The 12 Days of Cooking

Hello blog readers! Has your Christmas season been as busy as mine has? I thought to myself this morning, "Hey, I have time to blog! Yippee!" Then I looked at the blog and realized that I haven't been here in ages.*

But all is well, because we are here together now, laughing, drinking hot cocoa, and anticipating one of the holiest nights of the year. And how have I been prepping for this night?

By cooking every last lick of raw ingredients in my kitchen into every imaginable Christmas treat for four weeks straight.

It has been exhausting, but a lot of fun. It partly makes me wish that the season went on much longer than December 25 (oh wait...it does.) And, it makes me want to break into song.

Lucky you, I don't know how to add audio.

Nonetheless, you get my lyrics. Also in your favor: the tune is a dash familiar to you. Hum along to The Twelve Days of Christmas, won't you?

On the twelfth day of cooking, my kitchen gave to me:

Twelve loads of dishes,

Eleven dozen cookies,

Ten dozen truffles,

Nine dozen cupcakes,

Eight Tums needed,

Seven grocery store stops,

Six mini-meltdowns,

FIVE BATTLE SCARS!!

Four weeks of working,

Three dozen brownies,

Two failed attempts,

And a huge batch of TAH-MALL-EES!

That's right! After all those sweets, I went over to my in-laws' house and made tamales.

You know, because I am Mexican now.

Here's the proof:

He's finally going to share all his years of experience.


I see five plates, but six shot glasses. Hmmm, someone is getting the fuel without doing the work.


Yum.


My first masa-smeared corn husk.


Double yum.


I hope you have a very safe and holy Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I'll be sharing my memories with you soon, but don't forget to make your own!

Feliz Navidad!


*More than a couple weeks is pretty much ages in in the blogosphere. I'm surprised the blog didn't have wrinkles.

Crumbling Affection

Cookies.

Nothing hits home in quite the same way as a cookie.

Cookies and milk are a treat I still enjoy. Cookies and punch (a far inferior combination) nevertheless remind me of childhood parties, and school dances, and red KoolAid stains on your shirt that blend very well with smeared chocolate chips. Cookie dough ice cream stands alone.

You may have a favorite meal, or dish that mom makes that simply doesn't measure up to anyone else's version. But nothing beats the cookie straight from the oven, having only cooked through enough to keep the warm, soft edges from melting onto your greedy fingertips.

See? This is a feeling that pie could never evoke.

So why must I make you feel this way right now, while you are sitting at your computer or reading this on your smart phone, and very likely not near a bakery?

I must because it's cookie swap time.

Every year before Christmas, the Mastro ladies gather 'round to swap cookies. You bake five dozen of your signature nosh* and swap them with the several other varieties of treats that all your relatives brought. You leave with a bunch of different types of cookies without having to make anything but one type of cookie in your own kitchen.

Genius and delicious. Now, if only we could figure something like this out for weeknight dinners....

Anyway, I don't want you to miss out on an Advent or Christmas cookie swap just because you have no long-standing family tradition to eat way more butter and sugar than should be humanly allowed. Here's a guide to hosting your very own meaningful cookie swap that I really enjoyed reading.

For my cookie swaps this year, I'll be making my signature kolach, a cream cheese dough filled with fruit preserves. They're like miniature hot pockets, but sweeter. And, you can eat eight of them before you realize you're full.

In fact, maybe I need to go make them now.... Happy baking!


*I have totally just given an "out" to all of you Mastro ladies out there currently reading this blog who do not have the time to make your five dozen cookies. The stores have some good stuff nowadays. Feel no shame.

Gno One Hates It

"Knowledge" might be "power," according to those in the educational world, but it does not make us good adults.

I'm talking about decision making.

Yes, I'll explain.

I know, through years of grooming, that I am supposed to eat balanced meals. Meals with protein. Meals with vitamins. Meals with more than one item. (I also know this through nights of eating just cookies for dinner. That is a no go.)

Alas, this knowledge is not changing my behavior because...

I made gnocchi.



Gnocchi, the delicious potato-y pasta that says, "Hey, you can have a square meal if you think those vitamins will keep you warm at night, but you'll be dreaming of me."



It says that, really. You might need to listen closer to yours next time.



Either way, when the gnocchi are in the house, all this "knowledge is power" mumbo-jumbo gets kicked to the curb. You just want carbilicious gnocchi.

Or, maybe you're like me, and you want gnocchi with butter. And butter is dairy, so there you go.

Here's how you make 'em.

I learned how to make gnocchi from my dad's mom a few years ago. I have since added some "tips and tricks" that I have learned since then that are part of the sacred gnocchi-making strategy.

First, set your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and let it get hot. In the meantime, turn off your air conditioner. If you have both running at the same time, it means you are a millionaire and can pay someone else to make gnocchi for you. I might be available for this job.

Prep some potatoes for cooking by scrubbing them down, drying them well and poking them with forks. You'll need about 5 cups of cooked potatoes for this recipe, and with my little potatoes that meant about 7 (the rest are for later in the week).

Lay the spuds out onto a cookie sheet covered in salt. The salt helps draw moisture out of the potatoes, which is something you want when making gnocchi but no one ever tells you.



Cook the potatoes for about 45 minutes to an hour until there is very little give when you stab them with a fork. They should be wrinkly and sad-looking. This is a sign of success.

Take the potatoes out and let them cool a little before touching. No food is worth second-degree burns.

While the potatoes are still warm (but not hot!), peel off their skin.



Cut the potatoes in half.



Half a potato at a time, work the spuds through your ricer.

This is a ricer.





These are the potatoes going through the ricer.



Don't be scared of the ricer.

The ricer is important because it keeps some of the natural texture of the potatoes. A potato masher would destroy all of your hard work, giving you very dry mashed potatoes that could only be remedied with heavy cream and a nice, juicy steak.

The ricer is your friend. However, if you don't have a ricer, you could push the cooked potatoes through a colander like I used to when I was first learning how to make gnocchi. You'll look ghetto, but remember: you are not running your air conditioner and oven at the same time. No one thinks you're Daddy Warbucks.

When you've collected your 5 cups of ricerized potatoes...



...turn them out onto the counter into 3 cups of flour.



Your instincts will make you feel that this is wrong, that a bowl should be involved. Actually, this is the best way to do it.



Add one egg and a pinch of salt...



and mix these with your hands until a dough forms.

Not quite.



There you go.



This is the reason for bowl-less-ness. Mixing the dough this way will help ensure you don't add more flour than is needed. The dough will take what it needs, so don't force too much flour onto it. Show it some respect.

At this point in the recipe, you could add things like finely-minced garlic, Parmesan cheese, or fresh or dried herbs to the dough for a little zing.

But I don't have time for that. I need gnocchi now.

With a 7 out of 10 on the "reckless abandon" scale, pull off small patches of dough...



...and roll them into thin ropes on a floured cutting board. Cut 1-inch pieces from the rope and roll them up onto a fork.



This makes that little gnocchi sauce "well" everybody is always talking about. The well is important.

Seriously, just flick them up the fork.

My wells are satisfactory, which is good enough for me.



At this point, you have a couple options. The first is boiling up some water in your favorite pot and going to town. When the gnocchi float to the top, they're ready to eat.



It is very likely, though, that you cannot eat all of this pasta in one sitting (as hard as you might try). The other option is to lay the gnocchi out on a clean cookie sheet and freeze them. After completely frozen, you could store them in freezer bags. You can also cook the gnocchi straight from the freezer, too; again, when they float to the top of the pot after being thrown into boiling water, they're ready to eat.

Me? Well....



P.S. Here's somebody making gnocchi with Gorgonzola--yum!

Jen & Julie & Julia

Over the weekend, Stephen and I rented Julie & Julia. We rented it for several reasons. These reasons and their tangent-like paragraphs (none of which seemed large enough when I started this post to justify their own post) are below:

-I had not seen this movie yet, and it was basically the perfect movie for me (please see other reasons).

-Stephen thought it would lift my spirits a bit after a rough week. And, it really did. Light-hearted whimsy + movie about food + real-life food = excellent evening at home.

-We were amused at the idea of blogging about something for a whole year. I loved the idea of working my way through a cookbook, taking the no-excuses route and sharing your triumphs and failures with the blogosphere. Heck, some of my favorite blogs are those with such a specialty, like New Dress A Day, or a cooking theme, like Smitten Kitchen.

-I love anything "vintage." If you want to sell it to me, tell me it's vintage, or traditional, or classic, or some other synonym that basically means enduring and awesome all at once. Endursome. Yeah, endursome. This movie was full of endursome-ness.

-I love Julia Child. Her mannerisms, her tone of voice, her stature--everything about her makes me smile. I would rather learn cooking from her for only 30 seconds than to have Emeril yell Batman-esque words at me for an entire hour. Having her so accurately portrayed by Meryl Streep to endure for all cinema history is quite a treat (and, thankfully, we have Julia herself captured on film, teaching as she loved to do).

-I love to cook. I don't just love it because at the end, I am fed. I love the creating part of it, the part where the final dish becomes more than the sum of its individual ingredients. It might be one of the few things where you can be both technical and creative. You can be reassured that your recipe, with its precise measurements, will, in fact, make the exact dish promised at the top of the recipe card. At the same time, you can feel the recipe subtly allowing you creative freedom, assuring you access to any potential number of successes if you add a little of this, a pinch of that. It's a glorious mix that exemplifies how we should handle things in life: logically, but with faith in improvisation.

-(Please see first reason.)

Overall, I recommend Julie & Julia for any and all occasions.

Except maybe when you are on a diet. No promises, there.

What a Tart!

Over the weekend, I decided to make good use of all the figs I had accumulated and make a Fig and Almond Tart, which in theory should look just like the picture next to the recipe.

I began the process of creating the tarty goodness by washing a whole bunch of black Mission figs.



To ensure they were good, I had about seven before I started cooking. And darn! I didn't get a picture of that. Oh well...

I put the figs into a glass bowl and dug up my grandma's old food processor to begin forming the tart dough.



I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that's old. You're thinking that color (that beige-y sad color) was discontinued in the 1970's because it looks awful. You're thinking it will never work.

Well, I had hope. I was going to give the old girl a shot. I thought, "I'll prove that things don't need to be new to make delicious treats!"

In this coin toss, you won. Fried motor.

With the food processor out of commission, I resolved to make my tart the old fashioned way: with frozen butter. First I put all the dry ingredients together, including a lot of lemon zest.*



Then I folded in the butter, making sure it stayed chunky for tart tenderness, and mushed it with the dry stuff to look like this.



I assure you that in real life, it was not blurry. I then flattened the dough into a disc and put it in the fridge to keep it cool and full of potential.

While that hung out in the fridge, I mixed all of the wet stuff, including some local honey, with my awesome red spatula.



I think the red spatula is the secret. Or following the directions. Either or.

Then I cleaned my workspace so my mom and sister would not have a conniption after reading this blog post.



See, Mom and Steph, look how clean it is!

After basking in this tidiness for about 45 seconds, I busted the dough out of the fridge, rolled it out flat, spread the wet stuff onto it, put some almonds onto that, sliced the figs and laid them on top of everything.



Aww, pretty.

After spreading some fig jam on top of it all for glossiness, I folded the edges over and stuck it in the oven....



...where I stood right outside the door, waiting, wondering, "Is everything OK in there? It isn't doing anything." I think I was waiting for it to bubble like lasagna or something.

The timer finally went off, and all was well. It was cooked and delicious (and, again, not blurry in real life).



I took it to a few places this weekend so people could give it a try, and it was well received (except by my husband, who made sure to give me a kiss on my forehead before he said that I did a really good job, but that he could now confirm that he does not like figs).

I'm really glad people generally enjoyed the tart. It's encouraging when you make edible and likable food. I was sharing my success with my parents this week, which reminded them that that had a gift for me: 3 bags of dried figs.

Oh boy.


*By the way, I do not have a zester either. Food processor, zester...are there other things you think I need?

Are You Sure You Want To Eat That?

I've learned that I have a little too much to say about fashion. And even though we're wrapping up my first ever themed-week of blogging--food--I wanted to get a little fashion fodder in.

Well, at least fashion-related fodder.

Since we are about as far away from Girl Scout cookie season--a season I look forward to very much--as you can get, I thought it would be the perfect time to share this "vintage" sugar cookie recipe, and to get into the bigger idea of "vintage" food.

And, I think we can all agree there is a difference between "old" food and "vintage" food, so I won't go there.

Anyway, I really enjoy learning about the foods eaten by people from a different time and even a different culture. I have this same fascination with vintage fashion; how people dressed for the time and place they were in was always so fitting and flattering. With food, every people has worked with the natural ingredients around them to develop culturally relevant (and very tasty) food. But, as the world marketplace has grown and food is flown around the world, plus the modern kitchen's capabilities (read: microwave), we've modified what we eat and when we eat it.

In a very similar way, we've grown out of "vintage" recipes (like ones requiring you to baste a roast for 6 hours) in favor of newer ones (or, ones that other people prepare for us that we reheat and consume.)

However, being that I can't easily let anything go (or is it that I want to eat everything in sight?), I want to give some classics a try. Much like my desire to revive classic drinks, certain recipes shouldn't be discounted just because that same "food" comes in a convenience form (read: wrapped in a plastic tray and heated on medium for 5-7 minutes.)

Going beyond cooking in one of these, I think reading something like Fashionable Foods (which looks fabulous) may better fit my desire to blend vintage fashion and food into my modern kitchen.

Do you have a recipe for some classic but gone-by-the-wayside dish that's worth the extra effort?

Oh, and how did you like the themed week? Was it as fun for you as it was for me?

Organizing Memories

My wonderful Grandma passed away in 2007. She was so full of love that thinking about her always brings a fond memory to mind and a bit of a heavy feeling in your heart from missing her.

However, Grandma was also plotting trouble. I know this because I have been tasked with organizing this trouble.

You see, Grandma could cook.

Not like how everyone's grandma cooks well. She was GOOD.

Every once in a while, I'll be walking somewhere, catch a whiff of SOMETHING, and it just TAKES OVER.*

"Brain no function on task. Must get food."

These scents that remind me of her great food, cooked with love, have this way of stopping me dead in my tracks.

Anyway, her recipes are those you want to treasure, document, learn, and make every Sunday. Like any good chef, she had flexibility. She worked from a variety of source materials to make her traditional and new creations: cookbooks, recipe cards, squares of recipes scraps ripped from magazines, video tapes of celebrity chefs' creations, and good, ol'-fashioned memory.

It is now my duty to finally buckle down and organize all the recipes. This means I must look through every single page, including those I believe were put there to sabotage the whole project (i.e., the handwritten, very faded and frequently illegible notes that are also apparently recipes).

As I begin this task, sometimes I think Grandma knew I would never be able to read every item. "Is this a recipe for gravy or the directions to the mechanic?" Looking at a relatively new 3X5 with very faded writing I wondered, "Was she trying to hold the pencil two feet away from the note card while writing, slipped, and accidentally got some words on there? Was she trying to write it from the underside? Why is it so faded?!"

Some don't even have measurements, just random ingredients taunting you. I bet Grandma was thinking, "Ha! Just try to guess how much ricotta to put in that cheesecake!"

Alas, I guess that isn't too bad, really. Most of the recipes will make their way into a family "cookbook," and some will just forever be associated with her memory and the sneak-attack aromas.

How should I do all of these memories justice? I mentioned a family "cookbook," but I'm honestly not sure how to best organize everything. Do I do it scrapbook style? Take it into Kinkos? Something fancier? All thoughts are appreciated!


*You know how serious I am because of the prevalence of all caps.