road that goes on and on.

In the meantime, there is our apartment, a hub this summer for all our coming and going.  A place to hang up damp bathing suits and pool towels, a place to drop off the bass guitar after lessons and a dusty baseball bag after a night game under the lights.  An almost too big table that just fits on an almost too small back deck where we share our summer supper.  Where I notice the dirt still lingering beneath small fingernails and think to myself – Another good day.

A place for me to write, a place for my books and shelves for my cookbooks and food magazines.  A place to make a quick, small meal last night, that-turns out- has big flavor.

It begins with pasta – small penne cooked al dente then tossed with bite-size pieces of fresh mozzarella cheese, fresh basil and juicy tomatoes all from the garden – chopped.  A clove of garlic from the farmers’ market – minced, a bit of salt and pepper, a drizzle of olive oil.

Summer in a bowl.

Recipe adapted from Giada DeLaurentiis