yes, we CAN!

Last week, my grandma told me that there was a great sale on vine-ripe tomatoes.  48 cents/pound. 
We had been talking about canning, I wanted to learn the process, and she was happy to teach me.  When she saw that there was a great price, well, the time had come to pass the torch. 
I happily walked in and loaded my little basket with 20 POUNDS of tomatoes. They all looked fantastic, and there were millions in the bin, so I didn't feel at all bad about my purchase.
As the cutest girl ever rang me up, she looked at me like I was crazy and said, "what are you doing with all of these?!" (which I felt was a legitimate question)  "Canning them." I said, simply, as if it was something I did all the time.  "OH, ok...... how do you do that?" she proceeded where she should have just stopped at "oh, ok."  Her lack of confidence in my skills was not masked as I answered, "I have no idea."

I carried my lovely loot home and prepared for my lesson. 

No such lesson occurred.  My grandma evidently had some time on her hands because she texted me the next day (all grandmas should text) saying that the tomatoes had been washed, scalded and peeled, also the jars were washed and the tomatoes just needed to be cut and put in jars.

Ok. I can do that.

WOW. That was a lot of tomatoes to cut up. My darling daughter helped and we got through them fairly quickly.  Soon, there were 14 pints of tomatoes ready to go.  I have never heard of anyone canning the way my grandma did these tomatoes, but here is the process.  Messy, but easy.

you need: tomatoes, jars, lids, rings,  knife, spoon, canning salt, cookie sheet, oven

1. wash.
2. scald. (gently drop in boiling water for 10 seconds)
3. peel. (skin comes off fairly easily after the scalding)
4. cut. (cut out anything white leaving only the red meaty part. its best to cut over a bowl and save the juice. cut to quarters or smaller as you like.)
5. jar. (leaving 1/2 inch of room at the top, add one teaspoon of canning salt, add a bit of the reserved tomato juice or water, any seasoning you like - I suggest a few basil leaves - move a spoon around in the jar to release any air bubbles)
6. cover. (place a lid on top, twist a ring on just tight enough to seal it, not so tight you have strain a muscle opening it back up)
7. heat. (do not pre-heat the oven. put the jars in to a room temperature oven, turn it on to 250 for 50 minutes. turn the oven off, but DO NOT open the door. leave the jars until completely cool - over night if you can)
8. store. (in a pantry near you.)

Grandma said she has been using this method for 40 years and it hasn't failed.  If any of the jars do not seal properly, you can still use the tomatoes, but they are not shelf stable. Refrigerate them and use them within a week.

Buena suerte.  (I think you'll love this, really. Its pretty fantastic)

Nature vs. Nurture

We are entering in to that weird place of life where kids choose their own music, decorate their rooms as they see fit, wear what they want (within reason) and invite random neighborhood kids I've never seen before to join in their games. 
A few days ago, my kids were playing with one of the kids from down the street and they asked if she could come in to play. I said yes (because I had just cleaned the house, otherwise I would have banned her from the premises because I am just that vain).  It wasn't long before I heard the familiar percussion and guitar that precedes the undeniable voice of Mr. Mercury, himself . 
I was preparing supper and enjoying the laughter of the children.  I was oblivious to the world around me.  I was chopping broccoli to the beat and instinctively wailing along with Queen's 'Radio GaGa' as the new little friend of my kids walked into the kitchen with an inquisitive face. ("inquisitive" sounds better than "terrified") -but she came back the next day, so I didn't cause too much distress.

I am happy that my children (specifically, daughter, in this case) are appreciating the same trail blazing musicality that I cut my rock and roll teeth on.  They have so much music available to them, and yet, heredity (or the sheer beauty) drags them to choose Queen.  It just makes me proud, ok? Queen, if you did not know, offers answers that I might have had trouble articulating without them.
I found this quiz from several years ago, and it I think it will help you to understand me just a little bit more.  All answers are in the form of a song title.  All songs were recorded by Queen.

1. Are you male or female: white queen

2. Describe yourself: fat bottomed girls (they make the rockin world go round)
3. How do you feel about yourself:i'm going slightly mad

4. Describe an ex boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife: another one bites the dust

5. Describe your current boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife: somebody to love

6. Describe where you currently live: in the lap of the gods

7. If you could go anywhere, where would you go: i go crazy
8. Your best friend is: lily of the valley
9. Your favorite color is: my melancholy blues
10. You know that: the show must go on

11. What's the weather like: time to shine
12. If your life was a tv show, what would it be called:we are the champions

13. What is life to you: under pressure
14. What is the best advice you have to give: friends will be friends

15. If you could change your name, what would it be: the invisible man

16. Your favorite food is: coming soon

17. What you do for school / work: mother love

18. You wish you had: i want it all


This has long been one of my favorite pictures of my daughter. She was very young then, but it is perfect. She loves music. She is my best girl and I am amazed by her every day.

a tricky tip

I don't remember where I learned this, and I don't remember how I did it before, but I know that this is a new(ish) technique for me and I want you to know about it. 

I was sitting at the breakfast table with my grandma and she told my kids that she had another Jerusalem melon ready in the fridge.  They happily retrieved said melon and returned to the table a little daunted. It had not been cut up. There it was, in its juicy, sweet glory, and they couldn't even eat it.  I quietly asked them to bring a bowl, a spoon and a knife so I could prepare it for them.  (Quietly, because I didn't want to disturb the dramatic story being told from across the table.)
As instructed, my daughter brought the bowl and the knife.  With anxious eyes - and watering mouths, no doubt, the two strawberry blonde children watched and waited.  I don't think they even realized that grandma was still talking at this point. 

Carefully, I scooped the seeds out with the spoon and proceeded to section off a slice of juicy goodness.  I removed a section about one inch wide, and then began making cuts across the section which resembled the grin of the Cheshire cat.  With one masterful swoop of my knife, I separated those cut pieces from the rind and landed them in a bowl to be enjoyed by the patient on-lookers.

I noticed that my grandma was watching, too. I don't know if she was nervous about my knife wielding or if she was just as hungry as the kids, but she was checking me out.  I have decided that she was probably watching in amazement and trying to record in her memory exactly what I had done so that some day she could do the same.  I'm just glad she has me here to help.

 Here's a picture tutorial in case you, too, want to try your hand at melon slicing.  Don't cut yourself.

Thats my boy

My pregnancy was a surprise. (actually both pregnancies were a surprise) My daughter was only 4 months old when I found out that there was another baby yet to come.  I remember crying a lot. I was terrified. I only barely knew how to take care of one kid, and now there would be two!
Happily, that second pregnancy was so much easier, labor and delivery was easier, and he was just an easier baby. (that girl baby was a doozie.) 
He has always liked being with me. If I was cooking, he wanted me to hold him (which I mastered beautifully).  If I was folding laundry, he was in the middle of it, but he was happy about it, so I didn't mind much.  Even now, 8 years down the road, he likes to at least stop by the kitchen to see what's going on and ask if he can help or if I need a "taste tester".  He isn't as involved with the laundry. Its a battle we fight often.  One of the things he has recently become interested in is menu planning. Each week, he likes to add a few meal requests to my list, and I am happy to oblige.  Last night, for example, he wanted meat loaf with mac and cheese.  I whipped it up (along with some super healthy zucchini and tomatoes to balance it out) and he was -as he always is- very complimentary. 

Then something else happened. I impressed him. -- and that is the real reason for this post. I want to tell you about my success.  So... going back to a few days ago:  I found Avery sitting on the tailgate of his dad's truck. Just sitting.  I asked what he was doing, and he said he was waiting for the neighbor to come play (the neighbor is a really nice kid in his 20s).  Evidently, Avery had asked if he wanted to play catch, and he said he had a few things to get done and that he would in a little while.  So Ave waited. I told him that I would play catch with him, and he quickly turned me down.  I (half joking) said, "why? because I'm a girl?"  To my surprise, he said, "well, yeah, basically."  wow. thanks, son. 
I would not be seen as a girl. Not to this whipper snapper. No sir.
This brings us to last night.  After my impressive dinner, I bravely walked outside to where Avery was riding his skateboard and told him - not asked. told.- to go get the baseball and ball gloves and I would play catch with him. 
"Really. Mom. Really?" he said with contempt. "Yep. go get 'em." I said, standing my ground with confidence.
He did. He came out and zinged that ball right at me. No time to think. But I didn't need to think. I snagged that ball right out of the air (I jumped at least 4 feet off the ground) and whizzed it right back at him. 
A huge smile spread across his face, and he said, :"Wow, Mom. You're actually pretty good."
"Yeah, Ave. I can throw a baseball." I replied victoriously. 
He was impressed, and we had so much fun. I was even willing to ignore his hysterical laughter as I ran down the street chasing his wildly thrown baseballs. 
He's a cool kid. He's a happy surprise.
And I have to run, there are scouts calling.

Chopped.

I do not prepare a from-scratch dinner for my family every day.  This week, for example, I knew I would be baking Tuesday night, so I needed something I could toss together pretty easily.  Italian Chopped Salad was exactly what we needed.
I planned ahead and got everything from my local supermarket (where they have everything I could imagine).  Here's what I got to make 6 servings...
 

You need: large bowl, knife, cutting board, small container with a tight lid

Italian Chopped Salad
1 bag romaine lettuce
1 pint grape tomatoes
1C stuffed green olives
1/2 C kalamata olives
1/4 C sliced banana peppers
1 (6oz) package cappicola ham, sliced
1 (6oz) package shredded ham
2 oz fresh mozzarella, diced
4 oz provolone, diced
Dressing:
1/4 C red wine vinegar
1/2 C olive oil
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
Shaken, not stirred

Serve with this bread:
(Heat oven to 500)
1 loaf French bread cut in half and then sliced down the middle
1 stick unsalted butter, room temp

Slather butter. All of the butter. Place on a cookie sheet, bake 15-20 minutes til the bread is crunchy and the butter is turning brown.

I should have been making this once a week for my whole life. Better late than never.

Oh. My. Ganache.

It is possible that I have used this title before, but I'm not changing it. 
Years ago, years and years ago, I went to a wedding where they had food that changed my life. It was the wedding of my husband's brother and there was ganache.  I had never eaten anything with ganache, and I wasn't exactly sure what it was, but I ate it. I savored the smooth chocolatey decadence and I hoped to, one day, find it again.
((Fast forward 10 years or so.))
One of my dearest and oldest friends (old. she is so old.) requested that I make some cupcakes with a ganache filling.  All this time had passed.  I did not know if I could recreate the beauty, the art, the perfection that I had experienced all those years ago in Post, Texas. 

--aside-- the total request was as follows : banana cake filled with chocolate ganache and topped with peanut butter frosting.  I thought she was crazy, but I set out to complete the task before me.

As I lamented the sure difficulty of the ganache and toiled over how to prepare a perfect peanut butter frosting, I started to really over-think this whole thing. (shocking, I know).  "It can't be this hard," I thought.  ~and I was right. 

Here is my super-simple ganache recipe:
-what you need: sauce pan, spatula, medium sized bowl, wire whisk

1C heavy whipping cream
2C (one bag) semi-sweet chocolate chips

In your sauce pan, over medium-high heat, warm the whipping cream.  Be careful not to scorch it.  Stir it around a bit. Meanwhile, dump your chocolate chips in the bowl that you have set aside. When the cream is boiling (not a huge rolling boil, just some bubbles that tell you that its hot)  remove the sauce pan from the heat and pour the cream directly over the chocolate chips.  Stir with your whisk until all of the chips are melted and the chocolate is smooth. 

from this......to this

You can use the ganache just like this to dip fruit, cookies or spoons in. **ahem. don't burn your tongue off. Not that I would know anything about that.**  You can let it cool and pour it over a cake. You can let it cool and whip it in a mixer and make a fluffy icing. You can let it cool and fill up a pastry bag and pipe it in to some banana cupcakes and top it with peanut butter frosting, which is what I did today. ( I may also eat it with a spoon.)

Should you choose to create a fab cupcake like those mentioned above, you may want to do this as well:

Peanut Butter Frosting
-what you need a mixer (standing or hand-held)

1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature
1 1/2C creamy peanut butter
2C powdered sugar
2 Tablespoons milk

Cream the butter and peanut butter together, add the powdered sugar gradually, add milk. (you may like your frosting a little creamier, this is pretty dry. Add a little more milk as desired)

I filled a pastry bag with this loveliness and piped it through a star tip. 

The banana cake, you ask?  Store bought. I trust it. It's easy. I prepare my cupcakes just as the box tells me to.

Dear April, I did think this was a crazy combo. I was wrong. I apologize.

These babies have become one of my personal favorites, and one of my most requested.  My thanks to my brother-in-law (for getting married and introducing me to gananche) and to my girl April (for coming to me for this brilliant creation of flavor combination).

Bacon grease, melons and everything in between

It’s funny how sometimes I can’t get away from memories of my grandparents.  Not that want to get away from them, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that there are days, where everything seems to bring back a sweet memory.  Bacon, for example.  I don’t know how she did it, but my grandma managed to keep the smell of bacon in her house at all times. Possibly, a bacon grease diffuser, I’m not sure.  I fried bacon yesterday to make biscuits and gravy since the kids were home and I had some time to cook breakfast, for a change. I fried an entire pound of bacon for my little family of four. (I would like to tell you that I can put that in the “Cook it Once, Serve it Twice” category of my life, but that is just not the case. We ate it all. Happily.)  I thought of her while that tasty treat was sizzling away. I wondered what she did with all the bacon grease she must have accumulated. (diffused it, obviously). 

My entire adult life, my grandpa had a garden. Well, he called it a garden. It was huge. Almost ‘farm’ status, I think.  It was an hour and a half away, but for years he drove out to that garden several times a week during the summer, watering, harvesting, weeding, mowing; tending.  There was way too much produce for just him and grandma to eat, so he would bring his truck home loaded down with squash, tomatoes, cantaloupe, cucumber and start handing it out to friends, family, neighbors and grocery store check-out clerks so that he could load it back up a few days later. He worked hard and he had something worth sharing.  Yesterday, my neighbors brought a Jerusalem melon over.  They had grown it in their garden and there was just more than they could eat. It was juicy and sweet and I was grinning through tears as I cut it up and thought about grandpa and ‘something worth sharing’.

So many of my meals are based on recipes that my grandma wrote out for me. So many of the dishes I cook are things I remember discovering at her table.  She taught me to fry a cucumber, stuff a roast, and spin a thread of sugar.  They taught me to serve and to share.  They taught me that generosity had nothing to do with wealth and contentment was often found in doing something for someone else.

I remember talking with my uncle as the family was preparing for my grandma’s funeral six years ago.  I told him that I was afraid that I hadn’t learned everything I was supposed to learn yet, and I wasn’t ready to let her go.  He told me that I had learned it all, and it would be there when I needed it.   Again, as we were together at grandpas death six weeks ago, I looked around their house and hoped that all of the hours I’d spent there had somehow made me more like them.

photo cred: Laura Atterbury