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an everyday life

an everyday life

Tag Archives: In the Kitchen

Braking Tradition

08 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by Janell in Life at Home, Soul Care

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

breaking traditions, Childhood Memories, Easter Celebrations, In the Kitchen, Sacrifice, Traditions

No traditional Easter luncheon for us this year.

No baked ham.  Deviled eggs.  Nor scalloped potatoes or pineapple.

No family gatherings around the dining table.  Which is fitting, I suppose, since I’ve no dining chairs to gather around the table.  A case of poor timing on my part, they’re off being re-upholstered —  and my three married children are off celebrating elsewhere.  Kara and Kate are at their father’s place in Chandler and I think Bryan and new daughter-in-law Amy are in Tulsa with her family.

Today, we are a trinity of diners  — father, son and an unholy ghost of a mother, who once would have ensured she had at least touched based with all her chicks to know their plans, to perhaps let them know they were loved, if not with exact words, at least with action, as in an invitation to dine.  Or to drop by for dessert and a visit — perhaps, the perennial pink-swirled sugar cookies, called “Sweeties,” that became, without thought of tradition-making, my signature grandmother cookie.  Or maybe, if I had a few kinds souls to help me eat it, my very favorite coconut cream pie.

Alas, it’s chocolate cream pie for us today.  My sacrifice for the two I live with, since husband and son prefer chocolate to coconut.  But that’s okay since it’s becoming a day for breaking traditions — it will be my husband, instead of me, cooking in front of the stove today.  He offered to cook Cashew Chicken over steamed rice.  And I accepted.  It’s one of my favorite dishes he makes that — as luck would have it — he no longer enjoys.  So making it will become his sacrifice for me.

Perhaps all this off-with-the-old traditional meal and ways of celebrating is a good thing to do at Easter — and other holy days, too — at least on occasion.  Who knows but maybe the little sacrificial acts won’t bleed into everyday life.  But, even if they don’t, it’s good to take breaks from tradition.  Because, I confess, tradition blinds me.  It makes me deaf.  So much that it takes something new to wake me up — to stir me back to life — to the who and what which lies beyond and beneath the traditions of celebration.

So today, having no need to work heart out in the kitchen — for a feast consumed in thirty minutes or less — I’ve been contemplating the what’s and who’s of my life.   I’ve thought of the past, about parents and marvelous Easter dinners I’ve been blessed to enjoy.  I’ve thought of past egg hunts at my Granny’s house, when the egg-hiders —  my mother and her sister Jo and sister-in-law Georgia, who then seemed old beyond years, but — I see far more clearly, now, even with failing eyesight, — were oh so young — as they told us kids to close our eyes and not to peek.  As they’d wander off together laughing, toward the front yard with real boiled eggs dyed all the colors of the rainbow.  I’ve thought of other hunts that had nothing to do with boiled eggs, the one all the way back to that first Resurrection Sunday, to that young trinity of visitors to Jesus’ tomb — Mary, Peter and John — and how frightened they were to find no body home.

Funny how I’ve yet to think of the future.  But, thinking there now, I can’t imagine the thought of breaking the tradition of ham and hunts and family gatherings forever.  I cannot bear the thought of never again hosting all of my children and their families  to future grand Easter feasts and egg hunts.

Instead, I hope today is only a slowing down, a braking rather than a breaking of Easter traditions.   That I’ll soon recover my motherly mojo — not that I ever had a full cup of this, but at least whatever portion I once enjoyed — enough, to gather my chicks home, to a place that celebrates our joined and imperfect past as it builds bridges to some shared imperfect future.

Because no body, but nobody, like Jesus, lives here at this house.  Though sometimes, even in the smallest sacrifice, I catch a glimpse of him or two.  Maybe a ghost of his holiness.  A taste of him on my tongue.  If not in the breaking of bread, then in the braking of tradition.

Cashew Chicken, anyone?

Cashew Chicken for Three

1/2 lb boneless chicken breasts, cut in thin strips
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1/2 Tbsp cornstarch
1 Tbsp canola oil
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 small onion, diced
1/4 lb mushrooms, trimmed, sliced thin through stems
1 Tbsp canola oil
3 cups cabbage, shredded
1/2 tsp sugar
3 oz cashew nuts, salt rinsed off, dried
1/2 tsp cornstarch

1/8 cup soy sauce

In small bowl, blend soy sauce and corn starch and add chicken.  Let stand at room temperature for 15 minutes.

Heat 1 Tbsp oil with salt in wok over high heat.  Add chicken and stir-fry until white and firm.  Add onion and mushrooms, continuing to stir-fry until vegetables are soft.  Transfer wok contents to bowl.  Add remaining oil to wok with cabbage and sugar.  Stir-fry about 3-4 minutes until cabbage is crisp-tender.  Return chicken-vegetable mixture to wok, add cashews and toss to combine.  Sir in final cornstarch and soy sauce.  Cover and steam for a minute.  Uncover and stir until sauce is thickened.

Serve over steamed rice.

Pie & Shrimp Tales

23 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Janell in Far Away Places, In the Kitchen, Life at Home

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Birthdays, Cooking, Florida Keys, In the Kitchen, Key West Pink Shrimp, Lemon Cream Pie, Sister Rivalry, Southern Living, Travel

“… I also remember Grandma baking lots of sugar cookies, lemon pie and candied sweet potatoes, but I’ve no recipes for these.  Grandma just threw these things together from memory.”

— Cousin Nellie Yadon’s recollection of Great-Grandma Taylor’s cooking, published in the Centennial Cookbook of Rock Creek Baptist Church, 1997.

Five days gone from the Florida Keys and I’m not ready to write of my visit in any serious fashion.  Instead, I’ve been catching up on the life I missed and catching up on birthdays I missed, while key memories wash in and away from the shores of my mind.

Celebrating birthdays once had me making home-cooked meals for each of my children and their families — I’d prepare whatever the honoree selected from my standard “menu” of meals.  That stopped in the year of Daddy.   And carried on through the Summer of Sis.  And the very long difficult year of moving uptown twenty blocks and the grief that followed in the wake of dying relationships.  Was that just last year?

The straight-up story is that the part of me that used to relish making birthday dinners for everyone just quietly died.  And that these days, I celebrate family birthdays more quietly.  Smaller gatherings.  Smaller meals.  Sometimes a special restaurant.  Or maybe I’ll make some sweet dessert.  And when desired, I’ll help my children pull together birthday dinners for their families.  But usually, I limit home-cooked birthday meals for the two I share home with — unless away from the home-front, like last week.

My youngest, who still calls my home his, turned 24 on the 12th, when we were  walking up and down the party street of Duval in Key West. So last Friday I arrived home with need of cooking Kyle a birthday meal.  By then, already two birthday meals in the black, he was still happy to redeem my guilt, once I offered up two of three favorites — home-made calzones followed by twenty-four chocolate chip cookies — fresh from the oven.

Only later did I wonder whether Kyle might have preferred his favorite fried shrimp. For some fishy reason, I never thought “shrimp.”  Maybe it had to do with all that seafood my husband and I enjoyed last week? — but the idea never floated across my mind.  Until later.  Until I stumbled across frozen bags of Wild Key West Pink Shrimp while shopping at Whole Foods.

We’d hope to stumble across these ‘not-to-be-missed’, “sweet pink shrimp harvested from the crystal clear waters of the Florida Keys” while IN the Florida Keys last week.  But no.  Instead, all up and down the Keys, not once did we find these sweet pinks offered on the menu.  But being good sports and all, we kept ourselves busy trying conch and stone crab, then dining on shrimp and Yellow-tail Snapper and Mahi-mahi and Grouper, every seafood meal long hoping to catch sight of the words — Key West Pink Shrimp — printed on the menu.

It took dining at Southern Living magazine’s “pick” for Key West Pink Shrimp for me to raise the white flag.   Not finding them again, I asked our server, half expecting they might be an ‘off-menu’ item.  Instead, she gave us a shocking pink shrimp tale —  how they’d been taken off menus due to unsteady supplies.

At the time, the story seemed plausible.  Even though it didn’t mesh with Southern Living magazine’s recent write-up on the Keys, reporting “these succulent crustaceans are available year-round.”  But now I’m not so sure.  Seeing all those frozen tails while fishing the aisles of my local grocers, I’m thinking pink shrimp could be a sister to that other Key delicacy made with limes and a graham cracker pie shell; because both appear to lack straight-up stories.

Who invented Key Lime Pie? Nobody knows.

Who makes the best Key Lime Pie?   “We do.”

Where can I find Key West Pink Shrimp in the Keys?  Here’s a home-made shrimp tale I’ve spliced together:  Nobody knows like we do — at Whole Foods.

~~~~~~~

When it comes to being best in pie-making, the stories coming out of the Keys have nothing on my family’s.  A somewhat friendly sister rivalry had Aunt Jo tops in the categories of Pumpkin and Pecan and Mom with Coconut Cream Pie.  And though both made their best version of lemon pie, no one, but no one, made lemon pie like Great-Grandma Taylor’s.  Why more than fifty years after her death, we’re still talking about that pie, though most of us never tasted it.

But Mother had.  And so had Jo. And I suppose both sisters loved that lemon pie enough to emulate.  Perhaps this explains why Mother especially favored a particular tale about a lemon pie even more, since it raised questions about the fineness of her sister Jo’s pie-making abilities.  Mother told the story often — whenever Sister Jo wasn’t around — and last Monday, while four of us shared a lemon cream pie I made for Jane’s birthday, we relished the tale again.

Jane remembers the story taking place at a long-ago Mother-Daughter banquet held at Rock Creek Baptist Church.  Her mother — the woman we grandkids called Granny — sat with her three daughters — Jo, Mother and herself — with Great-Grandma sitting next to Jo.  It was likely not a catered affair since Aunt Jo contributed a lemon pie for dessert.  And because she knew Great-Grandma’s particular fondness for lemon pie, Jo offered to get her grandmother’s dessert; and, without mentioning she had been the pie-maker, Jo presented Great-Grandma a slice of lemon pie.

To this day, nobody knows why Jo kept her lemon pie-making a secret from Great-Grandma Taylor.   Perhaps she’d hoped Great-Grandma would rave over it, or maybe she wanted her pie to stand the test of an impartial judge.  But never hearing Jo’s side of the story, I can only report that a few bites into Jo’s lemon pie, Great-Grandma leaned into Jo and whispered in her ear, “I don’t know WHO made this lemon pie, but they sure were stingy with the sugar.”

Being on the end of a straight-up answer — Jo might say —  is perhaps not all it’s cracked up to be.  Especially when it’s stingy with the sugar and just a bit tart.  Like Great-Grandma’s famed lemon pie.  Or like Great-Grandma herself.  And maybe like my version of that famous family pie without an official recipe — that for the record, one might call, an ‘off-menu’ item of mine.

Lemon Cream Pie

Meringue

3 egg whites
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
6 Tbsp sugar

Separate egg white from yolk — set aside yolk for pie filling.  In a medium-sized mixing bowl, beat egg whites and cream of tartar with an electric mixer on high until foamy — add sugar gradually, beating until stiff and glossy.  Set aside.

One 9″ Baked Pie Shell

Pie Filling

3 egg yolks
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp water
~~~
1/3 cup cornstarch
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups milk, heated in microwave (do not boil)
~~~
2 tsp grated lemon rind
6 Tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 Tbsp butter
1/4 tsp vanilla
 

In a small bowl, beat egg yolks with salt and water and set aside.

In a large saucepan, mix cornstarch and 1 cup of sugar.   Add hot milk and mix with whisk — cook over medium-low heat until thickened.  Add enough cooked filling to bowl of egg yolks — when well-mixed, return egg mixture to the remaining pie filling and simmer until egg sets, stirring constantly.  Add butter, lemon juice, rind and vanilla and stir until mixture begins to bubble.  Remove about a half cup of meringue and stir into pie filling.  Blend until lumps disappear — over beating will cause the mixture to lose its fluffiness.  Pour filling into baked pie shell and top with remaining meringue.  Bake in a 425 oven for 5-7 minutes, watching closely, until lightly browned.

Afterwords

27 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by Janell in Life at Home, Soul Care

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Death, Grief, In the Kitchen, Recipes, Zucchini Squash Caserole

Huddled around the table were men close to my mother-in-law’s heart — my husband, two sons and Janice’s husband Ray —  with Amy and I making six.  It was our first dinner without her.  So I kept numbers small — in hope of making conversation easier.

The dinner menu was less important that the diners, though I did spend hours in the kitchen trying to make the most mouth-watering meal I could.  Not only did I make Ray’s favorite Zucchini Squash Casserole but I made sure to avoid any dish that would remind too much of Janice.  It was way too early to serve any of Janice’s favorite foods, like the chicken-fried steak she heavily favored.

Our dinner conversation wasn’t memorable.  Just the usual mish-mash of words spoken in response to questions about how work was going or something or other about the weather or how Kyle’s truck Betsy was running.  Followed up, of course, by the standard fare of favorite topics like how the Pokes were doing or how the Sooners were doing or how the Thunder was doing.

We failed to talk of how we were doing.

After dinner, conversation was much the same.  Until Ray began talking about new routines at home.  Until I responded by saying something about Janice.

Wait.  Did I just say ‘Janice’ aloud?

Yes. And though I said it as natural as breathing, I don’t recall what words preceded Janice’s name and what words followed after.  I only remember saying, “Janice.”  And then the silence that swallowed up her name.

But I also remember what happened after the silence: I remember how Ray’s surprise softened into something like relief, and that he began to share a few stories about Janice that were important to him.

It was good, I think, for Ray to talk of Janice.  And it felt good to hear Ray’s talk of Janice.  To speak and hear of her was the best we could do.  Why it out-shined everything else about the evening — even that squash casserole I troubled myself over.

Ray’s Zucchini Squash Casserole

Total baking time:   9o minutes at 350.

2 large tomatoes or a 14.5 oz can of petite diced tomatoes (if canned, drain well)
1/4 cup brown sugar
Salt (to taste)
2/3 cup of chopped onion
2 medium zucchini squash – sliced
Grated Velveeta Cheese — 2 cups
Home-made croutons (see recipe below)
Grated Parmesan Cheese

Slice tomatoes over bottom of an ungreased 9×9 casserole dish.  Sprinkle brown sugar and salt over tomatoes.  Add 1/2 of onion and 1/2 of zucchini.  Cover with 1/2 of grated Velveeta cheese.  Repeat layers.  Cover with foil or casserole lid and cook for 1 hour at 350.  After one hour of baking, remove foil, drain off excess water in casserole (leaving some liquid), add croutons and Parmesan cheese to top of casserole.  Return to oven (uncovered) for final 1/2 hour of baking.

Home-made Croutons:

4 slices of bread, cubed
Approx. 1/3 cup butter
garlic salt to taste

Sauté bread cubes in butter and garlic salt in a skillet over medium heat until toasted.

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