Blueberry-Pecan Whole Grain Pancakes

There once was a time, in a galaxy far, far away, when I slept late on Saturday mornings and then lounged around drinking coffee and reading the newspaper for, oh, hours if I felt like it.

Those days are over.

Saturdays begin a wee bit earlier now, and though the quiet and calm has been replaced with the sound of cartoons and squabbling children, my aim is still for a slow start to the busy that overtakes so much of our time these days.

Too much busy isn't good for anyone, and luckily, my little family seems to agree with me on this one small point. Yesterday, after three straight days of non-stop running around, the children and I had nowhere to be, nothing that had to get done, and no reason to look presentable to the rest of the world.

The Boy Wonder, usually game for any adventure, said wearily, "Mom, do we have to go anywhere today?" I shook my head and he brightened up instantly, saying, "Yay. Can I wear my pajamas all day?"

That's my boy.

And so it goes that there are mornings when we don't have to rush, when the cereal boxes get left on top of the refrigerator, and when we can all gather around the table and enjoy a leisurely homemade breakfast. In our pajamas, of course.

Pancakes are always a hit around here, and it is the breakfast I have the most fond childhood memories of myself. We have always been a whole-grain family. My mother raised me on oatmeal pancakes that, if followed with a glass of water, would swell in one's stomach and negate the need for another meal for the rest of the day (and sometimes the day after). These weren't the kind of thing that came from a box, but rather from the dog-eared, cover-held-on-with-a-rubber-band copy of Recipes for a Small Planet that lived on our kitchen counter through my entire childhood.

I love that cookbook. I do not cook from it these days (I am the only vegetarian, child-raised-by-a-hippie in the house, after all), and it has been out of print for many years, but the cover art is enough to send me back 30 years every time I see it.

The title of this silly blog is, naturally, a play on the title of that beloved old cookbook.

I have made variations on whole-wheat pancakes for some time now, tinkering here and there, and sometimes (shocker alert) going so far as to use a whole-wheat baking mix (!) in order to achieve the texture I was aiming for: something a little lighter than the usual brick-like substance that results when using 100% whole-wheat flour.

Actually, it isn't only pancakes that have given me a bit of trouble texture-wise. Bread, pizza dough, pasta, pancakes - anything made with 100% whole-wheat flour has been a bit too heavy for our taste, so I have tended to go with a mix of whole-wheat and unbleached all purpose flour when making any of these items.

It pained me to do so, to use all-purpose flour, and to have store-bought whole-wheat items surpass what I could make at home. A friend told me about vital wheat gluten, and said that it would help lighten the finished product, but I found that to be a rather intimidating prospect, though I cannot explain why.

It was only recently, when consulting Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food for something or another that I came across her recipe for pancakes. The answer to most of my problems was right there, and I felt a bit daft for not having thought of it myself: use 1/2 whole-wheat pastry flour and 1/2 regular whole-wheat flour in order to keep them light.

Whole-wheat pastry flour is ground very, very finely, and is quite lovely to use, as it turns out. I had a bag in the fridge already from a long-forgotten cookie recipe, but was, for some unexplainable reason, storing it for a special occasion I suppose. After reading the tip in The Art of Simple Food though, I pulled out the bag and went straight to work on it. Over the course of a few days, I have now elevated it to the same status as olive oil and kosher salt for items I would take to a desert island. It is crucial stuff, you see, and works magic on whole-grain foods. My pizza dough is now perfect (thin, crispy, and yet 100% whole-wheat) and the pancakes I made using this technique are, in my only slightly humble opinion, the best ones I have yet to eat.

And I've eaten a lot of pancakes.

Texture is key with pancakes, and not just in finding the middle ground between leaden hippie whole wheat pancakes and that spongy, tasteless fluff from a white flour baking mix. Something must break up the monotony of a single-texture meal, and in this case I use both fruit,frozen so it stays whole while mixing, and nuts.

I was a little late coming to the table where putting nuts in pancakes is concerned. As a matter of fact, and this pains me greatly to admit, it was at IHOP of all places that I first had a pancake with nuts. It was a revelation, I tell you, and it took me some experimentation at home, but when at last I got these pancakes right, I felt like I had reached the other side of my vision quest.

Everyone takes pancakes this seriously, right?

*****

BLUEBERRY-PECAN WHOLE GRAIN PANCAKES (serves 4, adapted from The Art of Simple Food)

• 3/4 cup whole-wheat pastry flour
• 3/4 cup whole-grain flour (any mixture or single choice of: whole wheat, spelt, cornmeal, rye or buckwheat)
• 1/2 cup coarsely chopped pecans
• 1 tsp baking powder (see recipe for homemade baking powder)
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 eggs, separated
• 1 3/4 cups buttermilk
• 6 Tbs butter, melted
• 1 cup blueberries, frozen

1. In a large bowl, mix together both flours, nuts, baking powder, baking soda, sugar and salt.
2. In a small bowl or large measuring cup, whisk the egg yolks into the buttermilk.
3. Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients, pour in the buttermilk mixture, and stir until just mixed.
4. Stir in the melted butter.
5. In a separate small bowl, beat the egg whites until the form soft peaks (this can be done by hand or in a mixer), then fold them into the batter.
6. Fold the blueberries into the batter.
7. On a preheated, lightly greased griddle (or skillet) over medium heat, drop 1/4-cup of batter and cook until lightly browned, about 1 to 2 minutes. Flip, and cook until the other side is lightly browned as well.
8. Keep warm on a cookie sheet in a 200 degree oven until all pancakes are cooked.
9. Serve with butter and pure maple syrup.

Life is Short, and the Winter was Long

Life is too short to do formal lessons on a beautiful day when the sun is shining, the breeze is warm, the birds are singing, and the daffodils are blooming. The phonics can wait. So can the dishes, the laundry, and the paperwork.

Life is too short to worry about what people will think if I post pictures of my shirtless children playing outside. We live in the country, and they were too full of joy to care about clothes or to even notice where they dropped their shirts.

It should be noted that life is not so short that I did not make absolute certain that I collected all the discarded clothing and put it in the laundry room before Elvis the bloodhound could run off with them.

Life is too short to toss the dirty shirts into the washing machine on a day like this. Like I said, the laundry can wait.

Pasta with Clam Sauce

There are days when so many things go wrong, when every well-laid plan is thwarted, when time spins out of control, when everything I touch seems to suffer the anti-Midas touch.

Yesterday was not one of those days.

Oh, things went wonky, of course. Things are always a little bit off around here (there is a two-year-old in the mix, after all), and every day seems to have its own detours and moments of hilarity, but serendipity herself came to visit yesterday, bringing little silver linings to each of the day's oddities.

After all was said and done for the long, rainy, chilly day, when all the members of our family had gathered back home for the short dinnertime respite between afternoon and evening activities, when it was time to breathe and to laugh and share time together, I surveyed our options for dinner and realized that my initial plan was never going to work in the time we had remaining. I scrambled around, a little unnerved at first, searching the pantry and the fridge for last-minute ideas, and that is when our old friend serendipity showed up.

Right there in the back corner of the fridge, was a giant batch of fresh whole-wheat pasta that I had rolled out and cut into fettuccine just a few days prior, and there is no meal that cannot be salvaged when fresh pasta is at hand. When time is short, dried pasta can almost always come through in a pinch, but fresh pasta? You could drizzle the stuff with olive oil and a sprinkle of grated Parmesan cheese and call it dessert if you wanted; no one would complain.

There are items I always keep around though, because moments like this happen so often, when time races away from me or when, (cough, cough) like today, I forget to soak the beans and have to scrap my original menu plan; items like flat-leaf parsley, lemons, shallots, and cans of chopped clams. Clam sauce is always easy, never fails to make the kids happy, and though it isn't so exquisite that the average person would write home about it, it can be a revelation when trotted out at a time that I might have needed to resort to fried egg sandwiches.

Not that there is anything wrong with fried-egg sandwiches, mind you.

Within 20 minutes, dinner was on the table, and the silky, fresh pasta elevated the clam sauce to its best day yet around here. I use chopped clams, rather than minced ones, for better texture, and use the clam juice as part of the sauce. It is a rare day that I am such a fan of food from a can, but in this case, I stand firmly behind the convenience, low-cost, and briny flavor. The fresh parsley and lemon zest brighten the dish and save it from being a Pantry Emergency Dinner, and a little pat of butter adds richness and heft to the sauce.

A quick, simple dinner can be such a thing of beauty.

*****

PASTA WITH CLAM SAUCE (serves 4)

Brush toasted baguette slices with a little bit of olive oil and lemon juice, and top with a smattering of the chopped parsley for an easy bruschetta to serve with the pasta.

• 1 pound dried spaghetti, linguine or fettuccine (or fresh pasta, if available)
• 1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 shallots, finely chopped (or 1/2 an onion if that's all you've got)
• 5 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 2 cans chopped clams, juice of one can reserved (discard juice from other can)
• 1/2 cup dry white wine (cheap old cooking wine is adequate)
• 1/2 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley, divided
• 1/2 tsp kosher or sea salt
• 1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
• 2 Tbs unsalted butter
• freshly grated zest of 1 lemon
• freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

1. Cook the pasta in heavily salted, boiling water until al dente. Drain, reserving about 1/2 cup of the pasta water to thin the sauce as needed.
2. While pasta cooks, heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat.
3. Add the shallots and saute until soft, about 3 minutes.
4. Add the garlic and saute for just a minute, taking care not to burn the garlic (burnt garlic can be unpleasantly bitter).
5. Add clams, reserved clam juice, wine, half the parsley, and the salt and pepper. Cover the pan, and simmer for 5 minutes.
6. Whisk in the butter, remove from heat, and toss the pasta with the sauce, adding the reserved pasta water (little by little) if needed to thin the sauce.
7. Plate the pasta, and sprinkle with remaining parsley, lemon zest, and freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

Irish Soda Bread

Sometimes it is almost hard to admit the reasons behind my recipe choices. Of course, the harder something is to admit, the more likely I am to cough it up here, publicly and without remorse. It isn't the confession itself that embarrasses me so much as the fact that I did something so ridiculous in the first place that it bears confessing.

I should have been Catholic.

Last week for instance, with The Carnivore out of town for four days, and The Boy Wonder's soccer season just beginning, I broke down and bought a Kashi frozen pizza for dinner. The thought of doing The Boy Wonder's lessons all morning, taking him to his homeschool PE class in the afternoon, doing the grocery shopping, picking up new cleats, and still getting to soccer practice and then putting the kids to bed seemed like enough to fill my dance card for the day. So I thought I would cut myself a wee bit of slack and skip the cooking and cleaning for dinner.

The thing was, I was kind of mortified to be buying a frozen pizza. I tried to justify it with it's Kashi name. Minimal packaging was involved, it claimed to be "all natural," and there were whole-grains involved, but it still tasted like a frozen pizza, only slightly better than cardboard, and I felt terrible bringing it to the table. Even The Boy Wonder turned his nose up, complaining that it wasn't a fresh-made crust.

The embarrassment was all in the purchase and the serving though. I went straight to Twitter and owned up to what I had fed my children for dinner.

See? Being Catholic would be so easy...

And so it is that I feel obligated to 'fess up to the story behind this Irish Soda Bread. The recipe turned out well; so deliciously, in fact, that I made two batches last week, eating it for breakfast and dinner on some days (the bread is so filling that it makes lunch a moot point), but even if it had turned out badly, I am sure I would have still brought the whole sordid affair into this little forum just so I could stick a 'Kick Me' sign on my back.

Irish soda bread wasn't even on my radar before a few weeks ago, when the March issue of Bon Appetit landed in my hands and I flipped through the magazine to see what jumped out at me. There towards the end, in an article not even alluded to on the cover, was a giant two-page picture of a piece of brown bread just slathered in butter.

Yum, right? Homemade bread topped with nothing but butter does it to me every time, and this photo got me all worked up. The title gave me pause though. 'A Slice of Ireland,' it said, which confounded me. Irish bread? Never even heard of it. I made to flip right on past, but the next few photographs, one of cows and another of a castle, were enough to make me turn right back to the beginning of the article, where I saw this: "In the countryside, there are as many versions of soda bread as there are cooks. Andrew McCarthy goes in search of the ultimate recipe."

Andrew McCarthy?

Like the Andrew McCarthy from Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo's Fire and Less Than Zero? The same one I had a deep, abiding teenage crush on through much of the late eighties?

Well, obviously it wasn't really THAT Andrew McCarthy, though just the memory was enough to make me giggle. I had forgotten all about him, so seeing his name in print (and remembering how badly I had wanted a pink Karmann Ghia for my 16th birthday) was a funny little blast from the past that made me stop right there and read the article anyway. Even though I knew it wasn't THAT Andrew McCarthy.

The article was interesting, of course, like all food/travel articles tend to be for me, but since baking bread isn't high on my list of things to cook, I finished the story and, with nary a glance at the accompanying recipe, flipped back to the front of the mag to commence my cover-to-cover reading. The whole 80's flashback had already slipped my mind when I reached the Letter from the Editor on page 16 and saw, there at the top of the page, "[Y]es, he is that Andrew McCarthy of Brat Pack fame."

Well, I'll be.

The absurdity was almost enough for me to go ahead and try the recipe. I already had all the ingredients on hand, after all, and I do love fresh bread, but, I mean really. Andrew McCarthy?

Maybe if Christian Slater had written the article...

So the bread was forgotten, in favor of Molly Wizenberg's British flapjack recipe (the only recipe that really caught my eye in the whole issue) and I tossed the magazine onto the menu desk, with the page turned down for the flapjacks, where it got pushed aside to make room for the baby squirrel and his shoebox (which is another story altogether).

Life went on, though the Psychedelic Furs stayed in my head on perpetual playback for a few days, as always happens when I come upon mention of a Brat Packer's arrest or addiction recovery or what-have-you.

Then, while skimming Facebook status updates on my phone a few weeks later, bored because everyone was yammering on about the Oscars (which interest me not), I saw more than a couple updates that mentioned The Brat Pack, Molly Ringwald's appearance and the John Hughes tribute.

Hmn.

I mean, I might have actually watched The Oscars had I known Judd Nelson was going to be on.

But, and here is that embarrassing admission that I brought up lo these many paragraphs ago (because, yes, there are more embarrassing things than admitting to crushes on Andrew McCarthy and thinking John Hughes was a directorial genius), the first thing I did was dig for that soda bread recipe, because, suddenly, its tenuous connection to John Hughes was enough to make me want to bake it. Are there support groups for people like me?

Hi, my name is Sarah and I bake bread from recipes that appear in articles written by people who were in movies I was enamored with 25 years ago.

Like I said though (if anyone is still paying attention and is still able to take me at all seriously), this bread was deliciousness-itself and I ended up baking it not once, but twice, within a few days. See, I am no good at bread, so any trained monkey could handle this recipe if I managed to pull it together two times.

It is a quick bread, with none of the fussiness involved with expiration dates on yeast and multiple rising times and dough punching and all of the other nonsense that always trips me up when I try (and usually fail) at making ciabatta; and can be pulled together in less than an hour, including baking time.

The bread is rustic and beautifully dense, with a hint of sweet and a touch of sour, but it's best feature by far is it's craggy, crusty exterior. I could nibble all day on the crumbs that break off the crust when the bread is being sliced, and somehow, even with the density of the loaf and the coarseness of the crust, the bread itself is not dry, not overly heavy. It is perfect on it's own, torn off in chunks and served alongside chowder (as we had it the first night), but is a revelation when sliced, toasted and slathered in butter and FROG jam (as the kids and I ate it every morning for breakfast).

The kids were huge fans, and they virtually begged me to bake it again when the first loaf was finished. As for myself, I'm kind of in love with this bread. I can only hope this crush lasts longer than the one I had on a certain actor.

*****

MRS. O'CALLAGHAN'S SODA BREAD (makes one loaf, adapted from Bon Appetit)

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 3 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 cup chilled butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
• 2 cups buttermilk

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees, and grease heavy baking sheet with nonstick spray.
2. Whisk the flours, sugar and baking soda in a medium bowl.
3. Cut the butter into the flour mixture until the butter is in pea-size pieces.
4. Add buttermilk, and stir until shaggy dough forms.
5. Turn dough out onto lightly floured work surface. Knead until dough comes together, about 10 turns. Dough will still have visible folds and will not be smooth and elastic.
6. Shape dough into imperfect oval, maybe 9-inch-ish by 4-inch-ish. (the "-ish" should be embraced here).
7. Cut large X, 1/2-inch deep, in top of dough.
8. Bake bread for 40 to 50 minutes, until deep brown and bottom sounds hollow when firmly tapped.

Peanut Butter Cups

Well, these aren't technically cups, per se, more like little peanut butter, eh, squares, but they taste so much like Reese's Cups that I simply cannot refrain from calling them by the same name.

Our family has hewn to a commercial-free approach to Valentine's Day for the past couple years. I think we said something out loud the first time, something along the lines of, "Let's cease wasting money on greeting cards that don't say anything worthwhile," but our high ground may owe more to pure laziness than to a moral imperative. We've been married for nearly 10 years now, and we know where we stand. Shopping for a way to prove it just seems rather silly, after all.

That said, we have these two hilarious children to think about, and while I do not want to raise them to think every little holiday needs to be commercialized and that we need to run to the inner circle of Hell to purchase the socially-required accompaniments, I also would rather not take all the fun out of everything for them.

Finding that sacred middle ground is an ongoing process. See, I don't really get into cutting out paper hearts and gluing glitter on construction paper and that sort of thing, but cooking is a craft I can really get behind. So last weekend, while we were all sitting around the table together eating lunch, I approached the subject of Valentine's Day and suggested we do 'something special' to celebrate.

"Like get some new toys?" The Boy Wonder asked excitedly. "Um, no," I responded, "Like make a special treat for each other," at which point I explained that Valentine's Day is about showing your family how much you love them, and what better way would there be for us to show love than to get into the kitchen together and play with some chocolate...

I mean, right? What would you rather receive for a V-Day present, a stuffed animal or a homemade dessert? A goofy five-dollar greeting card or a piece of hand-formed candy?

So that is how the kids and I found ourselves in the kitchen on Valentine's afternoon, rifling through cookbooks and stacking up measuring cups. Of course, there was the small stipulation that we would need to bake with whatever ingredients we had on hand. A trip to the store, even for a raw material, would negate the Commercial-Free Valentine's Day Celebration, so it is rather fortuitous that I keep a lifetime supply of dessert ingredients in the pantry (a home is not a home without vanilla extract and sugar).

A peanut butter dessert seemed to be our best bet for Valentine's Day, that being one of The Carnivore's favorite things in the world and he, after all, being my true valentine, so when I fell across an easy-looking recipe in The Silver Palate Cookbook (thank you, Becky, you dear, wonderful kindred spirit for this lovely book) for Chocolate Peanut Butter Bites, I halted the search immediately and started gathering ingredients. I was a trifle nervous, not an unusual state of being for me when armed with a new recipe, and not least because there was neither a photo of the recipe nor any descriptives whatsoever.

But like I said, it looked easy, not even requiring the use of the mixer or the oven, and the list of ingredients was so small and pure (butter, sugar, peanut butter, chocolate chips) that it just had to be good, especially considering the source.

There is little suspense to offer here though, because, obviously, these were a complete and utter hit. And I swear, I'm not exaggerating when I say it tastes just like a Reese's peanut butter cup (only better and without the preservatives and the excess packaging). There are two layers, the bottom one being the tender peanut butter 'filling' and the top being an absolute Godsend of thick, hard chocolate coating. And since I was out of peanuts, and substituted chocolate chips into the peanut butter layer, well, the texture is a revelation, with the firm bits of chocolate in the filling providing a welcome foil to the soft peanut butter. Perhaps just as important as the luscious flavor though, is the fact that this makes a nice, giant pan of treats. There were enough to share with my mother and grandparents, and still plenty left over to last us all week long.

THIS is what Valentine's Day is all about: love for our new favorite dessert (and, ahem, for each other, of course).

*****

CHOCOLATE PEANUT BUTTER BITES (adapted from The Silver Palate Cookbook), makes 50

Note: the original recipe calls for 1 cup of peanuts to be stirred into the peanut butter mixture, instead of the 1 cup of chocolate chips that I used. Do with this information what you will.

• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 pound confectioners' sugar
• 1 stick PLUS 1 Tbs salted butter, divided
• 2 cups crunchy peanut butter (natural peanut butter works great in this recipe)
• 1 cup PLUS 12 oz semisweet chocolate chips, divided

1. Mix brown sugar, confectioners' sugar, 1 stick melted butter, peanut butter, and one cup of the chocolate chips together.
2. Pat mixture into an ungreased jelly-roll pan (or cookie sheet), about 15x10 inches.
3. Melt remaining 1 Tbs butter and 12 oz chocolate chips, either in a microwave or a double-boiler, and spread melted chocolate mixture onto peanut butter mixture.
4. Cut into bite-size squares (about 1-inch x 1-inch) and refrigerate for about 15 minutes.
5. Serve chilled.

Burn Sauce and Baking Powder

I have no recollection of where I first heard the phrase "Consume Less, Create More," but it is something that has stuck with me - due in no small part to the fact that I have it written on a post-it note and stuck to my desk blotter where it refocuses my attention daily.

In a consumer-oriented culture, one in which money (or, ahem, credit) seemed to fall from the trees for a few years there, it can be counter-intuitive to NOT buy everything we need (and want), but this catchy little phrase grabbed me for other reasons as well when I first stumbled upon it. Namely, that I need to stop spinning my wheels and make things, you know? Not just to be less of a consumer in the financial sense (though that is often the driving force), but because I find such satisfaction, stillness and joy in making things. Hence the knitting, right?

Here lately, I have been digging a hole to the center of the earth when it comes to getting down to the basest of raw materials in consumption. It is all an effort to spend less on finished products, to better channel my meager funds into the local economy, to satisfy my own need to have a creative outlet, and really, to just flat out further my anti-establishment neuroses (of which I am quite fond); but what it means is that I have been lending enormous amounts of time and energy to thinking through each and every purchase I make.

Lest anyone think I've gone off the deep end, it isn't quite as neurotic as it sounds. To be sure, it is a little obsessive, but, well, I find it to be rather a fun challenge. And in the interest of full disclosure, I do still have cable television and plan to buy too many presents for The Boy Wonder's upcoming birthday. I am still an American, after all.

The thing is though, I want to whittle down my general household shopping list. It is the little things, really, that I'm devoting this kind of strenuous effort to, because we have long since shaken loose the sort of hangers-on like pre-made pasta sauce and bagged salads and other convenience items that encumber the typical grocery list, so my focus is narrowing, and now I'm being a bit spartan about the whole mess, even going so far as to try and make my own skin tonic (that was a disaster, by the way) in an effort to not purchase a particular type of skin cream that I do, it turns out, need to buy from the store.

Live and learn.

So I find myself somewhere in the middle, as usual. I'm simply not a purist - I'm just doing the best that I can. For instance, I will simply shrivel up and die a slow, agonizing death if forced to live without hair dye (I am a brunette this week, by the way), but I can, I have learned, live a full and happy life without commercial baking powder.

Have you seen the list of ingredients in a can of baking powder? What IS sodium aluminum sulfate? Calcium sulfate? Monocalcium phosphate? Do you really want those things in your dessert? A few years back, in an article on Scott Peacock in Gourmet, a recipe was printed for, get this, Homemade Baking Powder.

I had NO idea you could make it yourself. And it kind of pissed me off that I hadn't heard about it before. I mean, its no one's fault but my own that I didn't take Home Economics in school (and I will refrain from enumerating the details on the condescending attitude I held at the time), but why on earth aren't we all raised with this knowledge? Is it really so convenient to drive to the store to buy a package of baking powder when it takes all of three minutes to make it yourself?

This really steams my caboose, and I kind of want to stand in the baking aisle of the grocery store and pull a Michael Moore about the whole thing. I want a bullhorn and a camera guy, and I want to raise a big stink.

So it is kind of in that vein that I'm getting all slash-and-burn about our shopping list. And last month, when I reached up in the cabinet and pulled out the last of the bottle of Texas Pete or Louisiana Bull or Tabasco or whatever kind of hot sauce I had last purchased with a coupon, I got a little freaked out when I found myself just mindlessly writing 'hot sauce' on the shopping list. I mean, I can make homemade salsa. Why not hot sauce? Why should it be second nature to just go to the store and buy something without first even putting a few minutes of thought into whether or not I could make it myself? And, by the way, didn't I just see a recipe for pepper sauce in a recent issue of Food & Wine?

I did, of course. Right there, in the December issue that was lying open on the menu desk, was a recipe for Spicy Red Chile Sauce, and there I was, with a giant bag of red chili peppers that I had just picked up from Athens Locally Grown. Symbiotic moments like this are rare, I know. And this sauce, which I made on the spot, and which was not difficult and only took about 45 minutes total, has been a downright hit around here. Ours is rather spicy (we've taken to referring to it as 'Burn Sauce'), but the heat level can be tweaked to one's exact tolerance since, you know, it is homemade. The texture can be as thick or as fluid as you want, and the flavor, as I'm sure you can imagine, is so fresh and so pure that now I kind of can't imagine not having it around the house. Sort of the way I used to feel about bottled hot sauce. Funny, huh?

I may be neurotic, but in lieu of having a Michael Moore moment in the middle of the supermarket, I thought it might better suit my personality to just post these recipes here. Please share them; friends don't let friends buy baking powder.

*****

HOMEMADE BAKING POWDER (from Scott Peacock, makes about 1/2 cup)

• 1/4 cup cream of tartar
• 2 Tbs baking soda

1. Sift the cream of tartar and the baking soda together three times into a small bowl.
2. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 6 weeks (mine has lasted for months, actually, with no detrimental effects on the finished product). It gets clumpy when stored, so just sift it again before using.

*****

BURN SAUCE (adapted from Food & Wine, makes about 3 cups)

• 1 pound fresh chili peppers (green or red), stems removed & discarded.
• 2 cups (or more) water
• 1 3/4 tsp salt
• 2 1/2 Tbs rice vinegar
• 1 1/2 Tbs sugar

1. In a skillet, combine the peppers, the water and the salt, and bring to a boil.
2. Reduce heat, cover the pan, and cook over moderately low heat for about 25 minutes, until peppers are tender. Check often to be sure water has not simmered off - in a cast iron skillet, more water will likely need to be added.
3. When peppers are tender, stir in the vinegar and the sugar, and let the mixture cool.
4. Puree the peppers and the liquid together in a blender, and taste the sauce. If too hot or too thick, more water can be added by the tablespoon until desired heat and texture is reached.

Crispy Roasted Broccoli

I get really, really excited about simple side dishes. The kind of thing where the ingredient list is so short you can keep it in your head, the finished dish appears to be the simplest offering in history, yet the flavor and the texture combine in a sort of complex purity that mean leftovers would be a sacrilege.

Leftovers, of course, being the holy grail of mothers of young children, one of whom is being home schooled and likes for his mother to sit and read to him for lo, the many hours of the day.

Leftovers also being a sort of scourge to the work-at-home mother of young children who achieves a kind of zen-like calm during the brief, but oddly fulfilling, time spent fine-tuning flavors and tweaking textures in the kitchen at that beautiful midpoint in the day when the learning hours are past and a dark winter evening in a warm house stretches ahead.

Either way, or (sigh) both ways in this case, we never have leftovers when I make this lovely, crazy-easy, highly addictive roasted broccoli recipe. Last time, as a matter of fact, I doubled the recipe, sure that I would finally push the limits of our broccoli consumption, but still I caught The Carnivore pilfering the last few, by then slightly limp and completely cold, pieces out of the pan while I cleaned up the dishes after dinner.

We've fairly gone bonkers for this recipe, if I'm completely honest about it. I clipped it from an issue of Bon Appetit a while back, suspicious of it's simplicity, yet intrigued by the word 'addictive' in the headnote, and further captivated by the placement of the recipe in the magazine. I have long been a sucker for food columns in which readers request favorite restaurant recipes, and this was one of those. We have rarely been steered wrong by these sorts of recipes, and some of our longest-running family menu ideas have come from the same. And in this case, I mean really, if it is a simple broccoli side dish that has someone writing to a national magazine for help obtaining the recipe, well, I would be a little foolish to just turn the page and go on with my life, yes?

I had never roasted broccoli before encountering this recipe, instead generally steaming it and tossing it with a little butter and Parmesan, but our little family had recently fallen hard for a few roasted cauliflower dishes and were thusly prepped for the possibility of love in this instance as well. Of course, I have also turned my nose up at countless roasted winter veggie combinations that resulted in soggy textures and muddled flavors, so I came into this armed with prejudice and a grain of salt.

One just never knows. (Which is why I hope to someday learn to stop attempting new recipes when company is coming over for dinner. It would be nice to not have to stifle my horror the next time a cake refuses to be turned out of it's pan, or a candy seizes up, or a bread fails to rise).

This would have been a fine night for a dinner party though, as I'm sure you can imagine by the careless way I keep throwing around declarations of love and undying devotion.

The broccoli stems become tender as they roast, but just tender enough, if you know what I mean. Not soft. Not mushy. But the real beauty is at the edges of the florets, which crisp up as they begin to brown, lending every bite an irresistible crispy texture. The red pepper flakes are an added stroke of genius and are crucial to the recipe. Don't be afraid of their heat. The broccoli florets won't be overly spicy, and the finished dish would be one-dimensional in flavor without the oomph brought by the seasoning.

This is one of those dishes that goes with practically everything, is so easy to prepare that timing is never an issue, and, honest to everything, hand on a Bible, cannot be screwed up. In the countless times I have served this broccoli, I have made nearly every little mistake possible: I've pulled it out of the oven a minute or two too early, left it in a little too long, scrimped on the garlic and the red pepper flakes, and later overdosed on the same, but each and every time, we've loved and adored it.

And fought over the last few pieces. Of course.

*****

ROASTED BROCCOLI WITH GARLIC & RED PEPPER (serves 2 to 4 as a side dish, from Black Bottle Seattle, and printed in Bon Appetit)

• 1 1/4 pounds fresh broccoli crowns, cut into florets (to a kind of largish bite-size)
• 3 1/2 Tbs olive oil, divided
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• Large pinch of dried crushed red pepper
• Salt & pepper to taste

1. On a large rimmed baking sheet, toss broccoli with 3 Tbs olive oil, and sprinkle with salt & pepper.
2. Roast for 15 minutes at 450 degrees.
3. In the meantime, stir together the remaining 1/2 Tbs olive oil, garlic and red pepper in a small bowl.
4. Remove broccoli from the oven, and drizzle the garlic mixture over the broccoli, tossing to coat. Return to oven and roast for an additional 5 to 10 minutes, until broccoli is beginning to brown and has crisped up on the edges of the florets.
5. Season to taste with additional salt & pepper.

Spicy Green Cabbage

Oh, I know, really I know. Cabbage is never going to be sexy, and no one is going to read this and think, "I must go pick up some green cabbage right this minute and run home to make this recipe immediately."

I know.

But, see, I love cabbage. I mean really, truly, love and adore, pledge-my-undying-devotion-at-the-altar, LOVE cabbage. It could be the Southern girl in me, or the vegetarian - I'll never know, I guess, but I'm okay with that, because even if I am alone in this devotion, I will still have cabbage by my side.

I have only had fresh-from-the-farm cabbage a handful of times, and each time has been a sort of Very Important Moment, you know, where angels sing and a light beams down from above. If I could get it weekly from the co-op, I would, but I've only seen it listed on their website one time, and only twice in three years have I received it in my weekly box from the CSA. Honestly I'm tempted to try and grow it myself. Most of the time though, I pick up a heavy, firm head of it from the supermarket.

I've even been known to buy cabbage from a certain giant box store. I feel like such a junkie...

I have come to an uneasy truce with my desire to buy locally by finally settling for doing my best. If something is available locally, at any time of the year, then, with very few exceptions, I will only buy it locally and in season. The Carnivore scarcely notices, and The Boy Wonder has learned about seasons, about climates for growing produce, and about geography from our endless discussions about seasonal produce. I'm so tickled with the little fellow when he sighs wisely while in the supermarket and says, in his best world-weary voice, "I sure would like some blueberries right now, but they just never taste the same when they aren't fresh-picked in the heat of the summer. I guess we'll just wait, right Mama?"

I love him. More than cabbage, even.

Cabbage is one of our supermarket exceptions. Since I am virtually unable to source it locally, then I bend the rule and buy it from the store with the following caveats: that it be purchased only during it's local growing season, and it be grown within the United States. I would prefer to only buy it from our region, but since the produce labeling laws only require the country of origin, then I (again) just do my best.

See, this way I'm only being a little neurotic. 'Tis a vast improvement over some of my stricter OCD proclivities. Ask Beth if you don't believe me. She recently saw me lay a damp and dingy dishtowel over my head while I delineated some of my stressors regarding the simultaneous weighing of the environmental and financial conundrums of purchases.

I can live with 'a little neurotic.'

What I'm trying to say is it is cabbage season right now, and my nearest grocery store had some of the most beautiful heavy heads of green cabbage last week, listed as being from the next state over, and on sale no less. So I bought a few heads. Gleefully.

The Carnivore and I are both head-over-heels in love with the Braised Green Cabbage recipe that I have been using for the past few years, with it's luscious, velvety texture and rich, complex flavor. The only drawback is the 2 1/2 hours of cooking time involved. And since our days of late have been filled with learning activities and crafting and spur-of-the-moment times of drop-everything-and-go-do-something-fun, it is a rare day indeed that I remember to start dinner exactly 2 1/2 hours before we need to eat.

Hence the recent post about The Art of Simple Food. With the flexibility in our homeschooling and homeworking life comes a new flexibility in the way we eat. So last week, when it was suddenly past 4 o'clock, and I knew we would need to be sitting and eating within an hour in order for our busy evening to run as smoothly as possible, I flung open the fridge and surveyed my last minute options.

There was a fridge drawer chock full of cabbage, a few big knobs of sunchokes, some leftover blue cheese & wild rice frittata from the night before, and a few pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes in the pantry. I could serve the leftover frittata with Sunchoke & Potato Mash, but would need something a little crunchy to go with those softer textures, so really, the Braised Cabbage would have been a lousy choice even if I had, ahem, started it in time.

I had just the perfect recipe to try though, from Vegan Soul Kitchen, another cookbook I had lusted over for months before finding a used copy online. In it was an intriguing sounding, and easy looking, quick recipe for Spicy Smothered Green Cabbage. It sounded ideal for the purposes of this dinner, with hardly three minutes of prep time, a few strong-flavored spices to add some depth of flavor, and a short enough cooking time that the cabbage would almost certainly retain just the right amount of it's crunchy texture.

I'm telling you, if I thought I loved cabbage before this recipe, I love it even more now. This dish was so incredibly lovely, nicely flavored but versatile enough that it won't compete with whatever main dish it is paired with, idiot-proof in it's ease of prep and cooking, and ready in a flash. Simple does not mean bland, you see.

I upped the red pepper flakes a little, to add some additional heat (it wasn't quite spicy enough to merit using the word 'spicy' in it's title, I felt) and I added a little vinegar to brighten the flavor somewhat; you could tinker around with this as you see fit. The artistry of this recipe is in it's simplicity.

The final dish is a bit like a warm slaw, and is delicious on it's own, served alongside potatoes and frittata in this case, but would also do wonders as a bed for a pan-fried fish. Actually, I had thought about using the leftovers as a kind of fresher, livelier sort of sauerkraut atop tofu dogs, but I ended up eating it straight out it's container the next day for a very late breakfast.

'Twas THAT good.

*****

SPICY GREEN CABBAGE (serves 4 or more, adapted from Vegan Soul Cooking)

• 2 Tbs olive oil
• 2 tsp mustard seeds
• 1/2 to 1 tsp red pepper flakes
• 1 tsp raw cane sugar (or other less-processed sugar)
• Coarse sea salt (or kosher salt)
• 1 green cabbage (about 2 lbs) quartered, cored, and sliced relatively thinly
• 5 Tbs water
• Coarsely ground black pepper, or ground white pepper
• Rice wine vinegar (or other mild white vinegar), to taste

1. In a wide, fairly deep, heavy pan, like a Dutch oven, add the olive oil, mustard seeds, red pepper flakes, sugar, and 1/2 tsp sea salt. Cook over medium heat, stirring often, until the mustard seeds start to pop, about 2 minutes.
2. Quickly add the cabbage, and stir to coat with oil. Cover, and cook for about 5 minutes, until cabbage is a bit wilted.
3. Add the water, stir again, cover, and cook for another 4 or 5 minutes, until most of the water has evaporated. The cabbage is ready at this time, but can be cooked on low heat for an additional 5-15 minutes to achieve a softer texture if you wish.
4. Season with salt, pepper and vinegar to taste.

The Art of Simple Food

We periodically go through shifts in our way of living, and a seismic occurrence seems to be going on right now. It was the addition of homeschooling to our schedule that cemented this new shift, I believe. Well, that and learning how to knit, if you can imagine.

Regardless, we are currently mid-shift and it is affecting the way we eat.

Gone for now are the afternoons in which I can tinker around in the kitchen for a few hours, putting together complicated meals. Gone also are the countless other hours spent poring over cookbooks and food magazines, planning meals and shopping lists, and cleaning up a wrecked kitchen at the end of the day.

Instead, some of that former free time is being redirected into other pursuits that are becoming very important to our funny little family.

Archaeology training, for instance, takes precedence as a new daily priority.

There are tepees to make and science projects to root.

And we have frozen birdbaths to inspect (while wearing bathrobes and snow boots).

The Art of Simple Food has been my bedtime reading for the past week or so - such fortuitous timing, and while there isn't a lot of new ground in the way of recipes in this gorgeous book, it is her notes and explanations and, well, her guiding principles that I treasured as I read. If you are at all familiar with Alice Waters, then you already know why her cooking guidelines would be so endearing, and for those who might not have already been exposed to her quiet sermons on food and place, I could not possibly recommend this book enough as an introduction to her way of thinking about eating.

I cannot get enough of her, obviously, and have coveted this book since it was released. I finally splurged with some birthday money and read it slowly, cover to cover, even the sections on cooking meat, which I suppose means I may have slightly lost my mind (though I do not intend to actually eat any of those dishes, of course). The lovely book now sits proudly on the menu desk next to a few of the other Chez Panisse cookbooks that I have collected over the years. I turn to these often for inspiration these days, especially there close to dinnertime when I realize yet another day just sped by in a whirlwind of reading and snuggling and creating and learning and exploring with my young teachers.

As our schedule evolves, so do our meals, and I am a bit invigorated by the change and the challenge of seeing things anew. There have been a few duds (well, okay, more than a few) in the recent new, more streamlined, recipes that I have tried, but there have also been some make-you-smile-with-each-bite winners as well, and I cannot wait to share them here.

Of course, I'll need to squeeze in the time to do that...

Mocha-Frosted Cake

All has never been quite so well with my soul as it is right now, with a big mug of coffee in hand and a sliver of Mocha-Frosted Cake in front of me. If you know me at all, then you are probably aware that a coffee dessert will get me more excited than finding a substitute teacher for my homeschool.

And I'm a little bit in love with this one. The coffee dessert, that is. Not the homeschool.

A few weeks back, four generations of my family ate together at The Grit, Athens' beloved vegetarian restaurant, to celebrate my birthday, and I remember nothing from that day quite as clearly as I recall my first bite of their Mocha Cake. The wedge of cake was huge, far too much to eat in one sitting, and I brought the leftovers home to share with The Carnivore that night, but, of course, devoured it by myself when he wasn't looking. The cake was luscious in that way only a good homemade cake can be, rich and dense, tasting of butter and vanilla and sugar, but it was the mocha frosting that took my breath away. It was crazy-sweet, almost painfully so at first, but the flavor was something to swoon over. The coffee and the cocoa came through so perfectly, so exquisitely, that within a few hours I was digging through my copy of The Grit Cookbook to see if the recipe was in there.

It was not.

I was horrified. This was the kind of thing that I wasn't going to be able to live without, but at $4 a pop for a piece of cake, I didn't see living off take-out portions in my future. So I did what any industrious techno-savvy girl would do. I went to Facebook and updated my status, pleading for the recipe. And before you think I'm crazy, that this doesn't seem the best way to obtain a restaurant recipe, well, you might not be familiar with Athens. See, The Grit isn't such an institution around here just because we love their food (though that is true enough). It is just One of Those Places, you know? The kind of place that has been around pretty close to forever, has an offbeat personality that almost perfectly mirrors that of the town, and has employed something like 86.9% of all local musicians and artists through the years.

And we take our local musicians and artists very seriously around here. Athens is a little bit like high school, you see, except that in this case, The Geeks and The Freaks are the popular ones. It is a very endearing quality in a city.

I wasn't terribly worried about getting a hold of the recipe. At least a few handfuls of the people I know have worked there at some point (this is rather a small town), and The Carnivore does work on their building occasionally, bringing home treats and goodies for me and the kids.

There are ample variations of mocha frosting online, of course, but it was the one from The Grit that I wanted, and so I reached out. And within a few minutes, a handful of the best friends a girl could have were weighing in and giving me some options. In the most bizarre twist though, my old friend Becky found the recipe in Her Copy of The Grit Cookbook.

It isn't in my copy. I checked four times. She claims her copy is an anniversary edition, but I'm not sure I believe her and I didn't really have the urge to delve too deeply into that particular part of this saga anyhow. I just wanted to bake the cake.

Of course more roadblocks raised their heads. Nothing can ever be so simple that I eat a piece of cake, find the recipe in the restaurant's cookbook, and then come home and duplicate it myself. This time, it was the cake batter that tripped me up. The frosting recipe in Becky's Extra-Super-Special-Limited-Edition version of the cookbook was not associated with a particular cake, and the book lists a handful of their different batter recipes.

I skipped over Facebook this time and dialed the restaurant directly. "I want to bake your mocha cake," I told the person on the other end of the line, "but the cookbook does not mention which cake batter is used."

"It goes on the Chocolate Death Cake," she replied.

And I started to silently recite mild curse words in my head. "But," I began, "When I had the cake a few weeks ago in the restaurant, it was on a white cake."

Silence on the other end.

Then, "Nooooo," she said. "It would have been on the Chocolate Death Cake." [Pause]. "Unless," she went on, slowly, "Unless we were just playing around and trying something new."

I bit my tongue painfully for a moment, and then, in a pained voice, said, "Do you know which cake it might have been on then?"

More silence on the other end.

One of two things happens to me in situations like this. Either I dig my heels in and refuse to give up, plowing forward until I get to some conclusion, any conclusion, whether correct or not; or I walk away on the spot, fully absolving myself of the matter and refusing to ever bring up the subject again.

There is no middle ground. And the decision is always immediate.

I felt fully vested in this cake though, and I was starting to take the whole thing just a little personally. So I packed the kids in the car and went out to buy a pound of butter. When The Boy Wonder asked what we were doing, I gritted my teeth and told him we were going to bake a cake. Right away. He brightened up and said, in the most heartwarmingly cheerful voice I've ever heard, "You're finally going to get your birthday cake, Mama?"

I'm telling you, I love that little guy so much it makes my heart hurt.

Choosing a cake batter turned out to be relatively simple once it was all said and done. I knew I wanted a cake that was moist, but was not spiced, and was not chocolate, which narrowed down my choices in their cookbook until I ended up with the batter for their Vanilla Malted Cake.

Eureka.

By dinnertime, I had a three-layer cake sitting on the counter, slathered more than generously with the mocha frosting. After three weeks of bellyaching about this cake, I finally had it. It was right there on my counter.

And I was afraid to cut into it. Something about knowing how much butter and sugar went into it was really messing with my head.

It's not easy being me.

The cake did turn out perfectly, thank God. Even though I ripped the layers a little bit getting them out of the pans, and despite the way they each cooked up lopsided so that one side was higher in each layer, and overlooking the fact that I unevenly iced the layers, this cake is a wondrous thing.

I know there is untold disagreement on when a cake is at it's best. Some say cakes are always better on the day they are made, and then there are those in my camp that feel strongly cakes improve with an overnight rest. Please believe me on this one though: this cake is much better the second day. The cake layers seem somehow denser to me, and the frosting has hardened up just a little, enough to get those kind of delicately crispy peaks that make it so much fun to eat cake.

The coffee flavor of this frosting is heavenly to a coffee nut like myself, with the same delicate intensity of Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream, but, um, even sweeter from the ungodly amounts of confectioners' sugar that are used. Every bite tastes of butter and sugar and vanilla and coffee. I can't think of a better combination.

*****

MOCHA-FROSTED CAKE (adapted from The Grit Cookbook, serves at least 12)

Cake

• 1 cup butter, at room temperature
• 2 cups sugar
• 4 eggs, at room temperature
• 3 cups sifted cake flour
• 1 Tbs baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup whole milk, at room temperature
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

1. Grease three 9-inch round cake pans. Grease them liberally. And then grease them a little bit more. Then dust with a considerable amount of flour, shaking out the excess.
2. Using an electric mixer, cream together the butter and sugar at medium speed until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
3. Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.
4. Stir together the milk, oil and vanilla extract.
5. Add flour mixture to butter mixture alternately with milk mixture, beating after each addition, just until smooth.
6. Divide batter evenly (or close to evenly) into those 3 heavily-greased pans.
7. Bake at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the layers comes out clean. Take care not to overbake.
8. Remove from oven, cool for about 10 minutes, then remove layers from pans (run a knife along the edges, and gently use a spatula to loosen if necessary) and allow to cool completely.
9. Freezing the layers for about 5 minutes before frosting them will help them to hold together better and not get crumbs everywhere. Trust me.

Frosting

• 1 cup butter, at room temperature
• 2 lb powdered sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 Tbs instant coffee granules
• 2 Tbs cocoa
• 2 to 6 Tbs soymilk or whole milk

1. Beat butter at medium speed in an electric mixer until creamy.
2. Stir in sugar, beating until combined.
3. Dissolve instant coffee in vanilla and a tiny bit of water.
4. Add coffee mixture and cocoa to the butter mixture, stirring until combined.
5. At medium speed, add soymilk or whole milk, starting with 2 Tbs, and adding more as needed (1 Tbs at a time) until spreadable consistency is achieved.
6. Frost between layers, and top and sides of cake.