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The Monte Rio Diaries, Part Two

August 15, 2024 //
0

My friend S. is a late riser. I live a whole life before she gets up in the morning. I check email. I charge up a computer and a phone. I re-pack my luggage. I make coffee. I say hello to S’s husband G. who gets up even earlier than I do.

This morning I found a bowl of Bosc pears on the kitchen counter. That was the signal to make a baked pear pancake: after preheating a 425 F oven I sliced pears and caramelized them in a cast iron skillet with sugar and butter. While they were cooking I made a batter of flour, melted butter, eggs, milk, vanilla and raw sugar. I poured the batter over the fruit and popped it in the oven for twenty-five minutes. Voila.

After eating I went out to sketch. I’m supposedly taking a sketching class on Zoom, but I tried for twenty minutes to get in. No dice. I had assembled my sketching materials, filled my watercolor pen, sharpened some aquarelles, so I opened my sketchbook and began to sketch the bonsai tree out on the deck. I hate bonsai and feel sorry for them, so I made it a real, non-stunted tree and started filling in the colors and shapes of the trees in the landscape behind it. I used too much water trying to make the colors blend — I tore the bottom of the paper and my pigment bled through onto the next page or so. I left the sketchbook outside to dry and rinsed my brushes in the sink, checked email again and sat down to write. S. is still sound asleep.

I am getting used to S.’s kitchen: the rack of cast iron pans hanging above the stove, the baking sheets stashed next to the piano, the refrigerator door that requires slamming to stay shut. But sometimes I find the unexpected.

After lunch on Monday I was craving a sweet. I asked Sadie what she had. She offered me a chocolate bar and mentioned baking mixes. Nah. I had brought a container of rolled oats from the house I left in July. “I could make cookies,” I said. “I brought oatmeal. Do you have flour?” I knew there was butter and I had sugar.

“I have flour. I have eggs. Do you know where everything is?”

“I think so. I took a tour when you-all weren’t around.”

I found the flour in a low cupboard with other baking supplies and packages of pasta. While I was looking for it, I found a jar of bright white powder. I read the label pasted on the jar lid: “Powdered sugar, pretty much ant-free.” I laughed out loud and have been telling the story ever since.

S. got up. I procured a basket and picked blackberries in the garden. She was having breakfast when I got back. When I got hungry I made a peanut butter and blackberry sandwich: ripe blackberries — nature’s jam.

I had a second one of those the next day for lunch before we went to the river to swim. I swam. S. waded into the water a few times and sat on a towel reading. It was lovely: hot day, cool water, negligible current. The water is lower than I have ever seen it at the river, but I have only been here half a dozen times in my life. I would come back. There are hotels here and everything as well as S’s inimitable hospitality.

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Categories baking, breakfast food, cookies, Travel

Christmas Cookies, an essay

December 31, 2023 //
2

No one makes Christmas cookies like we do.

My mother baked a lot of cookies when I was growing up: Toll House chocolate chip cookies with walnuts, oatmeal cookies with raisins or coconut, peanut butter cookies marked by the criss-cross tines of a fork, snickerdoodles, butterscotch refrigerator cookies, brownies. She had a cookie press and I remember a few experiments with spritz.

When November came each year she chopped pounds of dried and candied fruit and nuts for homemade fruitcake, soaking the baked loaves in brandy. And in December she began holiday cookie production. Her specialty was thin, crisp cookies, rolled, cut and decorated with colored sugar. She made Moravian ginger cookies. She made butter cookies flavored with lemon and vanilla. She rolled her cookies out on flour-sack dishtowels on a wooden cutting board with a wooden rolling pin. The recipes made at least six dozen each.

I don’t know how she did it. I began apprenticing with her as a Christmas cookie baker when I was perhaps twelve years old. The floured cloth would wrinkle. The dough would stick to the rolling pin and tear. Some of the cookie cutters would not pick up the cut cookies and if I forgot to flour a cutter between each use the dough would crumple. The thin cookies had to be watched in the oven, pulled at the first sign of browning. Moravians burned really fast.

My first efforts were lackluster. I would use too much flour to try to control the sticky dough. The room would be too warm. I would not roll the dough thinly enough — usually Mom would take another pass or two with the rolling pin, or even take over, stretching the dough further than I could.

When I was in my thirties, I bought Mom a marble slab and a marble rolling pin to make cookie-making easier. I had read somewhere that working on chilled marble helped keep cookie dough at the correct temperature. She didn’t use the marble much, not liking to pick up the heavy slab. I used it at her house, clearing a shelf in the refrigerator to hold it, putting the metal bowls of cookie dough on top of it. I found it easier to roll cookie dough on marble than on cloth and when a construction crew was demolishing the old Cogswell College building in San Francisco I carted home a piece of marble from the walls. My boyfriend at the time cut it into a baking slab for me.

By the time Mom was eighty, she had ceded thin, crisp Christmas cookies to me. She still made dream bars and Russian teacakes, Rice Krispie candy, poppy seed bread baked in old coffee cans, and fudge. I spent long hours in the breakfast room rolling, cutting, decorating with colored sugar, ferrying finished trays to the oven and then to cooling racks.

One Christmas a friend gave me a silicone baking mat, a tool which made it possible for me to master Mom’s thin, crisp pie crust (Mine had always been too thick). A floured silicone mat will not stick, allowing you to roll thin sheets of pie dough, cookie dough, noodles. I acquired a bench scraper, which I had seen on some cooking show, and a microplane zester. My baking life got easier, although Christmas cookies still required long hours of work.

Somewhere along the line, I invented a third rolled and cut cookie: cocoa shortbread. I had the thought to swap one half cup of cocoa powder for one half cup of flour in a classic shortbread cookie. Those joined the roll and cut Christmas cookie line-up, but did not have to be rolled as thinly as butter cookies and Moravians. Then I read about Deb Perelman’s butter cookies made with maple syrup and nutmeg. I made them one year instead of our traditional butter cookies. My brother and I preferred them, so I swapped the maple recipe for the older one and never looked back.

I added one more cookie to our permanent Christmas cookie repertoire. One day twenty-some years ago, my mother was reminiscing about pfefferneuesse, a cookie they bought from the store during her childhood. Pfefferneusse are traditionally made with ginger, cloves, mace, cinnamon and allspice and candied orange peel. I remembered those tubs of commercial candied mixed peels from the days of fruitcake and shuddered. But both of us like candied ginger, so I decided to substitute that for the candied peel. Later, I started candying my own orange peel and made the cookies with a combination of the two ingredients.

The first time we made pfefferneusse they lacked something. Mom thumbed through some old cookbooks and discovered that the cookies used to contain ground white pepper. I threw some white peppercorns in the coffee grinder and added the fragrant powder to my next batch of dough. That was it — the “pfeffer” in “pfefferneusse.”

Most of our cookies are plain, not frosted, topped only with a sprinkle of colored sugar, but pfefferneusse require a coat of royal icing flavored with anise. I still struggle with getting the icing to set properly and watch for a dry day to make it.


* * *

Fast forward to 2023. My mother is ninety-three and has severe dementia and terminal cancer. I became her primary caretaker some months ago and do not have the time to bake Christmas cookies. I bought some chocolate stars she wanted from Trader Joe’s. We’ve eaten a few, but we don’t really like them: we miss our traditional cookies.

I put out a plea on Facebook, describing our Christmas cookie traditions. A friend offered to send us some cookies, to order them from a local bakery. I began to look at bakery menus. No one made the right things: there was too much chocolate, too many year-round cookies. My friend Kate offered to bake us some cookies if I could come up with something simple. I assigned her Russian teacakes, sending her the recipe that Mom had used for years. She brought them by a few days before Christmas with a small bag of her traditional homemade Christmas cookies. The teacakes were almost right, but a bit underdone and sporting only a thin and mottled powdered sugar coating (What we would consider the first of two required coats). Someone else dropped off first a bag of gingerbread cookies and then a bag of cut out cookies and rocky road fudge. A third friend, an experienced baker, volunteered to bake a batch of cookies for us. I sent her the pfefferneusse recipe and the maple sugar cookie recipe. When no one chose the pfefferneusse, I candied a batch of orange peel, hoping to make just that one cookie before Christmas Day (That is as far as I got with that project, but several of the twelve days of Christmas remain).

Alice chose the maple cookies and brought them by on the evening of Boxing Day, along with lemon biscotti, anise biscotti and stamped gingerbread that she had made. After she had gone, I opened the boxes to look. I found small maple stars, at least a quarter-inch thick, bearing marks of flour, sans decorative sugar. You could stack four of our cookies in the space of one of hers.

The flavor of the maple cookies was good, but, alas, they were not our cookies, rolled so thin as to be almost translucent. The lemon biscotti, however, were delicious. I might ask Alice for the recipe.

After sampling Alice’s cookies and Peg’s cookies and Kate’s cookies, I realized that our Christmas cookies, which I have always loved, are truly special. Other people make thick cookies, doughy cookies, under-baked cookies, when they make cookies with cookie cutters. Some of them apply white icing. I have not tasted a single cookie this season like our cookies.

In the past, only two people have come to bake Christmas cookies with me. The woman who is now my brother’s wife came to learn to bake them, spent a long afternoon with me in San Leandro cutting and decorating one year. She never came again. And an old friend came to take part in the holiday cookie marathon. She enjoyed decorating cookies with colored sugar, but soon suggested we abandon the project and walk to the mall instead. “This is a lot of work,” she said.

Indeed. A more recent friend suggested that I develop a sideline in baking cookies. “I would buy them,” she said.

“Too much work,” I responded, “I would never do production baking.”

At my current age of sixty-five, it probably takes me two days to make the four main cookie doughs and perhaps another two or three days to roll, cut, decorate and bake three kinds of cookies, plus a half-day to ice the pfefferneusse. It is a lot of work, special to the Christmas season: I only make these cookies once a year in a year when I have time to bake. I enjoy baking them and baking them tires me: once a year is enough, but I miss them in years when I don’t make them. Sometimes I pack up tins of them to send to friends or send them home with Christmas dinner guests.

I don’t know whether I’ll get even the pfefferneusse made this year. Yesterday I made homemade noodles and cloverleaf yeast rolls. I have not made any Christmas pie yet (twelve days remember) and I still have to bake my Mom an elaborate lemon-filled coconut cake for her 94th birthday. I’ll make Christmas cookies again though in some less busy year because their absence has taught me how unique and wonderful they are.

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Categories Christmas baking, seasonal recipes

Stone Fruit Crisp

July 1, 2023 //
3

This post is a throwback to my old style of blogging when I posted recipes each week. As I mentioned recently, I am doing a lot of cooking these days, just to get three meals on the table and to provide food that my aged mother might eat.

The hit of the summer has been a simple fruit crisp. I make it with whatever stone fruit is languishing here: I’ve used cherries in every one, along with white or yellow nectarines, peaches, apricots that are too mushy to eat out of hand. You can use plums if you like them (I don’t, but if someone gives me plums or pluots they are probably going into fruit crisp). You can supplement with frozen fruit or canned fruit as stone fruit season fades, but it is glorious right now made with fresh fruit.

Here is how I make it:

I get out an 8″ x 8″ Pyrex pan and make sure the middle rack in my oven is available. I assemble all eligible fruit on the counter by the cutting board, giving cherries a quick rinse in a bowl of water. Keep that bowl handy — you will use it again.

I put the 8″ x 8″ pan on the counter and start slicing fruit into it. I start with cherries, halving them, removing the pit with my thumb and dropping the halves into the pan. When I have used up whatever cherries I have, I cut up nectarines, apricots or peaches into the same pan, in chunks or wedges — it doesn’t matter. I do this until the pan is three-quarters full of fruit — I don’t measure the fruit: if you don’t have enough, you can add a can of sour cherries or peach slices or apricots, or some handy frozen fruit.

When I have cut up all of the fruit I turn the oven on to 375 degrees F. While it heats, I make the topping.

I empty the cherry-washing water into our waste-water bowl. I take the now empty, damp bowl and add

1/2 cup rolled oats

1/2 cup almond flour

1 Tbsp unbleached flour

2/3 cup brown sugar

Dashes of cinnamon and freshly-grated nutmeg. Sometimes a dash of ginger.

Using a pastry blender, I cut in 1/3 cup unsalted butter. That I measure using the handy-dandy guide on the butter wrapper. I blend the butter and dry ingredients until the topping looks uniformly crumbly. I drop the topping by large handfuls on top of the fruit, trying to cover the whole top. It always works — this is an easy recipe.

Carry your assembled crisp to the preheated oven. Bake on the middle rack for 35-45 minutes, depending on how much browning you like: we like ours brown.

Some notes: I use almond flour here because I think the flavor enhances stone fruit and also because it adds a bit of protein to dessert. You can use white or whole wheat flour instead if you like. I add the tablespoon of unbleached flour for binding the topping — you may not need it. I use unsalted butter because that is what we buy. I like cinnamon and nutmeg with fruit. I also like ginger. I haven’t tried cardamom, but it’s only a matter of time.

For me, the level of sweetness in this crisp is ideal. You don’t have to sweeten the fruit because some of the topping sifts down during baking and does it for you. Similarly, the topping thickens the juices. I like the crisp warm or cold. I usually eat it plain, but you could eat it with ice cream, whipped cream, yogurt. I’ve been known to reheat it topped with milk in the microwave, or stir a serving into oats as I cook them. If you like fruit desserts, give it a try.

Just a reminder: I still have openings in my July 15-16 Natalie Goldberg-style writing practice retreat, so, if your idea of a treat is two days devoted to writing, reading aloud and meditation, please consider joining us for $80.00 USD. I also welcome new students to my ongoing Monday AM Practice Group for either July 10, 17, 24 and 31 or August 7, 14, 21 and 28. Each four-week session costs $100.00 USD payable via PayPal at PayPal.Me/yourbusker. Yes, you can sign up for both July and August and the retreat as well if you are hot to write this summer. And no one says you can’t eat stone fruit crisp during your meal breaks!

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Categories baking, desserts

March Transformation: The Ascendance of Thinking

March 31, 2015 //
2

Hello. It is the last day of March and I have moved again: on March 21 I moved out of my mother’s house and back to San Leandro. I am still unpacking things and rearranging them — I can’t remember where everything went last time around, although I remembered the locations of all of the pieces of furniture. As I settle into the house and take up routines of cleaning and cooking I find myself thinking a lot.

These are the kinds of things I think. “I want to make some bread. I don’t have any whole wheat flour. I have oats and cornmeal and molasses and white flour. I can make anadama bread. If I make double amounts of the cornmeal mush we can have cornmeal pancakes for breakfast tomorrow. If the oven is on to bake bread, I should roast a butternut squash from the cache that I grew last year. We can have that tonight with baked beans and fresh bread.” Then I bake bread and roast squash, saving the squash innards in the freezer for some future batch of butternut squash soup. Using the oven to prepare more than one dish at a time is something I learned from my mother in her kitchen.

I think about the garden. Because I am going on a short trip to New Mexico in late April I do not want to start seedlings or plant anything new outside until I get back. The garden, however, had plans of its own. Forty tomato plants have started themselves from the smushed remains of last year’s tomatoes, tomatoes that fell off the huge Sun Gold vine. Many of them decided to grow between the tiles of the only paved area in the yard, although some have reasserted themselves in the soil by the fence where I planted them last year. The largest of the patio tomatoes is now in flower. We will have to wait to see what we get because Sun Gold tomatoes are hybrid tomatoes. I had also planted Amish paste tomatoes and Principe Borghese. It remains to be seen if any of them have come up in the tomato forest. The chard asserted itself as well and formed two healthy clumps in a boggy area near the shed. So far my gardening activities have been limited to weeding, cutting down dandelions and thistles and teasing out oxalis from the stems of the chard. I cut chard everyday to eat, adding it to pasta with sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives and feta or scrambling it into eggs with scallions. I think, eating from the garden, that I would like to plant some lettuce soon, maybe some radishes for variety, and then I remember that I am going away in less than a month and it would be better not to plant anything until I can be here to tend the garden.

I think about what I need and what I don’t need. At certain points in unpacking I declare “I don’t need any more stuff.” Then I realize I haven’t seen my set of biscuit cutters (“Maybe they are in the cookie-cutter tins by the kitchen bookshelf”) or my dough cutter. Because two of my bookshelves sit in the kitchen as a makeshift pantry and china cabinet respectively I have to edit the books that I display on the bedroom shelves. Last time around I consigned the short story collections to the shed. This time I have them out, but I am thinking they will be boxed up once again so that I have room for music books and volumes of poetry. Another strategy is to place books I have bought but have not yet read on a high shelf and to ask Johnny, who is tall, to get them down as I need them. Tomorrow, my “day off” I will face the book-sorting issue: last time I rearranged the books three times before I was satisfied.

When I spill water on the floor I am full of desire for a new, more effective mop and a large batch of cotton rags. When I think of making soup I covet an immersion blender, or, at least, a working regular blender. When I bake bread in conjoined loaf pans I remember the nice set of bread pans I saw at a thrift store in Berkeley and wonder if they are rust-proof and if they are still there. I make mental lists of groceries: whole wheat flour, lemons, sour cream, cinnamon sticks. Whenever I put something away in some inconvenient place I think, “Is there a better place for that in the kitchen?” (or the bedroom, or the bathroom).

As per the last time I moved I cannot find my camera battery on the evening that I write this blog post. If I find it soon I will perhaps add some pictures of the tomato forest.

Anadama Bread

In a saucepan combine:

1 and 1/2 cups water

1 tsp salt

1/3 cup cornmeal

Stir constantly until cornmeal thickens and bubbles. Pour into mixing bowl.

In a glass measuring cup, measure 1 and 1/2 Tbsp of corn oil or soft shortening. Add to cornmeal mixture.

In that same greasy measuring cup, pour 1/3 cup molasses. Add molasses to cornmeal.

DO NOT WASH THAT CUP YET. Into that molasses-smeared cup, put 1/4 cup water. Pop it in the microwave for a few seconds until lukewarm and add 4 and 1/2 tsp yeast. Stir with a fork until the yeast dissolves.

In another bowl measure 4 cups sifted flour.

Either go away and leave cornmeal mixture to cool to lukewarm and then add dissolved yeast OR start adding flour to the cornmeal mixture, which will help cool it. When the mixture is lukewarm add the rest of the flour and the dissolved yeast and begin to knead the dough. You may have to add more flour to overcome the stickiness of the molasses. I like to turn the dough out of the bowl and knead it on a lightly-floured  wooden surface.

When the bread is smooth and no longer sticky, add 1 Tbsp butter or oil or shortening to the mixing bowl and place the dough in it again. Cover with a dampened and warmed linen or cotton towel and leave to rise in a warm place until doubled (over an hour). Punch down. Let rise again (about half an hour).

Grease a bread pan or pans and shape dough. This recipe makes a good-sized round loaf or four small loaves. Preheat oven to 375 Bake for forty to forty-five minutes until nicely browned. Remove loaves from pans and let cool before slicing.

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Categories baking, bread, gardening, home cooking, Philosophy, seasonal recipes, Uncategorized, vegetables

December Transformation: Ghosts of CDs, Ghosts of Traditional Family Christmas

December 19, 2014 //
5

Painting of Christmas cookies on green and red tablecloth.

Christmas Eve. 8″ x 8″ watercolor pencil and white gouache. Sharyn Dimmick

My mother will turn 85 on New Year’s Day 2015. She has begun announcing that this is our last traditional Christmas celebration, complete with tree, wrapped presents, homemade festive meal, assorted guests and family members, cookie-baking marathon, cut boughs of holly, etc. It is time for a change, she says.

I had always assumed that I would step in and take over the family Christmas traditions. For many years I have increased my contributions to the Christmas labor. But, this year, I had an unexpected number of music gigs in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and a wild week where I both attended concerts and played them. I went north to sing on the radio and to visit my best friend. I went to a local party. And amidst all that I stood by to receive shipment of my new “Clueless” CD.

Clueless CD CoverThe CD was shipped December 10 from Oasis Disc Manufacturing via UPS with two-day shipping. The first notification I got said it would be delivered on Monday December 15 (NOT two-day shipping). Many emails and phone calls later I got a notification today on December 19 that it was on a delivery truck. Lo and behold it got here this evening and is available for purchase at long last. here this evening. In the meantime, Oasis offered to re-manufacture the CDs at no cost to me and to ship them this coming Monday. This means that I will eventually receive 600 CDs instead of 300, but it also means that I cannot get them to anyone but locals by Christmas or Chanukah: Now that the CDs  have arrived I will carry a number of them around in my guitar case and backpack. I will also offer them for sale at Down Home Music and at CD Baby where you can get my 2009 release “Paris” and hear full-length versions of most songs, plus clips of the cover songs. Soon I will begin the process of getting full versions of the songs from “Clueless” up on CD Baby as well. For now you can hear a couple of the songs for free on Reverbnation.

What I have learned from this is that Oasis comes through for its customers, even in situations where they are not at fault and UPS — well, let’s just say that my brother who worked in shipping for a number of years recommends Fed Ex for deliveries.

Anyway, as Christmas approaches, my participation has been limited to buying a few gifts (in October and November), and making ginger cookie dough (yesterday). When I feel better I will be making my famous cocoa shortbread and possibly a new cookie. Mom beat me to making pfefferneusse, Russian tea cakes, dream bars, apricot bars and sugar cookie dough, but I might make up a batch of Smitten Kitchen’s maple butter cookies anyway because my brother and I fell in love with them the first time I made them. I will put some Christmas music on as I lounge about today, awaiting the arrival of the “Clueless” CDs and hoping to put in a brief appearance at a music party this evening.

painting of pomegranates, limes and December sunrise.

December Still Life. 8″ x 8″ gouache and watercolor pencil. Sharyn Dimmick

Saturday morning I have one more gig at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, if it does not get rained out. Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning I will be assisting my friend Elaine in preparing for her annual Chanukah party. I will spend Christmas Eve Day with Johnny, eating salad and tamales from Trader Joes, after serenading the morning commuters with Christmas carols. I return home in the evening to rest before assisting Mom with the last Dimmick Christmas feast marathon the next morning. All traditions come to an end, changing in subtle ways before they become part of the ghostly past of memory. No one can remember what year I started buying Straus whipping cream or what year we stopped making homemade caramels or what year I put candied ginger in the pfefferneusse or what year I invented the shortbread.

Whatever you celebrate and wherever you are, I wish you the happiest of holidays. Happy Solstice, Yule, Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa. Happy holidays I have never heard of or can’t keep straight in my head. May you know the joy of feasting, of companionship, of bright light in a dark time, of joyful music. Best wishes to all who read The Kale Chronicles, whether you have been here from the very beginning or whether you just popped in today. May you enjoy your winter festivities and the love of all beings dear to you. Love, Sharyn

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Categories Christmas baking, cookies, home cooking, seasonal recipes

August Transformation: How Cooking Informs Character, What Happens When I Practice and a Vegetable Update

August 31, 2014 //
12

One Thursday evening and Friday afternoon this month two different neighbors dropped by with gifts of pears from their trees. I said thank you and put them on the sideboard. Pears do not keep long unless they are picked green, so Sunday morning after breakfast I started peeling them and cutting them open, cutting out bad spots. Some of them had rotted from the inside out and went directly into the compost can.

On Friday I had pulled a few recipes from the pear section of the huge recipe binder on my bookshelf. Depending on the state of the pears, I could make clafouti or pear tart tatin, but I had my eye on some pear pecan muffins, which would also use the last of the pecans in the shell I had sitting around. I have been eating said pecans at the rate of two a day, cracked and broken and stirred into my favorite summer breakfast of polenta with fresh peaches, mostly because of the time it takes to crack them and pick the meats from the shell and cartilage. Making the muffins gave me the excuse I needed to cover the breakfast room table with newspaper and crack all of the remaining pecans.

I had researched methods of shelling pecans on the internet. Some people boil them. Some people take the to other people who shell them. Some people use side cutters and pliers or build machines to crack the shells. What I learned was that I had been using a nut cracker incorrectly my entire life: I always put the nut in and squeezed as hard as possible —  generally, hard enough to break nuts in half. Instead, a couple of online sources suggested rotating the nut several times and applying just enough pressure to crack the outer shell without damaging the nut. Oh. I was intrigued.

I tried the new method, concentrating on cracking the ends of the nuts — one YouTube video presented removing the ends as the key to easy shelling. I had limited success with this maneuver, usually ending up with the ends of the nuts breaking in the shell. What did happen, though, is that I got absorbed in the task of shelling the pecans, forgetting about time as I turned the nuts, cracked off pieces of shell, pried nutmeat from shell with a curved pick. I forgot my coffee. I forgot my thoughts.

When I finished shelling the nuts and had moved on to another kitchen task — measuring flour, perhaps — I had the thought that if I would take the care in dealing with people that I took in shelling pecans, my relationships would go better — if I retained an open, curious attitude about what would work best and tried to do things gently so as not to hurt anyone. I heard my teacher’s voice, or her teacher’s voice, reminding me that anything you do can take you deep.

Naturally, this insight was fleeting. As I looked for the millet that I wanted to add to the muffins I came upon difficulties: I had to look in a cardboard box that was balanced precariously on some glass jars. The box itself contained other glass jars. Trying to keep it balanced while sorting through its contents, while standing on a step ladder, proved impossible. My mother informed me that the glass jars in the box only contained beans and suggested another location in the cabinet. I looked there with no success and then moved the ladder across the kitchen to look in a bin in another high cupboard. Because I could not see into the bin I had written a list of the contents on a post-it and stuck it on the side, but, when I climbed up, the post-it was gone and I had no alternative but to reach over my head to lift the heavy bin down to see what was in it. I found this irritating in extreme, that my contents label was gone. And, of course, the millet was not there. I said a few words about how I had tried to find a solution and someone else had undone my efforts.

This happens everyday, of course. Someone undoes my efforts and I undo someone’s efforts, each of us not knowing what we are doing that is messing with someone’s solution or desires or plans.

Eventually, I found the millet and put a half cup of it into the muffins. I have never cooked with millet before and it provides a satisfying crunch.

A few days ago, after two months of searching, I found some guitar lessons on YouTube that will help me improve my guitar playing. After nearly two years of busking I am bored by the sameness of my arrangements: because I play many of the same songs everyday I have started to hear what I am doing and to long for other options. Anyway, I finally found lessons and exercises from three different teachers that feature Travis picking, a style that I never studied formally or extensively. When I first found them and played through the exercises as best I could I was ecstatic: the exercises were challenging for me, I had to take them slowly and work to get them right. In my initial enthusiasm I researched tips for successful music practicing and learned that it was more effective to practice twice or three times a day for a shorter amount of time than to use the long sessions I had been using. I also learned that it was good to practice every single day, even for only ten minutes.

Following this advice, I divided my practice sessions. The first time I tried this I was late getting home from work and had to jam one practice session in shortly after arriving home so as to get it in before dinner and have a break before session number two. That evening I worked rigorously on the exercises in session one. What I noticed when I began session two is that I wanted to play, but I did not want to practice the exercises, that, in fact, I wanted to play anything at all as long as I did not have to play by any rules. Hmm.

Today, I was back at rigorous practice in session one. And during session one I noticed the comments of voices in my head. The loudest one wants to tell everyone I know how hard this practice is for me. She wants someone to listen to her. Another one calmly reminds me that I chose this set of exercises and this practice routine to improve my playing and relieve my boredom and give me more choices of how to play. The third voice gently suggests that I take breaks. The last one cautions me to be patient and to pay attention to what I am doing so that I do not practice mistakes.

All during this period from June to now as I transition into a new life back in my old location I have been nursing a few tomato plants and three pepper plants that I started from seed back in March, April and May. I have transplanted seedlings to buckets, staked them, watered them, watched them. They have grown taller, but the tomato plants have a tendency to wilt here in the fog. As of this afternoon I have small green tomatoes, both Principe Borghese and Amish Paste varieties and, miraculously, at least one flower on each of the pepper plants. Let us hope that September will provide enough heat and clear days to ripen them all. I’ll let you know at the end of the month — perhaps I’ll even find my camera by then and add a photo or two.

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Categories baking, fruit, gardening, home cooking, muffins

November Transformation: A Family Tradition, a Healing Hand and a New Opportunity

November 29, 2013 //
26

Painting shows ingredients for turkey-apple stew, plus a border collie.

Turkey-Apple Stew. 12″ x 12″ gouache and watercolor pencil. Sharyn Dimmick

Thanksgiving Day found me with my family in the house where I grew up, preparing traditional Thanksgiving dishes with my mother. At eighty-three Mom still does the heavy lifting, so to speak: she makes the dressing, stuffs it into the turkey. She makes her never-fail pie crust, which we fill with pumpkin, eggs, evaporated milk, brown and white sugars and spices and with sliced Pippin apples (The Gravensteins are long gone by Thanksgiving Day). I make rolls from my Grandmother’s recipe, only pausing to sneak a half cup of healthy whole wheat flour into the dough. Wednesday afternoon we peel potatoes and snap the ends off fresh green beans from the Bay Fair Farmers’ Market and boil and peel chestnuts for the dressing, cook whole cranberries with a little sugar and water. Thursday afternoon I make salad dressing and whip cream while Mom prepares a simple brown gravy from pan drippings, flour and water. We roast yams in the oven after the pies come out, cook the green beans in the microwave and the potatoes on the stove. I scoop the dressing from the bird. Bryan carves the turkey and lays slices on a platter.

Original watercolor painting shows ingredients for apple pie

Gravenstein Apple Pie. 8″ x 8″ gouache and watercolor pencil. Sharyn Dimmick.

At two o’clock we sit down to a bountiful table, the three remaining Dimmicks and our guests Johnny Harper and Art Peterson, who will play music in the living room after they have eaten their fill. This year I am struck by how long this has been our family tradition, how many years Mom and I have made this meal together, dividing our tasks and cooperating to get the food on the table in a timely fashion. We do have skirmishes: I am a careful baker, sifting the flour into a cup on a flat surface, heaping it high and leveling it off with my hand, but I find that I cannot sift easily with my recovering wrist. When I ask Mom to sift, she holds the cup in the air, occasionally shaking it to settle the contents, and hands me cups that I don’t think are full enough to level. We laugh about this later, after I have told her how much I like making this meal with her every year. We are the last two generations of our family and we do not know how much longer we will get to do this together. I enjoy the simplicity of a day spent preparing a feast and the routines we have developed.

The day after the holiday finds me with many fall tasks undone, due to a thirteen-week hiatus with a compromised right hand. My winter sweaters need hand-washing. It is time to start making cookies for Christmas and for an early Chanukah party. Add to my schedule three hours of hand and wrist exercises per day and I wonder, like many of you, how I will ever get everything done. The only answers I can come up with are to keep it simple and to just do the next task, to jettison things that seem too much for this year, as I work to transform my injured hand and wrist to new strength and health.

At the same time as I celebrate old family traditions, a new opportunity has arrived: my friends Maia Duerr of Liberated Life Project and Lauren Ayer of Quilts of Change have put together a Virtual Holiday Faire for 2013, where you can purchase my Paris CD and two original watercolor paintings, plus notecards, quilted bags, coaching services and other offerings. Please visit the Faire to have a look for yourself. Your purchase will help support independent artists and consultants.

Last, but not least, Susan of Susan Eats London, kindly sent me a care package to raise my spirits: she went to her favorite bulk bins and picked out aleppo pepper, dukkah, farro, Puy lentils and Nigella seeds, none of which I have ever used, plus blue cornmeal, fresh fig jam and three kinds of chocolate! I shall be having some cooking adventures in the future. If any of you want to provide suggestions or links for using these ingredients, the Comments field is open. I am thankful for all who enjoy reading The Kale Chronicles and grateful that my hand will allow me to type a blog post for you.

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Categories baking, pie, Uncategorized

Happy New Year, Writing Practice Classes and Russian Teacakes

December 28, 2012 //
29

Dear Kale Chronicles’ Readers and Friends,

It has been a long time since I sent you an update, much less a painting or a recipe. As Christmas Eve turned to Christmas Day I was standing in the kitchen at my mother’s house, baking a last batch of Russian teacakes, a traditional holiday cookie for us, consisting of butter, finely chopped walnuts, powdered sugar and enough flour to hold it all together. I had bought fresh walnuts in the shell from the Berkeley Farmers’ Market on Saturday morning and shelled them earlier on Monday evening while listening to Christmas carols on public television. Unfortunately, I had not consulted the recipe for amounts and had shelled just 1/2 cup when I needed 3/4 cup: as soon as I looked at the cookbook I went back to shelling nuts and wielding my chef’s knife.

It was an all-cookie Christmas this year, supplemented only with batches of Betsy’s delicious Italian Glazed Almonds. I did not have funds available for purchasing gifts in 2012, so I made them, Cocoa Shortbread and Pfefferneusse, Smitten Kitchen’s maple butter cookies, thin Moravian ginger cookies. For several days I busked in the Berkeley BART station in the morning and baked in the afternoon and evening, preparing a silver tray of cookies for my friend Elaine’s Chanukah party, packing a waxed cardboard box with almonds for another. When I wasn’t baking I was borrowing a guitar from Fat Dog at Subway Guitars who kindly lent me a Johnson to play while my beloved Harmony went to the guitar doctor, who treated her for a couple of serious cracks, rehearsing with Johnny for a gig at Arlington Cafe in my home town or giving my annual Christmas music party for which I prepared butternut squash soup, Mexican corn soup, Swedish rye bread and Finnish cardamom bread.

I remember standing at the bread board chopping resinous walnuts, seeing the chopped nuts in the metal measuring cup, the knife blade against the wood, thinking “This is not so bad a way to spend the evening.” True, it was late and I was behind on Christmas preparations, but I focused on the pleasure that a fresh tin of powder-sugar dusted cookies would bring my mother, Johnny (they are his favorite) and my sister-in-law who threatened to kill Johnny on Christmas Day if he had eaten them all. As the knife flashed through the nut meats, as the butter and sugar whirled in the mixer, as I rolled the cookie dough into small balls in the quiet night kitchen I thought how lucky I am:

1) My mother and brother are healthy and here to celebrate Christmas with this year.

2) I have a pleasant and safe home to live in.

3) I have found someone to love who loves me back.

4) I, too, am healthy.

5) My lone guitar has been safely repaired

6) Johnny and I played a gig together in my hometown to generally favorable responses and both ended the evening in the black financially.

7) Friends came to hear us play.

8) My song about our courtship, “Clueless,” continues to be a runaway hit and fun to play.

Honestly, I can’t remember more of those midnight thoughts now. Suffice it to say that I thought of my patient readers who have put up with my long absence from the blogosphere.

Just in case anyone has not had enough cookies over the past month or has never made Russian teacakes at home, I’ll share the recipe with you, slightly modified from that presented in our Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook.

Russian Teacakes

Soften 1 cup (two sticks) of butter — I use one stick salted butter and one stick unsalted.

Shell and finely chop 3/4 cup fresh walnuts

Combine butter with 1/2 cup sifted confectioner’s sugar and 1 tsp vanilla extract in electric mixer until creamy.

Slowly add 2 and 1/4 cups sifted flour, about 1/2 cup at a time, incorporating flour completely before each addition.

Mix in chopped nuts.

Chill dough as necessary. If you work late at night in a cold kitchen you will not need this step (or want to wait for the dough to chill either). Before baking, preheat oven to 400.  Bake cookies for 10 to 12 minutes until some color shows on the bottom edges. Roll warm cookies carefully in powdered sugar — they are delicate and will develop mangy-looking spots where the butter comes through. Let cool and roll again, or sift or sprinkle more powdered sugar to cover each cookie. Store in airtight tins for up to a week or two. (Mom recommends providing other cookies for the family to eat if you want to keep Russian teacakes on hand very long).

Food notes: the fresher the walnuts, the better the cookie. ‘Nough said. If you live in the South you could try making them with local pecans. If you prefer to bake exclusively with unsalted butter you will want to add 1/4 tsp of salt to your sifted flour. I use unbleached flour in these. Mom likes all-purpose. I have never tried them with a whole-grain flour — part of their attraction is that they are snowy white and ethereal. We only eat them once a year….

Painting notes: The reign of the emperor’s new clothes is long. You’ll know I am painting again the day you see a new painting here. Also, it has been so long since I’ve taken a photo that I cannot find the charger for my camera battery. Oops.

Writing classes: I will be teaching a six-week writing practice group on Tuesday nights in the East Bay starting January 8, 2012. My teacher Natalie Goldberg developed writing practice as a way to help people get their real thoughts on paper. For more information, see my ad on craigslist.

Happy New Year to everybody! See you again in 2013. –Sharyn

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Categories baking, Christmas baking, cookies, home cooking, party food, seasonal recipes, Uncategorized

November 2012: Pecan Rolls, NaNoWriMo and Gratitude

November 4, 2012 //
30

Photo shows whole pecan rolls.

Hot homemade pecan rolls. Photo by Sharyn Dimmick, who ate the missing one.

Two of my lovely readers, Smidge and Granny, asked me separately what the theme for November would be on The Kale Chronicles. I said I wouldn’t know until Sunday. Here it is Sunday evening and I have had a little time to think about themes for November. My first theme for November is returning to solvency. To that end I sold some more books. To that end I studied the buskers at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market yesterday, watching to see who was making money and who was not: the guy playing quietly to himself and not looking at passers-by had two or three dollar bills in his hat; the guy who sat in a chair playing the blues with his face to the crowds had a guitar case full of dollar bills. Who do you suppose I plan to emulate when I make my debut next Saturday afternoon? In the spirit of solvency I will be continuing to work with what we’ve got around here: today’s recipe incorporates some of the lovely pecans Lisa Knighton just shipped out here.

My second theme for November is NaNoWriMo, aka National Novel Writing Month. As a NaNoRebel I eschew the novel form altogether and have started another 50,000 word installment of my memoir, covering the history of Johnny and Sharyn, my pitiful finances and my various attempts to make money. I may post an excerpt of it here sometime in November to honor what I am doing (I spent the afternoon at a write-in at the Berkeley Public Library, scarfing leftover Hallowe’en candy and black tea, participating in “word wars” with my fountain pen — trying to write more words than dextrous young-ens typing on laptops — and feeling a little like John Henry meeting the steam drill…). At the end of the day I dropped my pen nib into my bottle of black ink by mistake and was grateful for my garage rag and bottle of water with which I scrubbed it clean, wiped the table and began to remove ink from my hands before going home to knead the roll dough that I had left rising in the fridge.

Which brings me to the third theme for November, always and forever a month of gratitude with Thanksgiving the third week in to remind us Yanks about sharing food with others, helping people and other things that got the Native Americans run out of their territory. My friend Vicki has started a month of gratitude posts on Facebook and it makes me happy to go to her page once a day and think about what I am grateful for: today it was the computer I type on and the apple pie that Mom made last night, specifically the slice of it I had for breakfast this morning with my decaf coffee.

When I was in the kitchen this morning mixing up sweet roll dough I realized that I had not had my hands in soft dough for a long time: roll dough is the lightest of yeast doughs — I can knead a full batch by hand without resorting to the Kitchen Aid with the dough hook. I used to make bread every week. I don’t know what happened to that habit — I just fell out of it somehow, between the demands of sourdough starter and the activities of daily living. I enjoyed having my hands in the fragrant dough, stirring with a wooden spoon, working in six cups of flour, greasing the bowl with a little butter before heating a tea towel and setting the dough to rise.

My pecan roll (and cinnamon roll and orange roll and spice roll) recipe comes from our trusty Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook. I make a full recipe of Sweet Roll Dough, using mostly butter, amending it to include a cup of whole wheat flour for health’s sake, scalding the milk because my Grandmother Carroll always scalded the milk. Before I leave to write at the library I divide the just rising dough in half. I give half to my mother to shape into clover leaf rolls and tell her to transfer my half to the refrigerator for a slow rise when she punches her dough down.

For the pecan filling I look at The Cheese Board Collective Works: they make delicious pecan rolls except for the mornings when some misguided person throws Sultanas or golden raisins in them and I have to pick them out. Repeat after me, “Raisins do not belong in pecan rolls, which are all about pecans, brown sugar and butter.” I take inspiration from their recipe, but not proportions: there is no way I am going to include a stick and a half of butter in twenty rolls. Theirs are good. Mine will not induce a heart attack. Pecans have healthy fat for you; butter not so much. If I use half a cup of butter it will be a lot.

To make your own pecan rolls, procure at least a cup of pecan pieces. Make sure you have milk, sugar, eggs, white and whole wheat flour, butter, yeast and brown sugar and cinnamon in the house. Then proceed with the recipe below.

Pecan Rolls

Proof 4 and 1/2 teaspoons yeast in 1/2 cup of lukewarm water. (If your yeast is sluggish, add a pinch of sugar and a pinch of flour)

Scald 1 cup milk.

Add to milk one stick of soft butter (1/2 cup) and 1/2 cup sugar. If you use salted butter you will not need to add any salt. Otherwise, add a pinch.

Pour milk mixture into a large mixing bowl.

Beat 2 eggs in the cup that you used to measure the milk. Temper the eggs with the warm liquid and add them to the  mixing bowl.

Add 1 cup whole wheat flour, plus 2 and 1/2 cups unbleached flour.

Check temperature with fingers. When mixture is no more than warm add reserved yeast.

Continue to add flour by the cupful until you have a soft but firm consistency. I used six cups total flour today, beginning with the cup of whole wheat and eventually adding five cups of unbleached flour, but sometimes the recipe takes as much as seven cups altogether. You know how bread is.

Cover roll dough with warm damp dish towel and go away for awhile. When dough has doubled in size, punch it down. If you do not have time to wait through the next rise, put the covered dough in the refrigerator and pull it out this evening or tomorrow morning. Let it warm and then roll it out on a floured board into a large rectangle. Roll it thin, but not so thin that it will break, perhaps 1/2 inch or a little thicker.

Let dough rest while you melt 1 stick of butter and stir in 3/4 cup brown sugar, plus 1/4 tsp cinnamon.

Spread one third of this mixture in the bottom of a baking pan (I used a 13″ x 9″ Pyrex pan), leaving a clear border at the edges with no goo.

Spread the rest of the butter and sugar mixture on the dough. Sprinkle on the pecans evenly and roll the dough up like a jelly roll, starting from the short side of the rectangle. Slice one-inch rounds from the log with a sharp, serrated knife and place each roll atop the goo in the pan. Let rise for fifteen minutes while you preheat your oven to 350.

Bake 25 minutes or until sufficiently brown. Then invert carefully onto another plate so that the goo runs down over the rolls. Enjoy, perhaps with a glass of milk.

Painting Note. No painting. I started one but I prefer not to paint after dark. When I finish it I’ll pop it into the post later in the week. Meanwhile I have NaNoWords to type.

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Categories baking, bread, breakfast food, home cooking, Uncategorized

A Homey Baked Lemon Pudding

October 21, 2012 //
30

So, you know I’ve been on a “Work With What You Got” kick for October at The Kale Chronicles. You know that I have been eating rye flakes, rolled oats and granola cooked with dried apples and milk, and then with Tropical Traditions Coconut Oil and peanut butter: when we ran out of peanut butter I substituted cashew butter and somehow breakfast keeps rolling along. So does dinner: Mom bought some black cod at Trader Joe’s on Wednesday and with Johnny coming over for dinner on Friday night (Yay!) I prepared the fish by baking it in a foil packet (similar to the baked salmon I made here) with roasted red bell peppers and kalamata olives from jars, fresh basil from the basil plant on the breakfast room table and a squeeze of Meyer lemon from our front yard tree. I made another round of my version of Shira’s Brussels sprout salad with toasted hazelnuts and dried cranberries, put some red potatoes in the oven to bake with the fish and spent some time in the kitchen with my mother concocting a family favorite dessert, a baked lemon pudding.

Original watercolor painting shows baked lemon pudding and ingredients.

Lemon Pudding. 8″ x 8″ Gouache and Watercolor Pencil on Paper, Sharyn Dimmick.

The lemon pudding began, as things often do at our house, with substitutions: the classic recipe, culled from an index card in one of my mother’s recipe files calls for Wheaties (“Breakfast of Champions”) cereal in the topping. Mom’s search of our high storage cupboards revealed that the orange boxes she thought contained Wheaties were in fact Bran Flakes. Oh. She decided to combine Bran Flakes and Corn Flakes to approximate the missing Wheaties.

I went out to the yard to gather lemons from the tree, bringing in four of the ripest ones I could reach. I asked Mom about quantity. She said, “The recipe calls for the juice of two lemons, but these are bland — maybe add an extra one.”

I zested and juiced three lemons, squeezing each half through my hand. This resulted in just a quarter-cup of juice.

“That’s only a quarter-cup,” I said.

“Maybe do the other one,” she replied.

I juiced the fourth lemon, but did not zest it, mainly because I had absentmindedly cut it in half to squeeze instead of picking up the microplane. Life is imperfect and I one of its imperfect creatures.

I reminded Mom that the topping for this pudding is usually tooth-ache-ingly sweet. I was working on the lemon filling while she worked on the topping and we agreed to scant the sugar in our respective parts. She reduced the brown sugar in the recipe that doubles for crust and topping and I scanted the 3/4 cup white sugar in the filling. The result of the combined sugar reduction was a more delicious pudding than usual, which we ate with the leftover sweetened mascarpone from last week’s strawberry shortcake. I present to you the modified recipe with additional observations in the Food Notes.

Homey Lemon Pudding

For lemon filling:

Juice and zest 2 ordinary Eureka lemons or 4 Meyer lemons. Set aside.

Place in saucepan:

Scant 3/4 cup sugar

2 Tbsp flour

1/8 tsp kosher salt

Stir in gradually:

1 cup very hot water

Bring sugar-flour-water mixture to boil over direct heat, stirring constantly for ten minutes.

Remove from heat.

Beat 2 eggs until smooth.

Temper the eggs by drizzling a little of the liquid into the eggs and whisking with a fork. Drizzle a little more liquid and whisk again. Repeat two or three more times until the eggs are perceptively warm before adding the eggs to the filling and whisking to combine. Tempering the eggs prevents having bits of cooked eggs in your lemon filling.

Add reserved lemon juice and zest to filling and stir to combine. Let filling cool while you make the topping (which also serves as the pudding’s base). At this time, also preheat your oven to 325.

In a mixing bowl combine:

1 cup flour

3/4 cup brown sugar

1/2 tsp baking soda

a pinch of salt (unless using salted butter)

Cut in 1/3 cup shortening (Mom uses part margarine and part unsalted butter)

Add:

3/4 cup lightly crushed Corn Flakes

3/4 cup lightly crushed Bran Flakes (OR 1 cup Wheaties*)

1/2 cup shredded coconut

Press 2/3 of brown sugar mixture into the bottom of a square pan.

Pour cooled lemon filling over topping

Top with remaining 1/3 topping.

Bake for 40 minutes.

Serve with barely sweetened whipped cream (creme chantilly) or sweetened whipped mascarpone. If you use Cool Whip or whipped nonfat dried milk I don’t want to hear about it, although I am not in your kitchens to supervise what you do.

Food Notes: If you have Wheaties on hand you only need a cup of them: they are thicker and crunchier than the other cereals we substituted here. On the other hand, the recipe was formulated for “old Wheaties,” which had less sugar than the current product, so substituting Corn Flakes and Bran Flakes may more closely resemble the original recipe. Bran Flakes on their own lack the necessary crunch, which is why Mom opted to mix them with Corn Flakes here. If you use salted butter in the topping you can skip the pinch of salt — it will provide all of the salt you need. Mom uses commercial sweetened shredded coconut — you can use unsweetened if you like: the topping ingredients provide plenty of sugar! We like tart lemon fillings — if you like yours sweeter either don’t scant the sugar in the filling or use one fewer lemon than we did.

Johnny and I liked the pudding so much that we had another square apiece after breakfasting on scrambled eggs with roasted peppers and cheddar cheese and sourdough toast on Saturday morning…

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Categories baking, desserts, fruit, home cooking, seasonal recipes, Uncategorized
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