Dessert

Once upon a time, I was six. And once, even, I was eight.
But never before have I been a parent of a six-year old and an eight-year old,
and I have to ask, does it have to be so full of yelling, screaming, crying,
and other forms of conflict? And I’m just talking about Santa Maria and
myself—just kidding. But seriously, did kids always fight this way, this often?

Now, I’m not blind, and I’m not an idiot, so I know I bear some
responsibility. If the 1971 film “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” is
to be believed, mothers and fathers are to blame when their children are brats,
though I don’t happen to know any brats myself.

Around the dinner table, things often come to a head, especially
when dessert is served. Santa Maria recently made a quick strawberry-and-rhubarb sort of compote with biscuits, and the children went to war over who was getting more
biscuits, or who was getting bigger biscuits, or some other earth-shattering
slight. Their yelling took all the sweetness out of the moment.

Later, Santa Maria was distressed, and she told me privately
in the kitchen that she couldn't be happy when everyone in the family was
fighting. She looked up at be dolefully, and asked if I could be happy in
situations like this. I didn’t have the heart to tell her then that it was
actually the only way I knew how to be happy. Growing up, my parents yelled at
each other and my siblings routinely violated the Geneva Conventions when they
were supposed to be babysitting me.

Despite (well, actually, because of) the intermittent
conflagrations, we’re working hard around the table and house to defuse the
fighting, to cease the yelling, and drain the swamp of anger. It’s a slow process. At our
best moments, we work together to have a family meeting once a week (if you
haven’t checked out Bruce Feiler’s “The Secrets of Happy Families,” which goes
into detail about family meetings, I suggest you do so right away; it’s a very
useful book).

Santa Maria decided to make this dessert because she was
looking for something that was easier and a bit more healthy than pie. It’s
basically a pie filling, without the crust. I dubbed it, with deepest
affection, “Ugly Pie” (and that was before the fighting started).

If you wanted to fancy this up, you could top the biscuit
with the compote and then cover it with whipped cream. You’d have a pretty
decent dessert then and there. This recipe is a bit of a work-in-progress, and
you might want to play around a bit with the biscuit part of it. The compote,
on the other hand, is just perfect. Consider making that and putting it over
vanilla ice cream. Just don’t fight over it.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Ugly Pie

• 2 cups hulled strawberries
• 2 cup rhubarb
• 1/3 cup sugar
• a light 1/4 cup tapioca
• 1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice

Mix together ingredients, and let sit 15-20 min (or you'll
have little hard nubbins of tapioca)

Place in 10" glass pie pan or casserole

Make biscuit batter:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

• 2 cups flour
• 1 Tablespoon sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Sift ingredients 3 times

Then cut in 4 Tablespoons butter

Quickly stir in

• 1/4 cup milk
• 1/4 cup ice water

Until it sticks together

Drop/form into little 2-3 inch blobs on a cookie sheet and
bake for 15-20 minutes

Bake the fruit for 30-40 minutes.

Drop biscuits in the cooked compote, if Ugly Pie is desired. Serve with
compote over the biscuit, if so desired. Whipped cream works in both cases.

Life, love, and marriage all work in weird and mysterious ways.
I’m old enough to know this, and young enough to find it captivating, so when
Santa Maria told me she wanted to go see the Nature Theater of Oklahoma at the
Public Theatre, I didn’t bat an eye. “This is why I married her,” I said to
myself, “because she’s kooky,” thinking also, “What on earth would a nature
theatre be doing visiting New York City?”

Well, the joke was on me—the Nature Theater of Oklahoma is a
very local (i.e. downtown) ensemble company that gets its name from “last
chapter of Kafka’s unfinished novel ‘Amerika’,” according to this Bomb Magazine
interview with the founders.
Its latest production, “Life and Times: Episodes 1-4,” is a ten-hour affair,
which can be seen either in one marathon session, where food is served, or in
various single-night episodes.

The show is described on the Public Theatre’s website as a “person's account of their own life from earliest memory through adolescence.”
The Daily News goes into more detail: “Specifically, it’s the life of Kristin
Worrall, a Nature Theater member. The show’s text – including countless
utterances of “um,” “like,” “yeah” and “haha” – is drawn from phone chats
between her and Pavol Liska, who founded the company with his wife, Kelly
Copper.” If you want to read more about what that might
mean, Hilton Als gives it a rave review on The New Yorker’s website.

Personally, I was less interested in the production than in
making Santa Maria happy. If she wanted to go see the Nature Theatre of
Oklahoma on Mars, I would have built her a rocket. So, I did what could to get
her tickets, and through the generosity of the company, a pair were set aside
for her. All she had to do, in exchange, was to make the brownies that are
served during the marathon sessions. The recipe comes from Worrall herself, which
means that even if you don’t get to the show, you can still experience a little
bit of the drama and excitement nonetheless. Just make the brownies. Here’s Santa Maria’s full report, followed by the recipe, which Worrall has generously offered to share, both in single batch form and expanded to feed 900 folks.

Warning:  this post is
full of extreme opinions, proceed with caution.

Unlike Stay at Stove Dad, I am a passionate baker and sweet
tooth.  I am picky about books, men, and
baked goods and I am extremely picky
about husbands and brownies. I waited a long time to marry (in dog years I
would have been nearly 300) and I never, ever buy brownies (because to do so
results too often in heartbreak).  I
never even bake brownies, for I have never found a recipe that is really good,
let alone great.

But this is a great
brownie recipe, and I only baked it as a small gesture of thanks for
tickets to the show, for which I am grateful. It is straightforward, and,
actually, very easy.

The aroma of these brownies is enough to drive your neighbors
delirious.  Luckily, if you cut modest,
2” squares, you’ll have plenty to share. 
I sent sending care packages to SASD’s work friends, two dear friends –
one down the block, one visiting from Northampton, and to two neighbors.

Give yourself at least 30 minutes to cool the chocolate/butter
mixture.  (I usually cavalierly disregard
directions, but I was too worried about making the brownies “heavy and dry” to
risk it). One note: You don’t need to use a double boiler for the melting of
the chocolate if you have a VERY low ‘melt’ setting on your stovetop.

I adapted it a few ways: I didn’t have instant espresso powder
(and had no desire to buy an entire container of it) so I used finely ground,
organic “Love Buzz” coffee. I used regular (Maldon) sea salt.  And I
used old-school Baker’s unsweetened chocolate squares along with Green and
Black’s 70% organic dark chocolate.  All other ingredients are organic. 

Be careful to follow temperature and timing directions closely –
your knife should come out mostly clean (from the center when testing
doneness), but okay to have a tiny bit of adhesion of the batter.  I think the 1 T of coffee is a key
ingredient.

Kristin Worrall’s Nature Theatre of Oklahoma Brownies

• 4 oz. unsweetened chocolate
• 2.5 oz. semi-sweet chocolate (Callebaut is my favorite)
• 1/2 cup plus 2 T butter 
• 4 large eggs
• 1/2 t sea salt
• 1 t vanilla
• 1 T instant espresso powder
• 2 c sugar
• 1 1/4 c all-purpose flour
• 3/4 t baking powder
• 1 T coarse vanilla sea salt

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and line a 13×9 baking pan with parchment paper.

Melt butter and chocolate together in a double boiler. Let this mixture cool before using; if you don't, the brownies will be heavy and dry.

In a small bowl combine the flour and baking powder.

Beat the eggs together in a large bowl until light and foamy. Add the salt, vanilla, and espresso powder. 

Continue beating while gradually adding sugar.

Stop beating and manually combine the chocolate mixture to the eggs with a few swift strokes using a large spoon or spatula.

Before the mixture is uniformly colored, fold in the flour/baking powder mixture until just barely dispersed.

Add to pan, and bake for 25 minutes, rotate pan and sprinkle top of brownies with coarse vanilla sea salt.  Bake for another 10-15 minutes or until done.

And in case you need to make a bigger batch, here's the ingredient list converted to make 900 brownies (which is how many Worrall made for the NTOK Marathons):

Much like the inner workings of a marriage, a good cherry pie is a bit mysterious to me, being both sweet and tart, if you know what I mean.
I’ve never had much of a sweet toot (the only times I had candy growing up was
once-in-a-blue-moon on summer vacations, when I got to buy a pack of Bubblicious,
and on certain Sundays when my folks would reward good behavior in church with
a pack of Lifesavers), so desserts aren’t really my thing. Santa Maria seems to
have come out of childhood with a different set of expectations (her mom’s idea
of dessert is a good pie; she keeps homemade ones in the freezer to this day),
and she is in charge of the pie making in our house. Her cherry pie is a wonder to behold.

One thing makes her cherry pie special, and that is the
cherries. This sounds like a tautology, but I can explain. The cherries are
tart, and not sweet, and they are packed in water. These tart cherries are only
slightly less hard to find around New York, it seems, than an affordable apartment.  We once had a dinner
party years ago, and asked some friends to bring some. They scoured the gourmet
store Dean & Deluca, only to arrive with a pretty glass jar of something
completely other than the vaunted tart cherry. We did without pie that night.

As hard as the tart cherries are to find, Santa Maria’s dad has a line on them. He picked up some from the Oregon Fruit Products
Company at his local grocery store (and you can find them here, on the
internet, too), and when we were down at their house for the holidays, Santa
Maria made a cherry pie for him for his birthday. It’s his favorite.

Santa Maria’s Scrumptious Cherry Pie

• 2 cans tart cherries packed in water (15 oz. cans)
• juice of ½ lemon (fresh)
• ½ cup juice from cherries
• 2/3 cup sugar
• ¼ cup tapioca
• ½ teaspoon cinnamon

For the 9” pie crust (for a top and bottom crust)

• 2 c. flour (pastry flour, without germ makes it more tender)
• 2/3 c. butter
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 4 Tablespoons ice water

Make pie crust this way:

Mix flour and salt. 
Add butter. Use a pastry cutter (or two knives) to cut butter into the
flour, until the butter is the size of peas. 
Gradually add the water (1 T at a time) and mix gently with a fork until
it gathers into a ball.  Divide into two
balls. You can gently press dough together with a piece of wax or parchment
paper.  Press down so that each ball
forms a hockey puck like shape.  Chill
for an hour; roll out dough and place in a (preferably) glass pie pan.  If you roll out the crust before the filling
is ready, put them back in the fridge so that the butter lumps don’t melt.  The little yellow blotches you see in your
crust are pockets of butter and what make it flaky and delicate.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. 

Drain cherries, reserve juice.  Add lemon juice, reserved cherry juice,
sugar, tapioca, and cinnamon to the cherries. 
Let sit 15 minutes (don’t skip this step or you’ll have little hard
pebbles in your pie of the unsoftened tapioca). 
Pour into the crust.  Place top
crust on top and crimp the edges (this is fun! You can use your thumb and
forefinger with a pinching motion, or use a fork).

Cut some air vents in the top crust to let out steam. 

Sprinkle 1 teaspoon sugar on top. 

Bake at 425 degrees for 20 minutes, then reduce heat to 350
degrees and finish baking another 30 minutes. 
Ovens are rather temperamental and you should check to see that the
crust is getting golden – a good reason to use a glass pan (though it’s fine to
use aluminum or ceramic if that’s what you have on hand).

Notes: She says, “Even though I have a sweet tooth, I like
my fruit pies on the tart side.  If you
don’t, you may want to use ¾-1 cup of sugar. 
It is imperative that you serve this pie hot from the oven (oh, let it
sit 10 or 15 minutes) with a dainty dollop of vanilla ice cream.” Also: “I
prefer using organic ingredients and I encourage you to do so as well if you
can afford it.” 

Additional Note: If you are scared of making a pie crust, Santa Maria says it will work fine with a commercially available pie crust. The filling is so good, that I would say it would be worth trying. Here's how it looks. Yum!

I think 2013 is going to be a year of changes and
improvements in life around the Stay at Stove Dad household. Just look at what
we’ve accomplished already: only a week has gone by in January, and we have finally
fixed our oven. Yes, Virginia, there is a Jenn-Air service company that can
stick to its word.

The saga of the broken oven is last year’s story. We now
have a working one, and that is a wonderful thing. I’m even planning on having a dinner party later this week.
I didn’t know how much I missed the oven until Saturday. I had gone out for a
run, and Santa Maria had been busy while I was gone. She made gingerbread
cookies, and when I came back into the apartment, the first thing I smelled was
the sharp and sweet scent of the cookies baking. Here’s the recipe,
photographed from an ancient cookbook belonging to Santa Maria’s mother.

I hope 2013 is a year of great improvements for you, too.  Making these cookies is an easy way to
start. Enjoy!

wanted the mouth wanted the mouth of the Jack O' Lantern to say "Boo!" Like everyone over the past few days, I did the best I could. And here is something sweet, if that's what you need now.

Quick and Easy Pumpkin Custard Dessert

• one 15 oz. can pumpkin
• 2/3 cup 1% milk (or whole or skim)
• 2 eggs
• 1 t cinnamon
• 1/2 t nutmeg
• 1/4 t ginger
• 1/4 t cloves
• 1/4 t salt
• ¼ cup sugar

Combine all the ingredients in a 9-inch pie or tart dish. Or use individual ramekins. This will probably make about twelve, three-inch ramekins.

Bake approximately 30 minutes in oven at 350 degrees.  Let cool 10-15 minutes. Garnish with whipped cream.

and the kids were away, I have to say, life
around the kitchen was very easy. I had forgotten what it was like just to cook
for myself. It was so easy that I almost (and just almost) didn’t know what to
do with myself.

I don’t know what it might be like for you (if you are a
parent), but for me, my mind is never fully my own. It is split right down the
middle, with one part belonging to me, and the other belonging to my family.
I’m always thinking about my kids no matter where they might be or what they
might be doing. I didn’t have any responsibilities last week, other than to
myself, and yet I still didn’t have a unified consciousness. In the back of my
mind, a constant script was running, along these lines: “Is there enough milk
in the house? Do we need bread? What will the kids eat for dinner any given
night?”

Now that Santa Maria and kids are back, I’ve ramped up the
cooking. This morning, I made a few weeks worth of Bolognese, Black Beans, and
Dhal. If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time, you know that’s
how I do it: Cook, cook, cook. Cook to freeze. Cook and have dinner ready by
lunch. Cook to breathe.

But life around my kitchen is not all daily grind. Man does
not live by soups and stews alone. A few weeks ago, in July, after our trip to
High Hampton, I was feeling so well rested and relaxed that I did something
very special (at least for me): I did a bit of baking.

At dinner one night down at High Hampton they served pound
cake for dessert. Nina was very taken by it, and when we came home I came
across an old newspaper clipping from the Dining section of the New York Times.
It had a recipe for a Lemon Pound Cake from an esteemed chef. It looked rich. It
looked delicious. (Full disclosure: one of my potentially habitual weakness is
buying and eating slices of those NYC deli pound cakes that are so moist and
yummy). It looked irresistible. I waved the clipping around and told Nina that
could make it for her.

Then I read the recipe. It was so complicated that there was
no way I could make it. It involved a lemon-syrup bath. A Lemon-syrup bath?
What was I thinking? I don’t have much experience baking, so I checked with
Santa Maria. She rolled her eyes, and confirmed my suspicions.

But I still wanted to make a pound cake. I figured the “Joy
of Cooking” would be a good place to look, and sure enough it had a recipe that
passed two important tests: I thought I could do it, and Santa Maria agreed. 

Whenever working with a new recipe, it’s important to a
couple of things before starting. 
The first is to read the recipe through all the way, at least a couple
of times. The second is to make sure you all your ingredients ready before beginning.
So I lined everything up.

Until I made a pound cake, I didn’t understand what was in
it, or were its name came from. It has a pound of butter. (The first recipes
had a pound of butter, a pound of flour, a pound of sugar, and a pound of eggs,
according to “The New Food Lover’s Companion.). A pound of butter is a lot of
butter. A whole lot. I was glad I knew there would be other people around to
eat the cakes. That weekend we were visiting friend and also going to a dinner
party. I could share one loaf with my friends, and bring the other the dinner
party, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The head note in the “Joy of Cooking” included a little line
about creaming the batter “An electric mixer is a true aid for creaming this
batter,” but I think it misses the point. Being new to baking, I was shocked by
the first step. “Cream 2 cups butter, no substitutes. Add slowly and cream
well: 2 cups sugar.” The thing that shocked me was how good butter and sugar
taste together. I almost stopped completely at after this step. What was the point
in going on?

But then I filled the cake pans, and put them in the oven.

One pan had a little bit more batter than the other, and it
took a few extra minutes to make sure the larger loaf was cooked through. The
old knife in the dough trick worked well. When it came out dry, it was done. We
took them to our friends, and we took them to the dinner party. Everywhere we
went, folks enjoyed the cakes. I wish I had the time and energy to make them
again soon, but on the other hand, it’s good that I’ve been busy cooking other
things for my family. All that butter can’t be good for anyone. At least not
all the time.

The girls and I made the pound cakes together. Working with them might not have made things easier for me, but they sure made things better. I don't think I would have been inspired to make the cake without Nina's initial enthusiasm. Easy is overrated. 

Lemon Pound Cake (adapted from “Joy of Cooking”)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.

Have all ingredients at room temperature before starting,
about 70 degrees.

• 2 cups butter
• 2 cups sugar
• 9 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• ½ teaspoon organic lemon extract
• 4 cups cake flour
• ½ teaspoon cream of tartar
• ½ teaspoon salt

Cream the butter and the sugar.

Beat in the eggs one at a time.

Beat the batter well after the addition of each egg.

Beat in the vanilla and the lemon extract.

Sift the flour, and resift with the cream of tartar and
salt.

Add the sifted ingredients slowly, at the lowest speed,
mixing only until thoroughly blended.

Pour the batter into a creased tube pan or into two greased
loaf pans lined with parchment paper or into a greased and floured hinged loaf
pan.

Bake the cake for about 1 hour for pans; 15 minutes longer
for tube pan.

Note: To make the cake fluffier, separate the egg yolks from
the whites. Add the yolks only per the instructions for the eggs above. Whip
the whites until stiff but not dry and fold them in as the very last step
before pouring the batter into the pans. I have not tried it this way, but it
sounds good. I did it the original, dense way, and it was delicious. 

, and in the spirit spreading more joy, I asked her to write about the desserts she made on Friday.

I'd say that I'm the Jack Sprat of desserts, but I have been know to make one or two. And Santa Maria does far more than just bake and make chocolate sauce. She makes kale chips, and does homework with the kids. Here's her post:

I love treats, I love hanging out with my girls, and I love Stay at Stove Dad.  After a very hectic work week, by Friday afternoon it was time to enjoy the lazier rhythms of summer vacation. The girls and I decided to bake Scotch Shortbread and make a fresh blackberry tart to welcome Stay at Stove Dad home and give him another use for a delicious but neglected container of crème fraiche that's been hanging around the fridge.

The shortbread recipe is quite similar to the pate sucree recipe in many of our cookbooks, so I decided to make one batch of shortbread, then use 2/3 of the dough to make thinner shortbread squares (I prefer them not too doughy, tender in the center, crispy on the outer edges); and then to use 1/3 of the recipe as the pate sucree for the tart (just needs the addition of half a beaten egg).

If this sounds complicated, it is NOT.  It is VERY EASY!!  If you’ve got the butter softened in advance, it will take you FIVE MINUTES.  Really.  Yum!!  We had so much shortbread we took happy packages to two of our neighbors, Cyd and Ivy, and Ivan and Sandy.

It was good to hear from Jordan S. that he loved the Dutch Baby recipe and that it was a big hit with his family – and it inspired me to share some more recipes for my favorite treats. 

Scotch Shortbread (Joy of Cooking)

• Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
• 1 cup butter (ie 2 sticks)- warm to room temperature, approx. 70 degrees, so it’s easy to cream but not melting
• 2 cups flour (I sift it directly over the creamed butter)
• ½ cup confectioners sugar (also sifted directly over the butter)
• ¼ teaspoon salt.

Blend the ingredients together then press into an ungreased 9×9 pan  ***I used only two thirds of the batter for these.***

Prick the top with a fork (see picture).  If the fork is lifting up the dough, dip it into cool water between pricks.

Bake for 30 minutes.  Sprinkle, if you wish, with a tiny bit of powdered sugar.

Pate Sucree Tres Vite!

Take the remaining third of your shortbread dough and add ½ a beaten egg (I used a whole beaten egg and it was too much – made the pastry a little eggier than I wished).  You can use the rest of the beaten egg in some fried rice or just cook it in a skillet for a quick protein hit which you probably need anyway if you’re a busy parent.

Press the dough into a tart pan.  I used a small 8”diameter pan (it would be fine to have the pastry thinner as well, so you could use a slightly bigger pan).  Gently press in fresh blackberries (or whatever summer fruit you have on hand – I imagine plums would be quite tasty), and bake in the oven  (also at 325 degrees) for 45 minutes.

It was a minor tragedy that we did not have whipped cream on hand to serve with the blackberry tart.  Perhaps you will plan more wisely!