Where I'm From: Food Edition

I am a different eater now, but I have not forgotten where I am from.

I am from Lauren’s salty chocolate chip cookies, from Good Season’s Italian dressing on iceberg lettuce, and take-in double-cheese Bocce Pizza while we watch the game on Sundays, always. I am from weekly chicken fingers at the Four Seasons Diner, hands and face dripping with chunky-tangy Rudy’s blue cheese.

I am from home-baked chicken dinner with steamed broccoli and Uncle Ben’s wild rice pilaf. Four people at the dinner table, every weeknight; TV off. I am from Lauren and Arthur, bickering, bickering. A kiss. A smile. Bickering more.

I am from “how was school today?” and “pass your chicken bones to Dad” and “yes you can have seconds on dessert.” My sister talks about Grease rehearsal  while Dad Hoovers the drumsticks clean. They wait forever for me to finish my broccoli stalks (tops go to mom).

I am from thumbs on the wishbone, pulling hard, and taking turns for chores: Aimee set, so Tammy clears.

I am from a camera shop owner and a Catholic-turned-Jew. I am from a boy scout troop leader and a dentist who found chickens and eggs on his doorstep as payment for pulled teeth. I am from theater people. They wrote their own stories and sang them. I am from travelers. I am from Poland and Russia and New York and Syracuse and Buffalo.

I am from sloppy/sappy/noisy/crowded Christmukkah in our brown living room, where dozens of family and near-strangers gathered to devour a mountain of presents and bagels and lox and sweetsweet kugel. High on holiday spirits, dripping brisket juice and applesauce onto the shag rug, the guests pledged lifelong devotion to my parents. They made good on their word. 

I am from 30 Jews and adopted Jews stuffed around the Passover table, helping themselves to seconds on everything except the lousy kosher desserts. They sing about four flawed brothers to the tune of Clementine and belt out God Bless America in honor of Irving Berlin. Slowly I progress from "the one who cannot ask at all" to "the wise son."

I am from shore lunches on the rocks of the Georgian Bay and Sahlen’s hot dogs charred and steaming from the grill, indoors or out. I am from Lauren’s fresh blueberry pie at family reunions by the stream. I am from Easter in the woods with The Woods, where I helped peel potatoes for thirty. I stole my annual taste of ham and gorged on peanut butter cups from my Easter basket while Aimee was off fishing with the boys. 

Today, I am the keeper of half-forgotten recipes. I’m from “add a little of this and a little of that” followed by the shock of “yours doesn’t taste like mine.” I am from much more sugar. I am from a significant amount of real butter.

I am the owner of Synagogue cookbooks and the handwritten matzah ball soup letter (“because someday you’ll want to know how to make my soup and I won’t be around to tell you.”) I have bound copies of the close-enough zucchini bread recipe card and the transcribed, “best I can remember” ratios of potato to egg for Aunt Robin’s scalable potato kugel. My own record-keeping has not been much better.

And my children will inherit this tangled mass of edible history. They will know that the food we eat is bound up in our identity. It is part of every story we tell about ourselves and about our families. As in all cultures, our food links us to our past and helps define our future. 

My childen will understand their place in my history and reconcile it with their place in their father’s very different food legacy. They will eat with us at the table (screens off); they will hear our stories, and they will add their own. They will know their food, and they will know where they are from.

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Thank you to Nina Badzin, via Brain Child Magazine, and Galit Breen, via Mamalode for introducing me to this template and prompt. Also thanks to MamaKat's Writer's Workshop, for reviving the template again. It was a perfect jumping-off point to help remember the food that defined my childhood.

My Grandmother's Teeth

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Images of my grandmother stick to me like tiny crumbs from yesterday’s lunch. The images are tenacious but incomplete, telling an imperfect story.

I remember:

•  A faded bowling ball bag in the trunk of her sedan. (Yellow/green? Leather handles? Circa 1972?)

• Grandma clutching her purse to her bosom in terror as we walked through Grand Central Terminal at rush hour.

• Thick warm arms around me, snuggled in bed as she recited The Story of Tammy for the thousandth time. (“First there was Grandpa Alfred and he married Grandma Ann. Then they had two boys… and then, and then…”)

• Drinking coffee together at the Pizza Plant restaurant in Buffalo, where she met my fiancé for the first time. He was a fellow New Yorker, so Grandma’s blessing was granted immediately. “Just don’t hit her,” she warned on her way out.

But the image that recurs most often, with the most clarity, is a mouthful of teeth. Perhaps because I spent so much time watching her talk when I was small, those teeth remain for me the most fascinating memory of my grandmother.

Off-white, not bright, but impeccably aligned and enormous, Grandma’s teeth demanded attention. Even with her unusually large mouth, the teeth seemed too big for her face. They took up so much room that there was little space for anything else.

What’s more, the teeth seemed to be in constant motion – punctuating stories and clacking opinions incessantly. If her mouth was empty, the teeth made a pleasant little click as she talked. If her mouth was full – which never deterred her from voicing an opinion – your only option was to duck and cover.

Yet even under the constant threat of a bagel/spit ambush, I loved spending time with my grandmother. With her, I was smart. I was funny. I was interesting. With her, I was special. So I ignored her table manners. I tried to avert my eyes from that mouthful of oversized teeth, simultaneously working their way through a meal and a treatise on my father’s naughty childhood antics. No matter what was in her mouth, Grandma Ann was the best storyteller in our family. So of course I looked forward to our time together.

Imagine my surprise when, one fateful sleepover, I wandered into her bathroom and found Grandma’s teeth fizzing away in a cup of water.

Grandma was unfazed. She calmly informed me that her teeth were false. Her dentist husband had replaced her real teeth years before, and now she had to clean her dentures every night in a glass of water with mysterious bubbles. “It helps with the coffee stains,” she explained. Eventually I got used to the idea of Grandma having false teeth. But when I slept at her house, I still kept myself far away from the bathroom after bedtime. A set of teeth with no mouth was just plain creepy.

But as it turns out, a mouth with no teeth is far worse.

I visited my Grandmother for the last time when she was on her deathbed. She was unconscious and breathing irregularly. We knew that she would be gone in a matter of days or even hours, and yet when I saw her, my first thought was how strange and shrunken her mouth looked without its dentures. I remember looking for the cup of teeth in her hospital room, thinking that if I could just put them in her mouth for her, maybe she would wake up and start spitting at me again. Then maybe if I could hunt down a bagel or a good Jewish rye, she’d perk up and start yelling at my uncle or my father, leaving shrapnel of crumbs in her wake.

But of course that didn’t happen, and my grandmother’s death came with the wistfulness and relief of knowing that she had had a long life, well lived.

I often try to revive my memories of her, to mold them into a fuller version of this woman who was my father's mother. In my imperfect catalog of the past, it seems that Grandma Ann and I shared bagels together at least weekly, and her first choice, inevitably, would be the pumpernickel. As a child I didn’t understand the appeal of that flavor. I preferred the sweeter, and decidedly less authentic, cinnamon raisin bagels. (Perhaps I already was traumatized by Grandma’s persistent spittle.)

But now that I’m an older, wiser Jewish mama myself, I appreciate the rich, chocolaty, earthy allure of a good pumpernickel. This week's Baking With Julia recipe for pumpernickel bread incorporates prune lekvar, caraway, chocolate and rye – making this bread worthy of any Jewish Grandma’s approval. As I sink my own teeth into it, I’ll  be remembering Grandma Ann and her big beautiful dentures.

But I’ll still try to chew with my mouth closed.

Thanks once again to Julia Child, Lauren Groveman and Dorie Greenspan, for giving us another opportunity to bake up memories. This bread is complex, dense, and worth all the fuss – even the elaborate sling-rising process.

For more information about the TWD project, check out the links to our fabulous other bakers. For a perfect poem about Grandmas and their pumpernickel, check out this post. For the recipe, I hope you’ll buy the book.

The Making of a Chicken Soup Snob

I am Jewish. I am a mother. Therefore I must make chicken soup.

This legacy is no small burden. The ability to conjure massive pots of steaming liquid gold out of a few bloody bones and a fistful of herbs is a critical part of the job description.

According to stereotype, being a Jewish mother means that I am required to ply everyone who enters my house with mountains of heavy food. In particular, I should supply those foods of our Eastern European ancestors, such as leaden sweet and savory kugels, over-baked chicken, Heinz-infused brisket, and any dish whose primary source of nutrition is schmaltz. Should you, as my guest, dare to suggest that these meals are imperfect in any way, I need only employ a little spit and a few carefully-chosen Yiddishisms to place the curse of the evil eye upon you. This food is what my mother cooked, and what her mother cooked, and her mother before her. Ask any Jewish daughter and you will get the same answer: Don’t mess with a Jewish mother's cooking. Ever. (Unless you’re an ungrateful, over-confident, budding foodie Jewish daughter like me. But we'll get to that.)

Learning to make chicken soup is a serious right of passage. I missed my first opportunities to learn to cook -- at the knees of my mother in the kitchen of my childhood. Mom claims, and I can attest, that I was always too busy in the other room reading to be bothered with helping to prepare family dinners. So when I was twenty-something, living away from home for the first time and not thinking a whit about cooking or my potential future status as a  Jewish Mother, my mother had the foresight to send me a completely unsolicited note in the mail:

“I didn’t want you to ever say ‘I wish my mother had taught me how to make chicken soup,’ so here is my recipe…”

My mother was thinking ahead. Way ahead. She sent this note about a decade before I even had conditioned myself to remain in the house while a chicken carcass was bubbling away on the stove (the smell was repellent). So when I received the recipe, inked in her flawless cursive hand, I carefully tucked it away for future use. For years that recipe languished among the tangle of recipes that I had inherited from dozens of well-meaning relatives. I cracked the spine of my recipe binder only when I needed to add a new, equally unsolicited recipe to the stash.

But mothers always know, don’t they? My mom knew that sooner or later, fate would step in to squat me squarely and inevitably into her shoes. Eventually I’d need to serve chicken soup to my own family. I might as well learn how to do it right.

Before I could say "kaynahora," I had a house of my own, a husband at the office, and a growing family to nourish. I was forced to overcome my aversion to the smell of cooking meat, and I began boiling up bottomless vats of chicken soup with matzah balls to see us through the season of sneezes and wheezes. I even learned to enjoy the aroma of onions and chicken pieces slopping their rich flavors together in a boiling hot stockpot. Matzah ball soup is now one of the most requested soups in our household, and desperate is the day when I must turn to stock-from-a-box for any of my other soups. I’ve become a chicken soup snob.

It has taken a lot of practice, trial and error, and even some advice from the MOTH (a shrewd kitchen maven if ever there was one) to become comfortable with the alchemy of chicken soup. Over time and at great risk of eternal damnation, I’ve adjusted some of the details of my mother’s recipe (see “salt” and “herbs”), but Mom gave me a baseline from which to start, and for that I am grateful. I’ve completed my culinary conversion and now I understand: homemade chicken soup really does make everything feel (and taste) better.

As with most of my recipes, the one that follows is a fairly loose interpretation, with lots of room for personalization. Again, I owe my mother an apology for halving the salt, and for replacing some of the parsley with a bundle of fresh herbs. But at least there’s no dill (which is certainly curse-worthy in her soup world). 

No matter how you prepare it, I am confident that you’ll agree that there is just no substitute for homemade chicken soup. If you are lucky, that soup will be made with love by a genuine Jewish Mother who Knows What She’s Talking About.

This Jewish Mother's Chicken Soup

• 2-3 pounds assorted chicken parts (I like to use 4 raw, bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs and 4 chicken drumsticks, but chicken carcasses, including backs and necks – previously baked or raw -- work just as well)
• 3-4 large carrots, in 3-inch chunks
• 3-4 stalks of celery, in 3-inch chunks
• 2-3 medium yellow onions, sliced in half, with or without skins
• 3-4 cloves garlic (optional)
• 2 tablespoons salt plus 2 bouillon cubes
• a large handful of fresh thyme, oregano, sage, or a combination of all three (20-30 sprigs)
• approx. ¼ cup dried parsley, or 3-4 stems of fresh parsley
• approx. 2 teaspoons ground black pepper (if you have whole peppercorns, you can use a teaspoon of these instead)
• 3-4 bay leaves

Throw all the ingredients into a 20-quart stockpot. Fill the stockpot with water to about 2 inches below the lip and boil it for an hour, stirring occasionally.

Remove the chicken parts.

Reduce the heat to simmer and continue cooking for 2-3 more hours.

Taste the broth and adjust salt and pepper to taste.

Strain out the vegetables and herbs.

Cool the soup in the refrigerator overnight.

Skim the fat (schmaltz) off the top of the soup and save it in a plastic container. This will keep in the freezer for months and it is perfect for making matzah balls later. (Check out this cool iPad cookbook by Michael Ruhlman to learn more about what else you can do with schmaltz.)

De-bone and chop the chicken to use for anything your heart desires. You can place it in the bottom of individual soup bowls when serving the soup, or turn it into the base for chicken pot pie, chicken salad, chicken burritos, or any number of other dishes.

To make matzah balls:

Go buy yourself a box of Streit’s Matzo Meal, some canola oil, a dozen eggs, and some plain seltzer water. Follow the recipe on the box, substituting a couple of tablespoons of schmaltz for some of the oil, and using all seltzer instead of plain water. (This will create light, fluffy floaters, which are almost universally preferred over sinkers.) 

Cook the matzah balls in the broth, not boiling water, as the recipe on the box suggests. Why would you waste all that good flavor?

Serve hot soup with matzah balls and chopped chicken, if you wish.

Note: Broth freezes well. Matzah balls tend to change their texture when defrosted.

The Bagel Battle Is Over

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-->The judges have ruled (at least the ones that matter to me): homemade bagels have bested chain-bakery bagels five out of six times in my house today.
  

Why did one of my very dearest friends vote in favor of the blatantly blah rubber gobstopper of a chain-store bagel? I can only say this: she’s from Pennsylvania. What do Pennsylvanians know of good bagels? They just want something that will taste like a pretzel. Crunch, elasticity, flavor – these mean nothing to her. 

So despite this one conundrum, I’m feeling a little self-righteous and proud of my Jewish self for making what I think are some amazing bagels. It was no small feat, I tell you. Even for an obsessive bread-baker like me.

The recipe, from Baking With Julia and contributed by Lauren Groveman, was a typical 4-page process, spanning 48 hours and at least three loads of dishes. But I am here to report that it was worth it, and the process was relatively straightforward, as bread projects go. It had taken awhile for me to work up the nerve to try baking bagels (until my 40^th birthday, in fact), but I’m so glad I finally tackled this right of passage.

Despite not having access to the famous “New York water” way up here in Connecticut, the bagels were everything we’d hoped for: golden brown and crunchy on the outside, and stretchy soft on the inside. They’re perfect for a shmear but also can be eaten entirely naked. Wait, that didn't come out right....

The basic recipe can be found at Heather’s Bytes. Also, I encourage you to check out other bakers' experiences at Tuesdays With Dorie.

The only changes I made were to add four teaspoons of vital wheat gluten to my bread flour to improve elasticity and rise. As usual, I also probably added more bread flour than the recipe called for. At some point I stopped counting scoops and relied on my laser-sharp baker’s intuition to judge when the dough was ready ("eh... that looks kinda close..."). Lastly, I used parchment paper instead of floured towels to prepare the bagels -- floured towels and I have never gotten along.

I topped the bagels with the usual fare: sesame seeds, poppy seeds, and one everything bagel. (You’re not going to find blueberry or french toast bagels in my breadbasket – I’m kind of a purist that way.) My “wild card” bagel, if you can call it that, was topped with sauteed shallots. As I poured the shallots onto the bagel, I dripped the olive oil on as well. Each bagel also had a touch of sea salt sprinkled on top just before I popped them into the oven.

Due in equal parts to the sweetness of the shallots and the extra kick of olive oil, the shallot bagel was the clear winner among the bunch, besting even the everything version. Still, every homemade bagel came in miles ahead of the gummy mass they try to pawn off as bagels at the chain store down the street.

Surprised?

Kitchen Oasis Naan

The scarf hails directly from India (thanks Aim),
The naan hails directly from my decrepit kitchen.

My kitchen isn’t fancy. It’s not practical or efficient.  There are no stainless-clad modern appliances or gleaming 6-burner cook tops. The setup is unwieldy at best, with the workspace situated about a mile from the stove, which makes every trip to the range a test of balance and agility. The oven itself is a crusty old electric number that hasn’t maintained a static temperature for more than seven consecutive minutes since 1972. Our creaky floor is a deeply wounded wooden testament to the kitchen tools that have landed there over the past 75 years or so.

The kitchen’s centerpiece is a craggy and burned wooden stand on wheels that we creatively refer to as “the rollie thing.” We purchased it circa 1994 from the now defunct Caldor, which was a prehistoric antecedent to Wal-Mart, so you can imagine its structural integrity. (Imagine kneading dough on a puddle of Jell-O.)

But it is my kitchen. And as such, it is my oasis. It’s the place I come back to again and again for solace, for sustenance, for adventure, for relief from the theater of parenthood and the general mayhem of mid-life. And in my kitchen, I find that the most effective escape – a mental oasis, if you will -- is baking bread.

Any excuse to use the ThermaPen.

So I was thrilled to learn that the assignment this week for the Tuesdays with Dorie group was “Oasis Naan.” I’ve made this recipe before, and although it does require a little babysitting while each piece is shaped and then plopped onto a hot baking stone, it is not difficult. It’s hard to go wrong.

Like pizza dough, naan can be a canvas for just about anything you could conceive. The biggest challenge for me was reigning myself in with the toppings. Because, like pizza, simpler naan is usually better naan. The recipe creates 8 6-inch rounds of bread, so I chose to leave 3 plain, topping with a little butter and a pinch of salt after they came out of the oven. (Though the Bean and Pie generally are adventurous eaters, they’re still kids, so I knew they would prefer the purely white variety.)

I used a mixer instead of kneading it by hand.
Worked like a charm.

For two of the breads, I used the scallions, salt and cumin seeds called for in the recipe. As expected, this made a lovely accompaniment for the leftover Indian takeout from the previous night (I’d planned ahead).

The dough bubbled like crazy when I let it rest in the fridge overnight,
then warmed it up by leaving it on the range while the stove was preheating.
Hooray for old appliances that leak heat!

For another two breads, I used the scallions, salt and caraway seeds, just as the recipe suggested. When I bit into this version, I couldn’t help but think “bialy.” Yes, it was missing the poppyseeds and the onions were totally different and yes I know that caraway doesn't usually make an appearance on bialys, but something about the salt and the thick doughy quality harkened straight back to Kossars for me. This is not a bad thing, I just wouldn’t recommend pairing this bread with leftover chana saag. This version cries out for just a little shmear of plain cream cheese.

The toppings

I used the final bread round as a platform for all of the toppings previously mentioned: salt, scallions, cumin seeds and caraway seeds. Plus a little butter thrown on at the end, just because, well, you know the adage is true -- everything is better with butter.

What a great day! For two straight hours, I had flour in my hair, dough stuck to the front of my shirt, and an assembly line of pillowy spheres parading from counter to oven to cooling rack. I had the house to myself, a warm, yeasty kitchen on a cold day, and an intimate oasis of calm. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Until dinner.

Thanks to our hosts, Maggie and Phyl.Check out their blogs this week for the recipes, or better yet, purchase the Baking with Julia cookbook.