Category:

Food

Q&A: Why is my Malt-O-Meal lumpy and how can I fix it?

by Diane Duane October 28, 2020

So, a little background here first. Though I was born and raised in the US, I live in Ireland. If there’s one thing about Ireland that you learn pretty quickly, it’s that if you like a hot breakfast cereal on a chilly morning, what’s available for you in the major grocery stores is going to be based on oats. The concept of hot cereals based on other grains (wheat, rice…) has not yet made any serious inroads here. If you know where to look — some specialty stores in big cities, some high-end groceries with imported foods sections — you may be able to score something (at a significant markup… enough to make your eyes bleed). But the odds are against you.

They’re worse if you like a cereal that’s at all specialized. For me, the cereal in question is Malt-O-Meal. For those of you not familiar with it, this is a wheat-based hot cereal with a malty flavor. I love it dearly, but as far as I can tell, it is nowhere available in Europe. So I normally wind up ordering it a few boxes at a time from the US on Ebay (while gritting my teeth at the postage costs, but that’s the price of admission).

I’d been without the stuff for the summer months, and as the weather started to cool down I ordered in some more. I received the package with joy, when it arrived after about three weeks (because no way was I going to pay the insane postage for faster shipping), and I had some for breakfast the next morning.

I have years of experience at making this stuff, and it never lumps. But the first potful of this batch came out studded with lumps the size of marbles. “Huh,” I said. I ate it anyway (after taking a potato masher to it) because I don’t waste Malt-O-Meal. But I was concerned.

Made another potful the next morning, and lo, it happened again. Lumps. Now I was more concerned. Was this whole three-box batch going to be defective? Most annoying.

Finally I put on my Science Hat and started considering what might be going wrong with this stuff, and what could be done about it. When I open a box of any dry hot cereal, normally I put it in a glass jar so that it’ll be easier to scoop out with a measuring cup. And as I turned the Malt-O-Meal jar over in my hands, I noted that the grains were sticking to each other a bit. Hmm, I thought. These things took the guts of a month getting here, and they weren’t that tightly wrapped. What if they picked up some moisture along the way?

So I did an experiment. I took a few servings’ worth of the Malt-O-Meal and spread it out evenly in a nonstick pizza pan.

Then I turned the oven on very low (about 100 degrees F / 50 degrees C) and put the pizza pan in there. Left the oven on for about fifteen minutes, and then turned it off and left everything as it was overnight.

The next morning I took a serving’s worth of the stuff (1/3 cup) and made a pot of it for breakfast… and there was not a single lump.

So if you’re having a problem with your dry hot cereal, give this approach a shot. (I imagine it’d work with Cream of Wheat or Cream of Rice too, if that’s what you’re working with.) And if this advice is of help to you, I’m delighted. Enjoy!

October 28, 2020

Weird bread

by Diane Duane April 9, 2020

Well, a little weird.

Ireland is on COVID-19 lockdown (and will be for the next couple/few weeks, it looks like), and our next grocery delivery isn’t until nearly the middle of next week, and there’s no telling whether there’ll be baking yeast in it. And yesterday we were down to our next-to-last packet of it. So I sighed and got ready to start employing stopgap measures.

…And a quick note here: if you’re presently drawing breath to say “But I saw a post about how to make your own…” or “No one is ever really out of yeast, let me tell you how…!” — then please don’t, because there’s no need. I’ve been baking bread casually since my twenties and much more intensively over the last decade (Peter and I simply decided in unison that we’d had it with supermarket bread, and when we found the most dependable recipe imaginable, that was that). At one time or another I’ve built levains and starters from scratch, worked with sourdough starters more than a hundred years old, and have caught and cultured wild yeast on two continents. I’ve even written fiction about yeast, Thoth help me.

Anyway, right this minute—as a busy longtime-work-from-home small-businesswoman who is usually hip-deep in several universes at once while also doing website management—my preference for day-to-day baking is plain old active dry yeast of the Fleischmann’s, Red Star or SAF type. These have been genetically tailored for their work and suit my needs perfectly—being predictable, reliable, and in no need of coddling or extra attention. To be told “All you need to do is mix together some flour and water and let the natural yeasts…!”, etc etc, is for me (at the moment) too much like someone kindly offering to replace my missing Lotus Turbo Esprit with a Trabi. I will cope just fine, but I won’t sing paeans of praise about the alternative strategy. So let’s not go there, yeah? As KP says, “Please and thank you.”

Anyway. What was plain when I got the urge to bake yesterday afternoon was that I was going to have to throw together a preferment, because the thought of actually using up that last packet of yeast was giving me anxiety. Fortunately, when doing the last bake I’d used only 3/4 of the package of yeast, and had set aside the rest for this very purpose. So:

(Stage 1) Find favorite handled soup cup. Spoon in a tablespoon or two of flour and that yeast, and stir it about well to get combined. Add about a quarter-teaspoon of sugar just to let the yeast know that, momentarily anyway, Life Is Unexpectedly Good. Add a quarter cup of water, or a little more if necessary, to make a thick paste. Then cover the cup (or other vessel) and put this whole business aside somewhere warmish for a couple of hours. (Note that no salt is involved in this procedure until making the actual bread dough, because the salt acts as an inhibitor and the last thing you want to do with the yeast at this point is get it feeling inhibited.)

(Stage 2) In a couple of hours there should be some bubbling going on. Stir the bubbles down, add half a cup of lukewarm water, enough flour to make another thick paste, and another quarter- to half-teaspoon of sugar, because keeping the yeasts extra happy/active at this point is smart. Mix it all up until it’s smooth and put the whole business aside for another couple of hours.

(Stage 3) Repeat the above routine one more time with about twice the ingredients, except for another half-teaspoon of sugar for the yeasts. Then off you go and spend another hour or so doing something else. If the bubbles aren’t pretty active in the bowl or cup or whatever when you get back, give it another hour.

(Stage 4) And now we finally start actual breadmaking. Measure out about 200g of wholemeal/whole wheat bread flour and 400g of white bread flour. Stir in 10-12 g of salt (usually about a scant tablespoon). Add to this about 2/3 of the starter and about 350ml of water, and knead by hand or in a mixing bowl with a bread hook until it comes together and is smooth and silky-ish. 15 minutes or so by hand: in a mixer, six minutes on low speed and six minutes on high. Add more flour if necessary. Grease or oil a big bowl: put the dough in it and turn it so it’s evenly coated: cover it with plastic wrap and put it somewhere warm and comfy to rise. (I wrap mine up in a foam throw from Ikea. Works great.)

Because of the lowered raising capacity of this yeast—which is still getting up to speed—the rise takes significantly longer than usual. In this case it took something like four hours for the sponge to fill my raising bowl, which was fine, because I was binging The Rise of Phoenixes (while oblivious to the potential pun, don’t mind me, I catch on slow sometimes) and the plotting and backstabbing had seriously sped up from the previous ten episodes’ everybody-is-poisoning-everybody-else-with-slow-poisons-while-snarking-at-them arc.

At this point I hit pause long enough to punch the dough down… or actually, smoosh it down: it was very soft and sloppy. It was also larger than my normal loaf, because I’d had a put a fair amount of extra flour in to stabilize it. It became plain that (a) it was realistically too late to wait through a second rise and bake last night—which meant an overnight “cool rise” out on the sink in the boot room—and (b) if I put it in a regular loaf pan / tin to do that, it would overflow the thing in the middle of the night and make all kinds of mess. So I oiled a three-liter Les Cousances casserole, dumped the sponge in there, covered it with a tea towel, and left it to its own devices for the night. Then I went back to my binging, though not before adding more water and more flour to what was left of the preferment, and just a few pinches more of sugar, because so far at least the yeasts had been behaving Very Well and deserved a treat.

When I got up in the morning and came downstairs, here’s what the casserole looked like:

The risen bread splonge

So it was plain that it was now time to bake, yay! Oven up to 200C, then (when preheated) slid the casserole in and for good measure threw about 150ml of water into the roasting pan at the bottom, to make some steam. Timer set for 50 minutes, and off to do some email and other stuff.

When the timer went off, this is what we wound up with:

The finished loaf

It took another couple of hours for the loaf to cool and stabilize enough to slice safely. It’s a peculiar looking thing, but Peter came along and pronounced it one of the best bakes of this kind ever. (He’s fond of the pot-baking end of things: he’s quite good with the New York Times no-knead recipe.) Having had a couple of slices, I’m inclined to agree. Light: a delicate springy crumb, nice and open in the usual manner of slow-and-cool rises: definitely tasty. The crust’s a bit aggressive, but a night in a bread bag will sort that out.

…So that’s one way to do it. That said: I still want my damn active dry yeast. Meanwhile, the preferment is sitting in the office window, enjoying the warmth from the wood-burning stove, and it’s getting to be time to feed it a little again. (Because an online associate caused me to think of the torture-a-cinnamon-roll concept just now, and a yeast-raised cinnamon roll can be pretty good. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.)

…See, it’s even got a hat!

The preferment and its hat

And for the moment, that’s all she wrote.

April 9, 2020

Absent friends Baking Food

Dave Gemmell’s Brownies

by Diane Duane November 14, 2017

The recipe isn’t his, but I think of him whenever I make it (which is way too often. Not in terms of thinking about David Gemmell, but in terms of eating the brownies…).

This recipe closely parallels one I always used when Dave would come to visit us in the house on the hill that we were then renting (from Harry Harrison) in Avoca, further east in County Wicklow. Along with the memory of the visits (always delightful: long walks, late nights, a lot of laughing) and the brownies (the record for baking them was four times during one visit) comes the memory of how we “lost” Dave in the bathroom for an hour on one visit, because the household’s complete collection of Calvin & Hobbes books was in there and he’d never come across the characters before. Only the cry of “There are brownies, Dave!” was able to cut the session short.

The recipe is easy and quick to make — the phrase “thrown together” would suit it: just mix everything together, pour into a buttered pan, bake — and produces a result very much like the much-loved “brownies from the box” that the Betty Crocker people used to make in the US. (Maybe they still do? But [assuming they do] I haven’t had more modern ones and don’t know what they’re like these days.)

This recipe is similar to one from AllRecipes.com, but mine is a bit lighter on the flour, producing a brownie a bit on the “squidgy” side. (That’s my preference, and Peter’s. Like yours more cake-y? Add another 1/4 cup of flour to start with and see how that behaves.) Also: I add conversions to metric measurements-by-weight for those who like more predictably even results.

The ingredients:

3 eggs
3/4 cup / 180 ml vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups / 150g sugar
1 tablespoon / 15ml vanilla extract
3/4 cups / 120g flour
1/2 cup / 30g cocoa
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
Optional: chocolate chips

First butter a 9-inch square baking pan and preheat the oven to 350F / 175 C.

Sift or stir together well the flour and salt…

Measure out the cocoa and baking powder and stir together.

Then combine them with the flour and salt and stir together until the dry mixture has gone a uniform color.

Put the dry ingredients aside for the moment, and measure out the sugar and oil. Beat well together; then add the vanilla and beat that in.

Sugar, oil, vanilla

Add the eggs and beat them in too.

Then dump the dry ingredients into the egg / oil / sugar / vanilla business (or the other way around, if you prefer; it makes absolutely no difference as far as I can tell, I’ve done it both ways, both on purpose and by accident…) and mix mix mix mix mix…

…until it’s all gone pretty and glossy and shiny. It doesn’t have to be absolutely smooth; don’t beat it so much that the gluten in the flour starts to develop. You don’t want that.

Pour the whole business into the baking pan.

And that’s it! Shove it into the oven for 30 minutes and bake.

At the end of half an hour, test it for doneness if you believe in doing such things. (I’ve never bothered. If the brownies rise, they’re done enough for me.)

…And you can see what they look like in the picture at the top. Peter likes sour cream on them, so that’s what we’ve got a pic of. Me, I just cut them up and stuff them in my face.

So go thou and do likewise: and think of Dave Gemmell, perhaps, if you do so. A lovely, dry, funny, talented man. Lost to us too soon, dammit.

November 14, 2017

Image from the front cover of the Big Nick's menu

Food Nostalgia Restaurants

The Menu from Big Nick’s

by Diane Duane July 2, 2017

I posted about Big Nick’s a couple of weeks ago on Facebook, and having had some requests from people to see the full menu — here it is.

Looking at it now, I find it damn near impossible to understand how they produced all this food out of the tiny downstairs kitchen there. True, some of the cooking happened upstairs — the grill was on the ground floor, as was the pizza oven. Right there, by the door, was one of the snuggest spots in the place to sit, even in cold weather, and watch the world go by and the clientele come in.

To reprise a bit of that Facebook post:

Sighing as I came across the attached in some old paperwork. Big Nick’s on 77th and Broadway, the place where Peter and I would always wind up after flying into NY and collapsing jetlagged, and then waking up at 11PM or something needing food… This was the place: open 23 hours a day (officially: if you were quiet they would just close around you for that 24th hour and get on with the cleaning…).

They knew Peter and me as “Grey Fur Lady and Retsina Guy” because I had this fake chinchilla coat then; and one of the first times we came in late at night, Peter was delighted to discover that they had retsina — Nick is/was Greek, and all kinds of Greek influences were scattered about the menu. So we polished off 2 liters of retsina in short order (with the staff watching with mild concern until they saw we weren’t going to trash the joint or anything).

Big Nick’s is gone now… alas for the ravages of time: escalating rents and the economic crash killed it. But it was a wonder while it lasted. A genuine neighborhood dive, where there was always endless comfort food and always someone interesting to talk to at 3AM…

…Anyway, the menu. I’ve stored it here at our offsite storage at Box.com for those who’d like to have a look at it. It’s about 6 megabytes: 23 pages long. Enjoy!

(By the way: Big Nick’s Facebook page remains, with many images and memories from customers and friends of the house. And wow, who knew: the window into which a hungry Jon Voight stares in Midnight Cowboy is the front window of Big Nick’s, and Nick himself is there…)

July 2, 2017

Cheese straws from Mrs. De Salis's 1903 recipe

Baking cooking Food Home life

The Cheese Straw Recipe

by Diane Duane December 28, 2016

In 2010 or thereabouts, a tiny little cookbook came to us via Peter’s Mum and immediately became a household favorite.

It was published in 1903 for what was the first generation of middle-to-upper class British housewives who couldn’t afford to hire kitchen staff, but still wanted to serve food suitable to a high-class household. These cooks were also beginning to come into possession of the first generation of true labor-saving devices — the initial gas and electric ranges, the first refrigerators — and were looking for recipes to take advantage of them. So along came Harriet DeSalis, and with this group of readers in mind, wrote Savouries A La Mode.

The cookbook was a huge hit — no surprise, when the recipes worked so well. Dipping into it, one finds recipes that make the mouth water and make the chronic cook (at least this one) itch to get into the kitchen and see how they turn out. It became the first of a series that went on well into the early part of the 20th century and sold hundreds of thousands of copies over numerous editions.

They’re all in public domain now, those original editions of Savouries and its sequels, which is what moved me to scan that first book and make it available over here at EuropeanCuisines.com. But the other reason I scanned it was so I don’t have to hunt down the cookbook proper, when the urge strikes, but can just load the PDF onto the iPad and work from that in the kitchen.

The other evening I was feeling like having some kind of snack, and it occurred to me to pull out the DeSalis and see if we had the ingredients for anything that looked nice. Paging through it, I ran into the Cheese Straws recipe, and the bells went off and I salivated on cue.

Here’s the recipe.

“Take two ounces of flour, and mix with it a little salt and a cayenne-spoonful of red pepper. Then take three ounces of Parmesan cheese: grate it. Rub the cheese and two ounces of butter well into the flour, then mix all these ingredients, together with the yolk of an egg, into a smooth stiff paste. Roll the paste out into a strip one-eighth of an inch in thickness and five inches wide, which is to be the length of the cheese straws. Cut this strip into strips one-eighth of an inch wide, so that they will be five inches long and one-eighth of an inch in thickness. With the remainder of the paste, and with two round cutters, cut little rings of paste. Put the cheese straws and rings on a baking sheet and put them into a hot oven for ten minutes, the heat rising to 246 degrees. For serving, put the cheese straws through the ring like a bundle of sticks.”

So. My first thought: God that looks fiddly. But never mind. Also: Forget about the little rings, this isn’t going to be a dinner party. The second (okay, maybe the third) thought: We don’t have any Parmesan: only Cheddar.

…Like I’ve ever let that stop me. (An old allergy put me off Parmesan early, and these days, though no longer allergic, I avoid it.) So I went forward with the same amount of Cheddar, knowing that the mixture would be a little wetter due to the Cheddar’s extra moisture, and I’d need to compensate with slightly longer baking.

What I learned in the process of making these:

The whole thing can be done in the Cuisinart / Magimix, which simplifies matters considerably. I grated the cheese separately on a microplane grater, then buzzed the flour/cayenne mixture together using the steel blade in the small bowl of the Cuisinart; then dumped its contents into the big bowl, whizzed everything together with the cheese, added the two egg yolks and pulsed until the whole business gathered together. If you’re going this route, don’t overdo the pulsing, as you don’t want the mixture to toughen up.
1 egg yolk wasn’t enough for our local flour to cohere: I wound up using two.
I’d never heard of a “cayenne spoon” until I saw this recipe. There are pictures of them at Google (click here), and you know what? They’re all too small for me. We like our cayenne around here. I put in a teaspoonful. (Peter noted that you could probably get away with using chili powder if you were of a sensitive disposition.)
1/8 inch is indeed very fiddly. I wound up cutting my straws / sticks to more like 1/6 or sometimes 1/4 inch, and that worked out fine.
I put baking parchment under these to make sure they wouldn’t stick. It turns out to be a good idea, as melting butter bubbles out of them at the edges when they’re baking.
Ten minutes was way too long a baking time, and the oven temperature takes some fiddling with as well. I have no idea what Mrs. De S. means by “rising to…”. I wound up putting these in the oven at 170 C / 350F for about 5 to 7 minutes (as our oven retains heat during multiple bakes, so they needed less time as I went on). Your mileage will almost certainly vary. Experiment with a small batch to see how you get on.

…And that’s all there is to it. The straws were incredibly delicate and buttery due to the very short pastry — but the cheese is great in them and the cayenne gives them a terrific kick. The whole bake lasted through about twenty minutes of the first Hobbit movie. Peter tells me they work as well with beer as mine did with that red wine.

Try them and see how they work out for you. And mind your baking times, as the Secretary and I will disavow any knowledge of your actions if the sneaky little creatures burn to a crisp between one minute and the next. (Like my first batch did.) Do a small batch first and watch them like a hawk.

December 28, 2016

cooking Food Home life recipes

Peter’s Dhal

by Diane Duane September 13, 2016

A bunch of you were asking for his recipe for this: so here it is. Believe it or not, I didn’t know he could do this kind of thing when I married him. Hidden talents…!

The problem with informal food photography like this, of course, is that (like so many other one pot dishes of a peasant-y nature) it tends to just look kind of beige. (Or, as Himself Upstairs puts it, “Like savory mud.”) I couldn’t be bothered to go get parsley or whatever for it. Trust me: it was extremely good. Below, Peter frames it as a possible side dish, but we ate it happily as a main course, believe me.

(PS: sorry for the slightly blurry photo. I was more intent on getting the image’s subject inside me than on the focus…)

Peter says:

Improvised store-cupboard dhal, for when you can’t be bothered with a cookbook.

1 cup vegetable oil

2 large onions, chopped fine

4-6 cloves garlic, chopped fine

1 tbsp. each of ground cumin, ground coriander

½ tbsp. each of ground turmeric, ground chilli, ground black pepper

½ tbsp. each of mild curry powder, hot curry powder

1 tsp. salt

2 cups red lentils

½ cup green lentils

½ cup brown lentils

Boiling water

1 tbsp. lemon juice

Heat the oil, fry the onions & garlic until soft and glossy. Add all the spices. Fry for a few minutes. Add all the lentils*. Stir everything together. Add enough boiling water to cover by ½ an inch. Stir everything together, reduce heat, cover and simmer for about ½ an hour. Check occasionally. Add more water if required a bit at a time, then stir. (Don’t overdo it. Preferred texture is like stew, not soup.) Add lemon juice, stir, and serve with rice and/or flatbreads.

Makes a good side with shop-bought tandoori chicken.

*Alternately add lightly fried chicken or lamb cubes and 2 x cans of chopped tomatoes along with the lentils. Reduce water accordingly. Simmer for ¾ hour, serve when meat is cooked, and call it a dhansak. (It isn’t really. But it tastes good anyway.)

September 13, 2016

Baking Food

The Owl Springs Gingerbread Recipe

by Diane Duane August 9, 2016

This recipe is kind of a favorite around here, so this morning I thought I’d put a copy of it on the blog for others who might like it. (Though the plan regarding “this morning” got a bit derailed by the video card software in the desktop machine suddenly deciding it didn’t want to acknowledge the monitor’s screen resolution. Anyway, it seems to have sorted itself out after a driver reinstall… I hope.)

Anyway. Gingerbread!

The original recipe came from this page at southernfood.about.com. The basic recipe was okay, but always struck me as too sweet, and over time it got tweaked. Now we’ve got a version of it that Peter and I both really like, so you might want to take a look at this and see if you’d like it too.

There are two ways to make it – with butter and without. The with-butter version produces a more cake-y result. The without-butter one is squidgier. Both versions seriously benefit from being served with sour cream, crème fraiche, or plain unsweetened whipped cream.

The ingredients:

1 cup all purpose flour
1 rounded teaspoon baking soda (It seems wise to specify how full that teaspoon is, as measuring-spoon amounts in Irish cookbooks are routinely heaped / rounded rather than leveled, and those of you who’ve seen recipes here before might be wondering.)
¼ tsp salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon (Less than in the original. More distracts from the ginger.)
3 teaspoons ground ginger (Because the original single teaspoon produces a genuinely underwhelming result.)
4 tablespoons sugar (Brown sugar is preferable, but white is OK.)
Optional: 1-2 teaspoons espresso powder (i.e. Azera or similar)
1 egg, lightly beaten (It’s going to go all sludgy when you mix it with the buttermilk. Don’t panic.)
½ cup dark molasses or treacle (Blackstrap molasses if you can get it. On this side of the water, plain old Lyons Treacle from the can works fine.)
½ cup buttermilk (You can do this recipe with milk, but it’s not as good. If you can’t get buttermilk, use the same amount of regular milk and substitute 1 teaspoon of baking powder for the soda.)
¼ cup melted butter (Include it or omit it as you please. The first time you do the recipe, probably it’s better to do it with the butter.)

…So. First thing: butter and flour whatever you’re going to bake this in. (I usually use a springform pan.) Preheat the oven to 350F / 175C.

Mix the dry ingredients together. You can sift them together if you like, but in my experience it doesn’t make a big difference. Re that “optional” espresso powder: I strongly recommend it. It really makes a difference to the flavor of the gingerbread, though magically it doesn’t jump out at you as coffee-ish. Think of it as a flavor enhancer.

As regards the liquid ingredients: Though we take buttermilk for granted in Ireland, it’s so weirdly regional in the US and Canada that it makes sense to offer an alternative strategy. If you’re feeling enthusiastic about the buttermilk but have trouble finding it locally, we’ve got a page over at EuropeanCuisines.com on how to make buttermilk from scratch, and also one on how to make (and keep) fake buttermilk. Check those out and exploit whichever method you prefer.

In a small bowl, beat the egg. Add the buttermilk. Beat some more. The egg will go sludgy because of the acid in the buttermilk. Don’t be bothered. Add the molasses and the butter and beat some more. The sludginess will recede a bit.

Add the liquid mixture to the dry ingredients. Stir them together, then beat them a bit more, just until the batter is fairly smooth. Pour it into the buttered and floured tin. Fire that directly into the oven (because when you’re baking something raised solely with baking soda, the raising period is limited and begins as soon as liquid hits the mixture).

Bake for 30 minutes at 350F / 175C. When baked, put the pan on a rack and let it cool thoroughly before removing the gingerbread. (Just as a side note: the butter-free version of this tends to drop a little in the middle after baking. This is normal.)

Serve plain or with a nice dollop of whipped cream / crème fraiche / sour cream.

…And now to go discuss matters with the video card again. AMD, gonif! (I swear, I’m changing over to an Nvidia card as soon as it’s practicable…)

August 9, 2016

Food Graphic and plastic arts

For Easter: okay, this is a little unusual

by Diane Duane April 1, 2015

Looking for something different in Easter chocolate? How about your own custom-made laser-scanned 3D-printed chocolate death mask?

Called “Eat My Face,” Bompas and Parr’s new project employs “the latest facial-scanning and 3D-printing technology” to create a mold of your comely visage, which is then used to cast an egg-shaped chocolate
copy of your face.

“The exclusive service is an epic interpretation of the season that
makes conventional chocolate eggs pale by comparison,” the pair write on
their site. “We will create a positive master mould of your face, which
you can display at home, and a negative plastic mould which can be used
to create further chocolate likenesses of yourself.”

April 1, 2015

Food Halloween Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Humor Obscure interests

Halloween Candy: an idle personal overview

by Diane Duane September 17, 2014

It was seeing this thing that got me thinking about the subject.

…WTF? RT @pattymo: Who will answer for this crime pic.twitter.com/u0h3jqCfIh

— Diane Duane (@dduane)

September 17, 2014

What surprised me after the fact was that the very sight of a “candy corn bar” provoked such a strong reaction from me (“EWWWWWWWWW”) despite my being long past trick-or-treating age.

This response poked me in the curiosity nerve, a little, so I went looking for evidence of whether other people shared anything like it — this idea that some Halloween candies were “right” and others “wrong”.

And a little research suggests there seems to be a bone-deep conservatism on this issue, combined with some regional implications, as various Worst Halloween Candy lists seem to have areas where they agree and then others where they diverge or disagree strongly. (As an example: lists at BC Living, HuffPo (in fact they have a few of these), TopTenz, Serious Eats, Complex, Nooga…) Google will guide you to more if you feel the need for a broader statistical sample.

I always took Halloween very seriously while I was still of participating age, as my family wasn’t particularly well off and there wasn’t that much candy in my lifestyle except at chocolate-heavy holidays like Easter and Christmas. (Fortunately I slipped out of this stage just barely before the OMG BAD PEOPLE ARE PUTTING RAZOR BLADES IN THE APPLES thing got started.* I didn’t mind the apples. I knew they were traditional.) (As they still are in Ireland, which is after all where it all began. Apples and peanuts have been the trick-or-treat staple here for many years: only now are the candies starting to creep into the Irish tradition.)

So for what it’s worth: looking over these lists, I find some common ground, but not complete agreement.

Stuff I liked:

Candy corn… legit candy corn. (And still do.)
Those marshmallow peanuts. (Don’t ask me why.)
Tootsie Rolls. (In the 60s they were better than they are now. There seems to be so much wax in them now that you could stick wicks in them and light them as candles in emergency situations.)
Full size candy bars. I was never a Snickers person: I prefer my peanuts separate from candy, as a rule. (Also, no Reese’s Cups for me: you can keep your peanut butter OUT of my chocolate, thank you very much. If I want peanut butter I’ll go make a sandwich.) …Three Musketeers was (and when in the US still is) my preferred bar. I had a brief flirtation with Baby Ruths but it never came to anything. The US Mars bar was and is different from the UK one, but I like them both. (And steal Peter’s occasionally.)
Licorice, especially the long “licorice whips.” Preferably the red ones, though I didn’t mind the black. I may be the only kid I knew at that period who actually liked licorice. (But then I liked spinach, and liver. Even from a young age I felt that normalcy was boring / for other people: it’s probably no surprise in retrospect that I should have become a Sherlock Holmes fan.)
Nonpareils. Those used to turn up in little boxes in my part of the NY metropolitan area. God, but I loved those things. (And if you handed me a bag of them now you’d get it back empty.)
M&Ms. Chocolate, not peanut. The same as the nonpareils. Then and now I could go through a bag of M&Ms with terrifying speed.
Candy cigarettes. My one attempt to become a smoker failed miserably — how could anyone do that, I thought at the time, it tasted awful!! — but there was just something about the texture of these things, the crunch, that I adored. Suck it until it was gone? You must be joking. Gone in three crunches.
Pixy Stix. Oh God I loved those. Strong sweet/sour contrasts have always been a draw for me.
Space Food Sticks! The chocolate ones. Wow I loved those too. Rare to get them in a Halloween haul, but when they turned up they were memorable.

Stuff I had no time for (and would swap with others who liked them):

Those Necco wafers. Not enough flavor.
Mary Janes. Boring.
Good and Plenty. Something about the candy shells always put me off. (Maybe they were distracting me from the licorice.)
Taffy candies generally, the exception being Bit O Honeys. Those were all right.
Lollipops in general. Normally too much work, not enough taste. Some Tootsie Pops made it over the bar, depending on the flavor.
Gum. Bubble, plain, whatever. Boring again.

Seasonal considerations: There were things I had no time for at Halloween because they were readily available at other times from the store up around the corner on Park Avenue:

The candy buttons.
The wax bottles containing dubious sweet liquids.
The wax lips.
Candy necklaces, bracelets, etc.
Those little wafer “flying saucers” with some kind of tiny hard candy inside them.

…Anyway. Enough of this: I haven’t even had all my breakfast yet.

(Meanwhile, for those of you who’re feeling nostalgic: have a look at OldTimeCandy.com. They have the stuff arranged by decades.)

*Has anyone ever actually found a razor blade in an apple? I mean, verifiably? With pictures? Or is this one of those Urban Myth Coinciding With Early TV/Mass Media Attention Causes Hospital X-Ray Departments Nationwide To Waste Millions Of Person-Hours On One Day Each Year things?

(See also People Being Gassed In Sleeper Compartments of European Trains And All Their Stuff Stolen. I went hunting for non-anecdotal data on this some years back and couldn’t find anything. My firm belief is that back in the day, numerous weary and stressed-out travelers were careless / clueless about making sure their sleeper compartments’ doors were actually locked before they went to sleep, and then desperately needed a face-saving excuse the morning after opportunistic thieves, or in some cases their fellow sleeper compartment occupiers, had ripped them off while they slept through it like the dead. “I mean, I’m a light sleeper, I would’ve heard anybody come in unless something else was going on. It must have been gas! Gas!” …But I digress.)

September 17, 2014

Baking cooking Europe Food Home life Ireland

In the holiday baking department: Braunekuchen / “Brown Biscuits”

by Diane Duane January 1, 2014

Braunkuchen (Brown Cookies / Biscuits)

Sometimes you want something a little different from the usual run of Christmas cookies. These fit the bill nicely.

Germany has a long tradition of spice-based cookies / bikkies, the most famous probably being the ginger-and-cinnamon-based lebkuchen that first start turning up in recipe books in the 1500’s and have since proliferated all over that part of the world in staggering variety. (A very basic lebkuchen dough, for example, is what’s usually used for the construction of gingerbread houses.) And there are some times of year in central Europe when escaping from lebkuchen seems like an impossibility.

Yet there are cookies in the region that share the same general culinary DNA but diverge in interesting ways. These simple brown biscuits are one sort. There’s no ginger in them at all — which by itself is a touch unusual, gingerbread having so generally overrun the holiday-baking landscape — but their spice quotient is very high, and their aroma gets significantly stronger over time. Opening a tin of them even after just a day or so sealed up lets a cloud of sweet dark fragrance into the air, after which it’s impossible to walk away without eating two or three. Or more. If not quite a lot more.

This is not a same-day cookie: it requires a stay overnight on the kitchen counter, wrapped up, before it’ll be ready to roll out, cut out and bake. Also, due to its northern heritage — it comes from Scheswig-Holstein — this recipe calls for treacle (a.k.a molasses), for depth of flavor, and lard, for additional body and crispness. (If you have trouble getting your hands on lard, you can substitute other solid fats like [UK] Stork or “white fat”, or [US] Crisco, or even butter: but lard works best.)

Ingredients and method under the cut.

January 1, 2014

Baking cooking Europe Food Food, restaurants and cooking Home life

In the holiday baking department: Speculatius / Speculaas

by Diane Duane December 28, 2013

If you’re in the Netherlands (I don’t say Holland, because you might be in the Netherlands without necessarily being in Holland) and you’ve ordered coffee after a meal or a snack, odds are strong that this is the cookie / biscuit that will come along with it. They seem to be everywhere over there.

For most of us who make it at home, this would be a cookie-cutter cookie, but on the Continent they’re likely to turn up in quite ordinary shapes — rectangles or squares — that are ornamented with designs that have been pressed into them with special Speculaas molds. (Very ornate and seriously huge Speculaas biscuits used to be given to children in the Netherlands on St. Nicholas’s Day [December 6th], but I don’t know if this is done any more.)

The flavor is something special. It sounds a little odd to describe a bikkie’s flavor as “fresh”, but this is, and the cardamom used in its spicing is what’s responsible. A lovely fragrance comes off a tin of these when you open it up, and the cinnamon and cloves that are also part of the recipe add a very holidayish scent. So this is nice to bake around this time of year for when you want something just a little different from the cookies you’ve probably been eating since the week before Christmas or thereabouts.

The only frustration about making these at home is when you go looking for a recipe on the Net. The best ones are all German, it seems, but they all seem to call for “spekulatiuswurz”, or “Speculatius seasoning,” which is a big help especially as it gives you no idea what’s in it. Fortunately there is a good scratch recipe in that bible for those interested in central European holiday baking, <em>Festive Baking in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, and this recipe comes from there.

Ingredients and method under the cut.

December 28, 2013

cooking Europe Food Home life

In the holiday baking department: Ginger Nuts

by Diane Duane December 22, 2013

Ginger nuts are a favorite store-bought biscuit in most parts of the UK and Ireland, but homemade ones are way better. And somehow or other I seem to have made these three times in the last week and a bit, so I think I’ve acquired some expertise.

If you want to make some holiday-ish biscuits/cookies that aren’t a lot of trouble, especially for gifts, these are an excellent bet. They’re crisp and flavorful and very more-ish. They’re also a good sort of bikkie to make if you want to let children or those who are normally a little baking-challenged assist (meaning it’s the kind of thing you can do sitting around the table with a bunch of adults and a bottle of wine, gossiping while you do the slightly repetitive work of getting them ready to bake).

Making the dough takes twenty minutes or a bit more, depending on how long you spend creaming the sugar and butter and flour together. After that it’s just a matter of how quickly you feel like assembling each baking sheet’s worth of cookies / biscuits. The dough refrigerates nicely for short periods, but because ginger nuts are raised only with baking soda / bicarbonate of soda, I wouldn’t keep the dough unbaked for more than 4-6 hours. The recipe makes between four and five dozen gingernuts, depending on how large you roll the pieces.

The ingredients and method:

200 grams / 7 ounces caster sugar / granulated sugar (extra fine if you’ve got it)
1/4 teaspoon salt
150 grams / 5 ounces butter, cubed and slightly softened
1 egg

Cream all these together with a beater until light and fluffy. This is the most labor-intensive part of the process if you don’t have a mixer, but whether you do or not it’s worth while taking your time over it until everything is as fluffy as it’s going to get. Do the sugar, butter and salt first, and then when they’re well creamed, add the egg and beat like crazy until everything goes very fluffy.

Meanwhile mix together:

125 grams cream flour / cake flour
125 grams strong white flour / all-purpose flour

(You can use just all-purpose flour if you don’t have both kinds. The mixture, though, produces a slightly more delicate / crisper cookie.) Add to the flour/s:

1/2 rounded teaspoon bicarbonate of soda / baking soda
1 rounded teaspoon ground ginger
1 rounded teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 rounded teaspoon ground cloves

If you’re a real ginger fan, kick it up to a teaspoon and a half. However much you use, stir until the spices are blended all through the flour.

When you’re finished creaming the butter, sugar and egg mixture, slow the beater right down to a crawl (assuming you’re using one) and start adding the flour and spice mixture in large spoonfuls until it’s all combined. Stop the mixing process and scrape down the bowl once or twice if necessary, rather than mix any more quickly: you don’t want to take the chance of toughening up the dough.

When the dough is ready, stick it in the refrigerator for half an hour or so to make it easier to work with (as it’s fairly soft when it’s initially finished mixing). Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 180 C / 350F and start preparing your first cookie sheet by lining it with baking parchment. (It seems likely you could use a baking-silicone mat for this, but I didn’t have one of the right shape and so haven’t tested that.)

Ginger nut dough is one of those kinds of cookie dough that likes to run all over the place while you’re baking it, so all the next steps are about controlling that tendency. Get ready:

A little bowl with four or five tablespoonsful of granulated sugar to roll the cookie dough balls in
A drinking glass to flatten them with (a heavy-bottomed one is best. We use a Pernod glass for this, but any tumbler will do.)

There are two schools of thought about ginger nuts. Some people like them big enough to dunk in tea. Others prefer to be able to eat them in one bite. (There’s something to be said for this approach, as these are quite crisp when baked.) You can make these either way, or both ways, depending on how large you roll the individual pieces.

If you want the dunking-size biscuits, start scooping out the slightly chilled dough from the mixing bowl with a teaspoon and rolling it between your hands into balls about the size of a big “shooter” marble (usually just shy of an inch in diameter, though who knows, your marbles may vary). After rolling each piece, drop it in the little bowl of sugar and roll it around until covered: then place it on the baking sheet. For smaller pop-in-your-mouth ginger nuts, roll each piece to the size of a small ordinary marble (about 3/4 inch in diameter), roll it in sugar as above, and sit it on the baking sheet. Whichever size you go for, this is the part of the process in which small children, or idly gossiping adults, can be enrolled to best advantage.

Once all this is done, use the bottom of the glass to gently flatten each of the balls a little bit. Don’t overdo this: they just need to be flat enough to stay put on the baking sheet.

Slide the baking sheet into the oven with some care (because the little flattened discs will still slide around on the parchment if you let them) and bake for between 5 and 6 minutes until the edges are just starting to go a little brown. When I was baking these I found that 5 minutes 30 seconds was the right time for our oven. Yours obviously may differ, so when you’re doing your first batch, check them at 5 minutes and see how they look.

Remove the baking sheet from the oven and move the baking parchment off the sheet and to a heatproof surface for five minutes or so. After about that long, use a spatula to remove them from the baking sheet and let them finish cooling on a rack.

Repeat the dough-rolling, sugar-rolling and ball-flattening process on another parchment-lined baking sheet, and keep going until all the dough is shaped and baked.

Once baked and completely cooled: immediately put the biscuits / cookies in a paper-lined tin or other airtight container and seal them up. They’re really hygroscopic, and will quickly go soft if you leave them out. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Otherwise: enjoy!

December 22, 2013

Newer Posts

Older Posts