Shortbread & QuickJams

We made shortbread the other day. My gran was famous for her shortbread, and instilled in me a love of the stuff. 

Gran never shared her recipe though; she was of a generation whose women guarded their recipes jealously as the trade secrets of their personal and social success. So when I'm in the mood for shortbread, I look at the recipes in Joy of Cooking, Bittman's How to Cook Everything, the Bon Appetit Cookbook, and Regan Daley's In the Sweet Kitchen, which has several good ones.

I love experimenting, so I usually make a hybrid of several recipes plus whatever substitutions or additions take my fancy. Shortbread is a recipe with latitude—it bears additions and substitutions well—which is a bonus for those of us who like to get creative, and a blessing if you're missing an ingredient. Although shortbread relies on ingredients that are common in my house—flour, butter, sugar and salt—on the odd occasion we're out of something, so it's convenient that each ingredient has a couple of substitution options. Because of its flexibility, shortbread is a good option for spontaneous baking.

Shortbread also has latitude in difficulty and fussiness. You can get perfectionist with it, but you don't have to. It's pretty kid-friendly too—you can let the kids measure and mix, hoping they don't eat all the dough, but not worried if they eat some. 

Each person can take a portion of the dough once it's mixed and create their own work of art. They might like to:

• Add a flavouring such as a salt, herb, spice, essence or nuts.
• Etch the top of the dough. Use a pointy object to create art or to make "cut here" lines.
• Decorate the dough using food coloring or cake decorations.

I had made apple butter and a plum quickjam earlier that day, so I jazzed up the shortbread with little dollops. The combination was amazing. And maybe healthy, or am I just kidding myself?

Watch your plate; this dessert disappears quickly.

 

Recipes
You can make both recipes quickly* and with almost any amount of fruit. It's a good way to:

• Use up older fruit that's still good but no longer pretty
• Deal with "little kid leftovers"; residuals of smaller children, who typically can't eat an entire fruit at once
• Quickly add home-cooked deliciousness to any meal, snack or dessert. I've added these butters and quickjams to salads, vegetables, yogurt, ice cream, toast, stews and meat dishes. 

* (2-3 minutes for cutting; 10-20 minutes on the stove. You can instead push it to the back of the stove and cook it on low for a longer time, if that suits you better. Just be careful not to forget it because once the water's cooked off, everything burns very quickly. Set a timer!)

Apple Butter
Cut apples into chunks, remove seeds.
Place in saucepan, cover with water.
Simmer until liquid is absorbed, occasionally stirring and mashing the fruit.
(You can add sugar, salt, honey, other fruits, herbs, or essences as it cooks. Flavours added earlier in the cooking process will intensify and blend with the fruit.)

Plum QuickJam
Remove pits from plums.
Place plums in saucepan, cover with water.
Add 2 T sugar.
Simmer gently until liquid is absorbed, occasionally stirring and mashing fruit. If you want thicker jam, add more sugar (to taste) gradually during cooking time.
(You can add sugar, honey, other fruits, herbs, essences, etc to taste).

:::

Backyard Harvest

One of my favorite flavours is just-picked tomatoes, still warm from the sun. It's a childhood memory that's been reawakened now that we're growing our own once again. (Previous attempts at my old house were less than fruitful due to insufficient sun, but my present back yard is sunny and well drained.)


Homegrown food has become a luxury but I'm remembering how easy it is to add a few plants. The hard part is remembering to water them! Being able to wander outside, snacking on fresh warm miracles is one of life's treats that beats anything a restaurant has to offer. If you plant from seed, a whole backyard's worth of plants would probably cost less than one fancy restaurant meal. And you can eat in your pyjamas!

This year we had almost no rain for two months. The lavender, tomatoes, rosemary and sunflowers love it. They're abundantly productive, and the tomatoes are deliciously sweet. The alpine strawberries are even sweeter—little flavour bombs so strong you'd swear they were artificially flavour-boosted.

My carrots also came up in bunches, probably because I planted them too close (: Let's call it an experiment in plant sculpturing... yea, that's it. I'll invoke my creative license.

So here's to local food and my one-yard diet. I'll be outside snacking if anyone needs me.

Super-easy christmas dinner

We usually go out for lunch on christmas day, but just in case, I had a chicken brining in the fridge, and bought some winter vegetables. Sure enough, we couldn't muster up the energy to go out of the house, so I made the chicken.


The prep took maybe twenty minutes, including wine breaks. I had bought two bags of pre-washed mini-potatoes that were mixed in color; some yellow, some red and some purple. The potatoes were small enough to use whole without pre-boiling. I chopped some kabocha squash, a couple of beets, enoki & oyster mushrooms, onion, celery, carrot, and sweet potato, put them all in the bottom of a roasting pan and added a cup or so of chicken stock.

The chicken was stuffed only with seven garlic cloves and I patted a bunch of sea salt on the skin.

Cooked it at 450, rotated it after forty minutes and cooked another twenty. Meanwhile, we made red rice in the rice cooker. Easy peasy.

Plating the chicken, I sprinkled it with a touch of 5-spice. Oh man, what a great dinner. We couldn't eat fast enough. I love those meals that are so delicious they taste bad for you!For desert we had a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream (Haagen Dazs), with equal amounts vanilla yogurt, vanilla soy milk and eggnog. What a finish. Then we lay around for the rest of the evening, stuffed and happy.

ready to serve

the raw ingedients

Peanut brittle

Who knew peanut brittle was so easy to make? 2 cups of sugar, melted over low heat and stirred occasionally; 2 cups of peanuts stirred in. Then dump it on a greased cookie sheet, let cool and then smash and serve.

This year we made batches to give to friends along with shortbread, gingerbread men and christmas hippo cookies.

Faux trifle

When I take a break from writing sometimes I want a snack that’s both nourishing and a treat. I want fast, satisfying and fresh, so I make a faux trifle.

I made muffins on Monday. Today being Friday, they are viable but getting dry. They were nothing special to start with – from a nice enough moist organic banana muffin mix, but you’d never confuse them with homemade. Without their moistness, they are nothing.

Today I ground one up into coarse crumbs in a small bowl. I added vanilla yogurt and almost dessert tofu then stirred it up to a bready-custardy mix.

I could have drizzled it with a fruit syrup or honey or chocolate milk syrup. Or topped it with fresh fruit or frozen berries. I’ve blended it before, making a kind of smoothie.

It’s totally customizable to the moment’s whim and pantry and is always delicious, and a pretty healthy snack.

Sure there’s sugar, but you just build that into your daily diet plan. I believe that if you feel indulgent when you snack, you will feel satisfied and not crave snacks as often. The sugars and carbs give you quick energy.

Tofu and yogurt are high in fat and protein. Protein gives us long-term energy, and along with fat, contributes to a mental and physical feeling of fullness that makes us want to stop eating.

We continue to eat until we feel satisfied; one way to eat less is to take in foods that satisfy us.

Apple crumble for breakfast

after dinner we have it with whipped cream

I believe that each day is a gift and should be celebrated as such. So today, a school holiday for the kids, we had popovers and apple crumble for breakfast. But wait a minute, you say, apple crumble is a dessert and as such neither healthy nor a desirable way to start the day.

Before you allow this kneejerk response to carry the day, let's compare. Bacon and eggs is not a bad breakfast, but what's in your bacon? Apart from all the salt and smoke (even natural smoke isn't good for you), there's a lot of protein.

Cereal? Don't get me started. There's either tons of sugar, or kids add it. And not much protein or flavour. In most cereals, almost all of the calories are from fat or carbohydrates. All those carbs get you going but you crash an hour later. The milk saves the day, nutritionally speaking.

Pancakes aren't much better, and if you're picking up breakfast from a drive-thru window you're just kidding yourself. (Nutritionally as well as the dis-healthiness of eating on the run, oblivious to your food and body.)

I recently read an article by a fitness consultant who said she eats dessert only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and has cut all other sugar out of her diet.

Blek. How over-regulated and well, dull. Life is a celebration - eat dessert every day. And as the old saying goes, life is uncertain - eat your dessert first. I reward myself for all the hard work I do and energy I expend in service by eating well and loving what I eat.

So popovers with apple crumble: using Bittman's recipes from How to Cook Everything they contain eggs, milk, flour, oats, brown sugar, six cups of apples, six tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon or less of white sugar, salt and cinnamon. Not bad.

Not made by machines or kept warm under heat lamps. Not dried out and tasteless but warming and desirable. Textures were great: the apples were softened with a bit of not-quite-crunch in the middle, oat topping was crunchy, the popovers their usual combination of doughy and crispy. (One of my big complaints about machine-made food is textural blandness.)

Each kid ate about the equivalent of one egg and one apple, and I'm sure less flour than a piece of toast. They loved it and felt very special to have such a 'decadent' breakfast. Lovely. Now isn't that what life's all about?

Pear Butter

...with cinnamon sugar sprinkled over top.