Lifescapes

Green tomato pie

One of my mother's favorite Depression-era recipes was her green tomato pie. Back in Illinois, where I grew up, we ate quite a lot of green tomatoes, usually in the fall, before the first freeze killed the vines. Now, gardening in Texas, I make Mom's green tomato pie in July, because the nighttime temperatures are too warm for the fruit to set.

The pie begins with thin-sliced green tomatoes, peeled and cored (green tomatoes often have a bitter core). Just for the heck of it, I added a couple of sliced zucchini. I sauteed the slices in butter, mixed them with lemon juice, sugar, salt, spices, and flour, and put them into an unbaked crust, topped with pastry. Bill (who generally prefers his tomatoes sauced and won't eat a zucchini unless he doesn't know what it is) thought I had baked him an apple pie. It didn't last long.

Mom's Green Tomato Pie

3 1/2 c. peeled and sliced green tomatoes
3 tbsp. butter or margarine
6 tbsp. lemon juice
1 1/4 c. sugar
3 tbsp. flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. cloves

Saute the tomatoes in the butter and lemon juice until just tender. Combine tomatoes with sugar, flour, salt and spices. Line 9" pie pan with pastry, pour in filling, dot with butter and cover with top crust. Bake at 450 degrees 10 minutes then reduce to 350 degrees and bake until crust is brown (about 35-40 minutes).

Book Report. I'm moving forward with The Darling Dahlias & the Eleven O'Clock Lady--chapters 13-15 this week. I'm hoping to be finished by the end of this month. (If it seems to you that I've been working on this forever, not so. I began it in mid-May. It just seems like a long time, to you and me both.) I'm also making daily entries for another Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days, which I'm planning to author-publish in 2015, if all goes well. In this, I'm following in the tradition of acclaimed journal writer May Sarton, one of my heroes. 

Reading note: If you want to write, if you want to create, you must . . . write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy head.--Ray Bradbury

 

 

The Joys of Cooking

 

For me, one of the great delights of my life as a writer is learning new things every single day. For the past several months, I've been working on the 2013 Garden Club mystery, The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star. Because the books are set in the 1930s, this involves a lot of research--and a lot of learning, some of which I've been photo-documenting via a Pinterest board. 

Since this series is "cozy," foods and cooking are important, and of course there's a recipe section in the back of the book. Since the Dahlias are Southerners (the town of Darling is located in southern Alabama), the foods are regional. And since the action is set in the 1930s, the characters are cooking and eating 1930s food, both at home and in the local diner.

Well. southern food is pretty easy, as it turns out, and the information is easy to get. Witness the large number of hits you get when you google "southern food." And then of course there are the dozens of good Southern cookbooks. Hush puppies, grits, fried green tomatoes, red-eye gravy, buttermilk pie, stewed okra--there's no shortage of great regional foods for Lizzy, Verna, Myra May and the others to enjoy.

But while many foods are timeless (okra was first documented as a vegetable in Egypt in 1216), others are definitely rooted in history. In this case, in the U.S., in the 1930s. Vinegar pie, for example (I have my mom's recipe, clipped from a 1934 newspaper). And "Canned Sandwich Filling," from a 1932 cookbook, which begins this way: "At butchering time take the liver, kidneys, lights, melts, rinds from lard meat, cleaned, bony head pieces, etc. Cook until meat drops from bones..." Spam, anybody?

Let's cut to the chase. In the mystery I'm working on, the Dahlias are creating a party menu, and they would like to serve quiche. But wait! What about quiche? It's French, right? No, I remember seeing it--as a savory pudding--when I translated a 14th century English cookbook years ago. But what about 1930s Americans? Did they eat quiche? Was there a 1930s recipe for quiche?

Well, yes, there was. After a couple of hours of research, I think I've gotten to the bottom of this little culinary mystery. So far as I can tell, the first recipe for quiche, under the name of Cheese Custard Pie, appears in the very first edition (1931) of Irma Rombauer's Joy of Cooking. I'll write more about this wonderful book (I have the facsimile edition) later, in another post.

But for now, let me just say that the Dahlias will indeed be serving quiche--or rather, Cheese Custard Pie--at Mildred Kilgore's party in The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star. And if you happen to have the 1931 edition of Joy, you'll find Mrs. Rombauer's recipe for this dish on page 60. There, she tells a marvelous little story about the "vile tempered cook named Marguerite" that the Rombauers hired when they lived in Switzerland. Marguerite regularly served Cheese Custard Pie "in solitary state." Its flavor "varied with [her] moods and her supply of cheese" and was "never twice the same, as she had no written rule." Mrs. Rombauer's written rule is very simple: 3/4 cup top milk, 1 cup grated cheese, 2 eggs, salt, cayenne (a "few grains"), paprika. Sound familiar?

As I understand it, Irma Rombauer's 1931 recipe for what has become a weekend treat at our house is the first quiche recipe in an American cookbook. If you know of one that's earlier, please tell us. I would love to hear about it.

Reading note: Cook-books have always intrigued and seduced me. When I was still a dilettante in the kitchen they held my attention, even the dull ones, from cover to cover, the way crime and murder stories did.--The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954)

 

Food from the garden: green beans

We love green beans, especially these McCaslan beans, which seem to have more flavor than the Kentucky Wonder I've grown in other years. These seeds came from Southern Exposure. I planted them the third week of August, and they're bearing heavily now. The story goes that this variety was grown by the McCasland family, in Georgia, well before 1900. They're good as green snap beans and as shelly beans, and what we don't eat fresh, I put into the freezer. (Blanch three minutes, cool fast in cold water, freeze.) The plants are open pollinated, so I can save seeds and plant again in the spring 2011 garden.

Tonight, we're having these cooked with ginger, garlic, and onions. Bill always likes his beans cooked longer/softer than I do, so I scoop mine out of the sauce and let his cook a bit longer.

1 pound fresh green beans
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger or 2 tablespoons candied ginger
8 cloves garlic, minced

1/4 cup chopped onions
1/3 cup chicken stock (boullion okay)

Wash the beans, trim the ends, and cut into 2" pieces. Arrange beans over vegetable steamer and place over boiling water. Cover and steam 5-6 minutes, until the green beans are tender crisp. Drain beans and set aside. Heat oil. Add ginger, garlic, and onions, and sauté until onions are translucent. (Watch: garlic burns easily.) Add chicken stock, stir. Add beans, cook 4 minutes stirring occasionally. 4 servings.

Reading note. Weather means more when you have a garden. There's nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans. --Marcelene Cox

Mesquite: Drought Notes #5

One tree that is unaffected by our two-year "exceptional" drought is the mesquite, an important tree in the ecology of our area. So many different species depend on it, from insects (especially bees) that thrive on the nectar of the flowers to raccoons, deer, coyotes, rabbits, and more that eat every ripe mesquite bean they can find. The other day, our neighbor noticed a fox under one of our mesquite trees. Pausing to watch, he saw another fox jump out of the tree, and the two foxes trotted off together. I love the story: I didn't know that foxes can climb trees! There's more about the mesquite here, but I want to tell you about my own adventure with this remarkable tree.

Yesteray afternoon I went out to the garden and collected a basket (about two pounds) of ripe mesquite beans. I picked them up inside the fenced garden, where they littered the ground, safe from the deer and other animals that have cleaned them up around the other trees. I dried the beans in the solar oven (2 hours, about 180 degrees). (Click on the photo for a larger view). Then I snapped them and ground them in my small metate, using a mano. I also tried grinding them in my blender and in the coffee grinder (I don't own a food processor), but stuck with the traditional hand-method, which seemed to me just as fast and considerably more satisfying.

This is what the grinding process looked like. The pods ground readily, to a fine, sticky, sugary meal. The seeds were much harder. With a great deal more effort, I might have been able to grind them too, but I gave it up: everything I've read suggests that the protein and sugars are mostly in the pods. The grinding itself was extraordinarily interesting. The tools--the metate and mano--are ancient, and as I was working with them, I felt a wonderfully strong connection to the uncounted and unnamed women of past times who have used these same tools to perform this same vitally important task: making meal of their wild-gathered or gardened seeds and grains--mesquite, maize, amaranth.

The result of an hour's work: about two cups of fine mesquite meal. It's surprisingly sweet to the taste and sticky with sugars. (As a medicinal, mesquite is under scientific study as a possible control for diabetes.) I've refrigerated it and will make some muffins with it in a few days, when Bill gets back from his trip to New Mexico. I'll let you know how it tastes.

I've been involved with gardening and food-raising most of my life, and I'm always impressed by how much work it takes to make anything "from scratch," whether it's growing and cooking our own potatoes or corn or green beans or chickens or other meat. Making mesquite meal certainly belongs in the "lots of work" category. But while I was working, I was thinking about how dependent we are on our extraordinarily complex, fossil-fueled food production system, and how little capable most of us are at the task of producing our own food, "from scratch." It was sobering thought, and a sobering experience.

I'll let you know how those muffins turn out.

Reading note I don't think we're looking for a single model [of food production]--one size fits all. The problem with our current food system: it is a monoculture economically, as well as on the ground. We have to let a thousand flowers bloom. We want to have many different food chains in this country because some of them are going to fail. We want to know that if there's a problem with organic, that we have local. And if there's a problem with local, that we even have conventional. We’re not looking for the right answer, the single answer for all of us, in all places. It's going to have to be locally adapted. And the more different food chains you have, the more resilient your food economy and the less likely you are to go hungry.--Michael Pollan, NPR, "Science Friday," Aug 21, 2009

Spring garden soup

 

Soup for supper, made with chicken broth (from chicken I slow-cooked last week), sausage, and onions, carrot, kale, potatoes, and parsley from our garden, along with some herb bread I baked in the slow-cooker. The potato crop was disappointing (10 lbs of seed potatoes yielded 10 lbs of potatoes--not exactly a stunning success), but the potatoes are tasty and I've learned some good lessons. I'll plant some fall potatoes in early August and see if they do better. I've also ordered a couple of different varieties, all early. (Did you know that some potatoes produce in a shorter season than others?) I've found a great supplier: www.potatogarden.com. They're easy to work with and their catalog is terrific. This year, I planted Kennebec, Yukon Gold, Bintje, Caribe, Red Pontiac. The Bintjes, Yukons, and Pontiacs (all earlies) did best.

This week in the garden: planted three cane bean tepees (cut from the cane that grows by the creek), then planted pole beans (Blue Lake pole) around each tepee leg. Also planted a couple of rows of soybeans (Shirofumi). These are new to me--I love the frozen soybeans that I get from the supermarket, but stopped eating them when I discovered that it came to my table all the way from China. That's just too many food miles for me. Planted sweet potatoes (grown from slips in the kitchen window) and bush beans (more Blue Lake). We're a little cramped for space, so I'm getting ready to move the fence and expand the garden by another five beds.

Fence? Absolutely necessary here, and in most places for a successful veg garden. There are too many critters, both in town and country, that love fresh beans, lettuce, peas, etc. If you don't have a fence, you'll be waging endless battles. It's a little more work, yes. But definitely worth it.

Book stuff. Worked on The Tale of Oat Cake Crag (still a working title). Slid into Chapter Four but feel that I need to go back and add in a couple of scenes. The main story line is off to a strong start, but the subplots need attention. And since this is the next-to-last book in the series (only 8 Cottage Tales), I have to start paying attention to winding up all the subplots that have been developing over the course of the books. I've never written a time-limited series before: that is, once that develops a main story and a gang of little stories across a definite, planned number of books. An interesting challenge.

Also on the book front, Bill finished the contract details for The Darling Dahlias, the new series I'll start writing in September, due out in July 2010. Nice to have that interesting project settled and scheduled. If you missed the announcement, it's here, where (as a bonus) you can see a photo of our Lady Banks rose in bloom. She was gorgeous this year.

I'll be in Austin and San Antonio this week, celebrating Texas Mystery Month and selling books (on behalf of Story Circle). If you don't have your copy of Wormwood yet, you can get it, signed, and support a good cause.

Reading note. I truly believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live among [is profoundly important]. . . then I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home . . . If we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put . . . then I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of true desolation. --Terry Tempest Williams

Sun Cookery

My new solar cooker, a Sun Oven. I'm learning a lot about the way the sun moves across the sky during the day, and how the temperature rises and falls with cloud cover. I've cooked rice, lasagna, and green beans; baked a loaf of bread and a cake.I always use the thin lasagna, which is easier to work with and tastes just as good (to us, anyway). It bakes perfectly in just under two hours, at a temperature of about 275.

The zucchinis are starting to bear, now that the weather has cooled off. I had plenty of extras (who doesn't?) so I baked a zucchini chocolate cake, with pecans. I used a recipe I found on the web--not only zukes from the garden but pecans from our last year's super harvest. The cake baked in the solar oven in just under three hours. Since I didn't have any powdered sugar, I made a sour cream frosting.

                                                                                                   
Book report. I've started on the next China Bayles--worked on the overall character set, central mystery plot, secondary plots, and started the first chapter. I wanted to get something into the computer before I leave this week for my class reunion in Illinois. I'm doing a couple of book talks and a signing. If you're in the area, you're invited, but please check with the library venues to see if there's still room.

The Tale of Briar Bank will be in the stores on Tuesday. If you'd like a signed copy, click on the link--your purchase through our website will benefit Story Circle. Many thanks to those of you who have ordered through SCN. Your book purchases help us do all kinds of good things that we couldn't do with out your support. Have you checked out our women's book review site lately? Something to be proud of! (If you've already ordered a book, it will be in the mail tomorrow. And I hope you enjoy the dragon!)

For those of you who missed the link, you can find my first post on growing medicinal herbs at Hen & Harvest. Part Two will be along in a couple of weeks. These are easy-to-grow, easy-to-use herbs, nothing at all exotic about them.

Reading note. Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.--G.K. Chesterton, quoted in The Tale of Briar Bank.

Think about this, please: One in five U.S. presidents have died in office.

Crockpot bread

I try not to use the oven in the summer, because it heats up the kitchen--but we still love fresh bread. This is my latest experiment, "baked" in my oval crockpot. The bread that's pictured doesn't include herbs; the recipe does. Good either way, with or without. The jar in the background is hog plum jelly, a gift from our rancher friend Dolly, who gathered the hog plums herself. Bill is still in New Mexico, and I'm afraid I'll eat this whole loaf myself, and probably half that jar of jelly. Think I'd better put the bread into the freezer.

I've spent the week catching up on emails and various small projects. Peggy and I assembled our herbal eletters for September. I wrote an article for Sharon Astyk over at Hen and Harvest--the first part of a two-part piece on growing herbs for your medicine cabinet. I'll let you know when Sharon posts it. While you're waiting for that, you can read an excerpt from Sharon's new book, Depletion and Abundance. (Hey, Sharon: I'm still waiting for my review copy. Hurry it up, okay?) Peggy and I also worked on the new eletter for our Story Circle book review website. If you're on our SCN mailing list, it'll show up in your inbox on Wednesday. Also caught up on the week's entries for my journal book.

Fall Garden report. The temperatures are cooling off, which seems to be encouraging more female blossoms on the squash. I've planted more beans, peas, carrots, lettuce, and radishes, but am saving space for later peas and spinach. The potatoes will go in as soon as the seed potatoes arrive--next week, I hope. Meanwhile, I'm watching Ike. The computer models are split, half taking the storm to LA, half to TX by late in the week. No way to tell at this point.

Several people have written to ask how Toro is adapting to being an Only Dog. Frankly, he's bored. He's a heeler, and he likes to keep an eye on things. When there's nothing to keep an eye on (when Mom is sitting in front of the computer for hours on end, say), he takes a nap on my feet, just to make sure that I don't get up and go someplace without him. Bill and I are discussing the possibility of getting a puppy to entertain Toro. We're not sure that this is the right motivation for getting another dog, but like Toro, I miss the extra doggie energy that's generated by more than one dogs. So we'll see. Still in the talking stages.

Book talks. Bill and I are driving up to Illinois for my high school class reunion (Bismarck High, 1958!) in early October. I'm doing three book talks in the area. You'll find the details here. If you're in the area, stop in and say hi.

Reading note: I truly believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live among . . . then I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home . . . If we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put . . . then I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of true desolation. --Terry Tempest Williams.

Mesquite and Cactus Cornbread

3/4 cup chopped nopalitos (about 2 medium prickly pear pads, available in the produce section of many large grocery stores)
pinch baking soda
1 cup mesquite flour (make your own by drying and grinding mesquite bean pods, or purchase online or in Southwestern specialty shops)
1 cup yellow cornmeal
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter, melted
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
3/4 cup corn kernals (fresh, canned, or frozen)
1/2 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese
1/2 cup shredded Cheddar cheese

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease and flour a 9x13 inch baking dish. Cook chopped nopalitos in boiling water with a pinch of baking soda until they turn a dull green (3-4 minutes). Drain. In a large bowl, beat together butter and sugar. Beat in eggs one at a time. Blend in nopalitos, corn, and cheeses. In a separate bowl, stir together mesquite flour, cornmeal, baking powder and salt. Add flour mixture to nopalito mixture; stir until smooth. Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake 1 hour, until the top is golden brown and a wooden pick inserted into center comes out clean.