The Way to a Man's Heart

There were many upsides to delaying our honeymoon to Belize until the week between Christmas and New Years. For one, and this was big, my office was closed so I only had to take two vacation days for a 12-day trip. And while I don't much mind the snow and cold weather, it was nice to head south for a bit before the long Chicago winter settled into our bones.

But the best part was simply having the energy to enjoy the trip. If we had gone right after the wedding, I would have been too exhausted to do anything, and we like to be active when we travel.

For instance, one of my favorite things to do in Belize was to sip coffee and eat a soul-satisfying breakfast of fresh papaya and granola with yogurt and gaze at the toucans, like the one pictured above, flying by as the sun rose gently above the mountains. It was tiring, I tell you.

We also drank many Belikin beers. Lifting a Belikin is hard work. The glass bottles are about twice as heavy as American beer bottles, so we had to give ourselves a break sometimes by ordering margaritas. And napping on hammocks. Sometimes we did both at once.

But while we made sure to relax, there was too much to experience in Belize to sit around for long. Aside from bird watching (which really does take a surprising amount of mental energy) and Belikin lifting, we snorkeled in the world's second largest barrier reef, canoed past orange iguanas, hiked in a jaguar preserve, learned how to spot wildlife in the dark, biked the rocky dirt road through a Garifuna village, and explored Mayan ruins on foot and in caves.

We also received the warm hospitality and kindness of the Belizean people. Seriously, we met this one man at a bus stop who gave us his phone number and email address and told us to contact him if we needed anything.

Those were all the upsides. The downside, though, was that we missed Christmas with Ryan's family, and their annual gift exchange and dinner. Although I don't celebrate the holiday, we participate in each other's traditions. So it was a big deal to miss Christmas, and we had to make up for it.

After the trip, we hosted Christmas dinner at our place for Ryan's parents and his aunt and uncle. The occasion presented a nice opportunity to mix our traditions. We made brisket, a recipe that shows up at many a Jewish holiday meal, and used my sister's mother-in-law's recipe from the family cookbook that we received as a wedding gift.

My ancestors, who came from Eastern Europe in the late 1800s, probably served brisket at their own special occasions. When winter came, around the time of Hanukkah, families often slaughtered their cows rather than bear the cost of feeding them until spring. The brisket, which comes from the lower chest of a cow, was also a cheaper cut of meat.

This is all according to The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food by Gil Marks, which inspired me to dig up my Grandma Shirley's well worn copy of The Settlement Cook Book that I found on the shelves of my grandfather's kitchen after he passed away last year. The book was first published in 1901 with recipes for Jewish immigrants who settled in the United States. I laughed out loud when I saw the cover which, in a sign of the times, proclaims that these recipes are "The Way to a Man's Heart."

The book includes three different brisket recipes with beans, cabbage, and sauerkraut, which advise: "Place [brisket] in large kettle of cold water" and "Boil until tender." This made more sense when my Grandma Pearl reminded me, "Oh honey, we didn't have ovens back then." The broth might have some brown sugar, molasses, or mustard added to it for sweetness, or vinegar for some sour flavor.

The use of ovens ushered in a new era for brisket, which could now be slow cooked for hours in a sauce to tenderize the tough connective tissue in this cut of meat. Old World flavors were replaced by an Americanized sauce of "foods" like ketchup, chile sauce, and onion soup mix.

I know, it sounds disgusting. But it's not. The brisket was well received by Ryan's family, and by then we were calling it a chrisket (a Christmas brisket), and defining a new tradition of our own.

As for whether brisket is the way to a man's heart, stayed tuned for the next recipe we made out of the family cookbook, which is for sure the way to MY man's heart.

Happy Valentines Day, all.

Grandma Joanie's Brisket

1 brisket

1 cup orange juice

1 cup ketchup

1 cup applesauce

1 packet onion soup mix

Stir oj, ketchup, applesauce, and onion soup mix together and pour over brisket. Add chopped potatoes, carrots, onions--any root vegetable will work. Cover with foil. Bake at 350 for at least 4 hours. Cool, remove remaining fat, and slice against the grain.

We made the brisket the night before and refrigerated until about two hours before serving, when we sliced it (against the grain--this is critical!) and heated it up in the oven at about 200. An hour would have been enough time to heat up our brisket; it was a tad dried out but still had plenty of flavor.

Mais oui! Blogging the Family Cookbook

The summer before my senior year in high school, I had the privilege of living with a French family for three weeks. It was a wonderful experience, and I learned so much that I was dreaming en Francais by time we said our goodbyes. Their home was in Saint Andre des Eaux, a quaint rural town outside Saint Nazaire, a west coast city with a harbor that opened up to the Atlantic Ocean.

The town was straight from my French book, complete with une boulangerie, un boucherie, and other assorted speciality shops. Every night after dinner, I would take advantage of the late sunset and walk a mile along cow pasture-lined country roads with Indigo Girls "Closer to Fine" blasting through the headphones of my Sony walkman (RIP, Sony walkman!) to La Briere, a giant marsh with interconnecting narrow waterways that people would paddle around by boat to look at the native flora and fauna.

I hit it off with my French sister, and my French parents couldn't have been nicer. Dad often wanted to practice his English while Mom didn't speak a word of it. But I considered myself incredibly lucky because every night she would ask me what I wanted for dinner in contrast to some of my American friends, who regaled me with horror stories of the meals that they were forced to eat.

I ate chicken. Every. Single. Night. Of course now I kick myself for blowing such a unique opportunity to try authentic French cooking and learn more about local food. But I was still a very picky eater at the time and clearly did not try to break out of my comfort zone.

There was one recipe that she made that I couldn't get enough of--potage. This thick vegetable soup included pureed potatoes, carrots, onions, leeks, and some other flavorful ingredients that for the life of me, I was never able to replicate. Although I left France with her handwritten recipe tucked in my bag, and my (real) mom and I tried to make it many times, potage never, ever tasted the same again. As the years passed, the ink on that paper literally faded away, and no record exists any more of that recipe.

My mom reminded me of potage the other night when I asked her why she included "Mom's Potato, Fennel, and Leek Soup" in the family recipe book that my sister compiled as a gift for my wedding. Mom had a string of reasons ... that it was getting on to winter and she wanted to include a soup ... that she decided to submit a recipe for every course ... that she had just clipped this recipe from the newspaper ... and then as an afterthought, that it reminded her of potage.

Potage!

While I hadn't thought about potage in years and our disappointing failure in trying to recreate the recipe, I do love to make soup now. In fact our most used wedding gift so far is a 12-quart soup pot, which is great to use (but a giant PITA to clean).

So it works that I had unwittingly chosen this as the first recipe to make from the family cookbook when I decided to blog my way through it. While this recipe is no potage, it's easy to make and turns out a nice hearty soup on a cold winter's night.

Mom's Potato, Fennel and Leek Soup

2 leeks, light green and white parts only, thinly sliced

2 T unsalted butter

1 T olive oil

1 carrot, peeled and chopped

1/2 bulb fresh fennel, trimmed and chopped (about 3/4 cup)

3 baking potatoes, about 1 1/2 pounds, peeled and cut into chunks

1/2 t dried thyme

2 T chopped parsley

1 bay leaf

4 1/2 cups chicken broth

salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste

In a soup kettle, cook the leeks slowly in the butter and oil for 5 minutes. Add the carrot and fennel; cook 5 more minutes. Stir in the potato chunks, thyme, parsley and bay leaf. Add the broth, bring to a boil, then cover and simmer for 25-30 minutes, or until the potatoes are completely tender. Discard the bay leaf. Crush about a third of the veggies with a potato masher (we skipped this step and opted for chunky veggies). Season with salt and pepper. Serve piping hot.

Serves 5

What I've Learned

Growing up I always made a big deal about my birthday, mostly because I was a year younger than most of my friends and always felt behind.

I saw my birthday as a day to catch up, and everyone knew it. Exactly three months prior, I would start to self promote so by the time the big day rolled around, anyone who forgot incurred my wrath. Then my friends turned a year older, and that longing to be the same age started all over again.

That all changed once I turned 30 and no longer felt so eager to catch up.

So that may explain why nine days ago, a very important birthday of sorts slipped by without me even realizing it: my two-year blogiversary! But really, it was two years ago that I subscribed to a CSA and changed my eating and cooking habits. (Technically I didn't receive my first box of produce until November 16, so I suppose I have some time yet.)

When I started this CSA experiment, I wasn't sure if I would really take the time to find recipes, cook, and manage to eat the stuff too. But it has become a new way of life for me.

I went from buying the same boring foods at the grocery store to getting unidentifiable veggies that I had to figure out how to make.

I went from coming home from work, ordering takeout, and planting myself on the couch in front of the tv all night to chopping onions and garlic, sauteing with spices and veggies, and going straight to bed after eating and cleaning up. (Except when Lost is on. Two more months!)

Along the way I have collected some favorite recipes: strawberry and feta salad; chicken tajine; rhubarb crisp bars; pasta with butternut squash and sage, and so many others that I was just plain lazy to blog about.

I have learned important lessons about cooking: always make at least one test batch when baking pumpkin pie for a holiday dinner; always put a lid on the pan when popping popcorn on the stovetop; and food left out too long or stored incorrectly will rot (and when this happens, I will feel sad).

I also have made many discoveries about food and my own tastes and habits: I don't like a vegetables that rhyme with arse-snips; potatoes come in different colors; and grating beets is tiring, turns my hands magenta, and inspires bad, punny dialogue between me and Ryan (Me: I'm beat. Ryan: You're doing great, Hon.) I never wrote a blog post about this, so you'll have to take my word for it.

I now know what sunchokes, rutabega, celeriac, salsify, and rhubarb look like.

I think some foods taste best when eaten raw: raspberries, grape tomatoes, carrots, and strawberries.

I would be nothing without onions and garlic.

But most of all I have gained tremendous appreciation for the farmers, who deliver fresh and delicious produce week after week. I have learned that no matter how hard they work, sometimes the weather has other plans. Like last summer too much rain destroyed crops, and my CSA decided to delay deliveries for a few weeks to let the farmers catch up.

I know the feeling of wanting to catch up. But as long as they're growing food, I'm eating it, I hope, for many years to come.

Lost

The carrot peeler disappeared last Thursday night.

It was the strangest thing. On Wednesday, I was peeling carrots like crazy, trying to use up the store-bought bag before picking up the first winter box for my CSA. On Thursday, I lugged home two overflowing bags of pie pumpkins, butternut and acorn squash, apples, mushrooms, sweet potatoes, more potatoes, onions, popcorn (yes!), cranberries, leeks, and a huge bag of juicy, juicy carrots.

I love carrots. Especially raw. Growing up, carrots were one of two vegetables that I ate (the other was green beans). I love the easy preparation and crunchyness. Carrots make the best snack.

And I was really looking forward to the carrots in my CSA, because they taste so fresh and worlds better than their counterparts at the grocery store.

So I was completely baffled when I went to look for the peeler, carrot in hand, and it was gone.

There has been some chaos in my household lately. We finally moved Ryan's turtle in last weekend, which to my surprise has been more high maintenance than Karl the cat, who sits on the bed and stares at the turtle all day long. We had to drain the 40-gallon tank, take out all the rocks, bring it over, create space for it, and design a set up for Grace to sun herself and dry off.

Amidst all of this, the carrot peeler vanished and we think Karl had something to do with it, but who knows? You can't ask a cat these things.

I try to keep my kitchen utensils to a minimun and stick to the basics, but this is one that I can't live without. So I resolved the situation in the easiest way I could think of and bought a new one, which works wonderfully.

Now I can eat carrots again, and I feel calmer already.

At the Lake

Every summer I spend a long weekend at my parents' lake house in western Maryland. It's about a 10-hour drive from Chicago.

Since Ryan couldn't make it this year, I got a ride with my sister's family. In the mini-van. With my 2- and 4-year-old nephews. And the dog.

It was a long ride.

In the 20 summers that my family has spent up there, we've always eaten the same meals. Grilled hamburgers. Grilled chicken. Corn on the cob. Salad. Yuengling beer.

This year I brought some food from my CSA - a bag of carrots, potatoes, an eggplant, and a watermelon. I wasn't concerned about introducing some "new" foods into the mix, but I wondered how it would play out.

The carrots were easy. In fact, my nephews and I ate most of them before we got there. They helped me peel all of them before we left Chicago by standing on little stools to reach the sink. Once I showed Max how to peel down from the top of the carrot (instead of the other way around), he was a pro. Nate mostly watched and knawed on a peeled one.

I wanted to use the eggplant as soon as possible because it had been a few days, and I was worried that it would go bad if we waited too long. Our first night there as hamburgers sizzled on the grill, I cut the eggplant into vertical slices, dipped each side in olive oil, and salted. Then I threw them on the grill for about 7 minutes on each side. Delicious!

A few nights later, we boiled and mashed the potatoes with butter, milk, and salt. Decent, but not enough flavor.

My favorite food moment came with the melon.

I was upstairs when my mom, Max, and Nate sliced it open. "Linds?" my mom called out. "Are you sure this is a watermelon?"

"I think so," I said. The CSA newsletter had said I would get either a watermelon, an orange fleshed musk melon, or a green fleshed honey dew.

"It's yellow!"

I went downstairs to see for myself. My mom was cutting up little pieces and digging out the seeds as my nephews gobbled them up. She couldn't cut fast enough. They literally squealed with delight.

It looked like a watermelon. It tasted like a watermelon (but sweeter). We decided that it was a watermelon. (Unfortunately I forgot to bring my camera but here is a great photo of the watermelon taken by someone else who is in my CSA.)

Okay, so that would be my favorite CSA-related food moment.

My true favorite food moment came when we made s'mores. I think Max and Nate liked them too.

Camping Trip

As summer begins to wind down, I managed to squeeze in two short vacations over the past two weeks.

First I went to Missoula to visit my friend Ali, who moved from Chicago last year. (I'll blog about the second trip in a later post.) Every Saturday there are three farmer's markets, which we hit up to buy food for an overnight camping trip.

We got some onions, garlic, squash, carrots, chard, cheese, and potatoes to make a veggie stir fry over the campfire and what Ali calls a "tinfoil surprise" (put chopped up potatoes with whatever veggies you have in tinfoil, throw it into the fire for awhile, unwrap, and eat).

But our planned meals almost didn't happen.

We set out for a campground later that day, a spot a little over an hour away on the Bitterroot River.


We were car camping so we didn't bring a container or rope to sling the food up in a tree, but we did have some bear spray just in case.

But bears turned out to be the least of our problems.

We hadn't made a reservation and that campsite was full. So were the next 8 campsites that we tried.

We had driven around for about four hours and it was starting to get late when we pulled into Holland Lake. Apparently there are a lot of unmarked campsites in Montana where you just have to know where to go. Ali had been to the lodge at the lake before and knew there was camping. But from the road, we never would have known.

We pulled in, and there was one open site! So what if it was right next to the bathrooms with no view of the lake?

Then we realized that the site was reserved. It was also 7:30pm and would get dark in about an hour, so we decided to stay. The camp manager said that if the group came and kicked us out, we could set up our tent in the "day use" area.

We were hungry, so we took our chances and started to build a fire. Our wood was a little wet and moldy, so it didn't quite roar. We made our tinfoil surprises but since it was late, we decided to eat the veggie stir fry with eggs for breakfast the next day.

Even though it was practically dark, we held our breath every time a car went by on the road - hoping it wasn't the people who reserved our site.

By this point we were starving. Throwing in the surprises had just about killed the fire, but we kept them in the embers. One of them cooked a little more than the other, but they weren't bad with some added seasonings. And we didn't have to worry about putting out the fire, which took care of itself!

We tucked in the tent for some uninterrupted sleep (for me anyway, Ali thought she heard an animal in the middle of the night and couldn't fall back asleep).

The next morning, we walked down to the lake. It was spectacular!

We made our eggs and veggie stir fry (over her camp stove - no more fire), packed up, and headed home, thanking the Marsenichs on our way out for not showing up.

C is for Cabbage

Even though I am getting deliveries every other week, the CSA recommends using most of the food within the first 5 days or so. Some can go in the freezer, but I see it as a challenge to cook and eat as much as possible within the first week.

Of course I am going to be out of town the next two nights, so we've been a little more frantic than usual to use the food.

Last night we wanted to use the cabbage and still had some mint left over from the first delivery. Ryan went online and found a recipe called ginger-scented tomato and cabbage soup with fresh mint.

One of the ingredients was alphabet pasta!

We enjoyed the soup a lot. It was steaming hot so we ate outside, where it was much cooler than in my kitchen. All the vegetables still had a little crunch, and the cabbage added some nice texture.

Ginger-Scented Tomato and Cabbage Soup with Fresh Mint

1 head of cabbage
4 ounces small pasta, such as alphabets
2 onions, coarsely chopped
3-5 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
1 tablespoon butter
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 small carrot, diced
2 cups diced fresh tomatoes
6 cups vegetable broth

10-15 fresh mint leaves
salt, black pepper and cayenne pepper to taste

Cook the pasta, drain and set aside.
Lightly sauté the onion and garlic in butter until softened. Stir in the ginger and carrot and cook for a few moments; add tomatoes, broth and cabbage.
Cook over medium heat until the vegetables are tender (15-20 minutes).

Adjust seasoning.
Ladle the soup over several spoonfuls of pasta per person.

Season each portion with a sprinkling of fresh mint and serve immediately.

Spicing it up

Over the past few weeks, we've had a major weather event almost every day here in Chicago - from sub-zero temps to 50 degrees and back again to crazy wind, a thunderstorm that turned into sleet and snow, to blizzard conditions. My office, along with many others in and around the city, even closed early today.

It has reached that depressing point in winter where we've been through a lot but there is so much more to go.

That's sort of how I feel about those potatoes in my cupboard. I've been through so many of them but there are so many more still left.

Okay, I promised myself no more posts about potatoes.

But it raises a reality of subscribing to a CSA. You get what you get. It's winter, so I got a lot of root vegetables. I have to admit that it got a little old after awhile. The more stews and soups that I made with the same ingredients, the less interested I got. Unfortunately my list of rotting food is a little longer than usual this month.

A few weeks ago I took a cooking class with my boyfriend. We made some great dishes, including a moroccan chickpea stew over quinoa. What I liked about it is that the recipe calls for some items from my CSA (carrots and onions) but also for spices that I don't typically use, like cinnamon, turmeric, and cayenne.

After the class I paid a visit to The Spice House, a local store that sells spices from all over the world in bulk. This place is great. You can smell and taste any spice, and buy amounts as small as a 1-ounce sample, if you want to try one out without commiting to a whole jar. It's an inexpensive way to experiment with different flavors (thanks, Klein, for the suggestion!).

I made the stew tonight. It's hard to tell in the photo, but it's resting on a delicious mound of quinoa, which just might be the new couscous for me. The colors and the new flavors even helped lift me out of the winter doldrums.


Moroccan Chickpea Stew [from Rice and Spice by Robin Robertson]

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
1 zucchini, diced (I subbed broccoli, which soaked up the flavor really well)
1 garlic clove, minced
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/4 teaspoon cayenne
1 16-ounce can diced tomatoes
2 cups vegetable stock or water
Salt, to taste
1/2 cup dried apricots
1/4 cup raisins
Zest of 1 lemon
2 1/2 cups cooked or canned chickpeas, rinsed if canned
2 tablespoons minced fresh cilantro or parsley
6 cups hot cooked couscous or rice (or quinoa)

Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium heat until hot. Add the onion and carrot and cook, covered, for 5 minutes, or until softened. Add the zucchini, garlic, cinnamon, turmeric, salt, cayenne, tomatoes, stock or water, and salt to taste. Reduce the heat to low, and simmer for 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, soak the apricots in hot water for 20 minutes, then drain and finely chop. Add the apricots, raisins, lemon zest, and chickpeas to the vegetable mixture and cook 5 minutes longer, or until hot and the flavors are blended. Stir in the cilantro or parsley and serve over couscous or rice (or quinoa).

Serves 4-6.