What Francesca is …
March 5, 2009
March 1, 2009
Vicar Says: I, Too, Take Tea
Okay, I’m not a vicar. Not even close. Plummy will never confuse me with her beloved man of the cloth. But I do love the ritual of tea. I may start my day with the delicious bean of the coffee plant, but in the late afternoon nothing is quite so satisfying as a good cuppa, properly brewed with a tiny treat or two for it to wash down. Little sandwiches filled with things like olives or watercress, fresh scones spread with jam or butter, bite-sized cakes and cookies…these things refresh me like nothing else on earth.I don’t do it every day, but I like to do it at least once or twice a month. I make a small pot of the best tea I have on hand (unless I pick up something entirely for the purpose), make the snacks by hand, put the tea in my prettiest cup and saucer and the nibbles on one of my very pretty plates, and settle in for a nice few minutes with me. It’s a reminder that we all need to slow down once in a while and be nice to ourselves. It’s a bit of ritual in a world where we sometimes need the comfort of an act that feels entirely deliberate. As good as breaking bread with friends and family is, I think every now and again it’s important to break bread with just you. It’s also a chance to eat the things nobody else in the house will touch with a barge pole, but that’s another matter. Right now the important thing is that you find a few moments and do something that make you feel whole. For me, that thing is tea. for you it may be something else entirely. What matters is that you carve out a space in your life to do what makes you feel like you in the best way possible. Find it. Do it. Keep doing it, even if only once in a blue moon. We take care of everyone else. Sometimes we need to take care of ourselves as well. Tea might well be a good place to start. PS: extra points to the first person who can identify where the title comes from. PPS: This was not all one paragraph to begin with, but WordPress is apparently miffed with me today and refuses to do my bidding. Humph.
February 22, 2009
Warning: Cooking At Home Makes You Fat
For years now we’ve been told that one of the leading causes of the Obesity Epidemic (boogeda, boogeda!) is the way that Americans eat out too often. It’s been blamed on Mickey D’s and Col. Sanders (for those of us old enough to remember the good Col. who is now known as KFC), on MarieCallendar and your corner steak house and, well, really just about anyplace outside the home where you might get something to eat.
But now a new study informs us the problem is closer to home. For those not familiar with other work by Brian Wansink, who’s a marketing professor at Cornell University, he’s also the author of a recent comparison of how fat people and thin people eat at Chinese buffet restaurants that concluded fat people are fat…because they put napkins on their chests rather than their laps or sit at tables rather than in booths. Now he is putting the blame for American girth squarely on good old home cooking.
Yes, it seems the real culprit is The Joy of Cooking, that staple of American gastronomic literature. Wansink found that of eighteen recipes (chosen because they appear in every edition of the book from 1931 to the present), seventeen of them had risen in fat content, portion size, and calories. Some recipes had risen in calories by as much as forty per cent. The ones that included meat used more meat than when they started.
For instance, the Chicken Gumbo recipe in 1936 made 14 servings at 228 calories each. The same recipe in 2006 made 10 servings at 576 calories each. On the face of it, that sounds pretty dire, doesn’t it?
Reality, though, is a very different question. The study not only picks a miniscule number of recipes to compare (according to Amazon, the number of recipes in the 2006 edition of Joy of Cooking is a whopping 4,500, which makes 18 look prettyteensy potatoes), it does not take into consideration the way people actually eat or how that has changed over the same time period.
When Joy of Cooking was first published in 1931, people who had suffcient money to get what was considered adequate food ate a lot more courses per meal than we do now. Even when I was a child in the 1960’s, it was not unusual for dinner to consist of meat; a potato, rice, or noodle dish, often with a sauce or gravy; two vegetables or a vegetable side and a salad; bread or rolls and butter; dessert. That’s about six different foods being consumed in a single meal. Now most people eat from two to four things per meal. Meat, veggies, and grain or potato dish, with an option of dessert, which many people avoid or save up for special occasions. The human body still needs more or less the same amount of fuel to get through the day, but we expect to consume it in less dishes. It stands to reason that a few of these dishes would be served in larger portions.
Another aspect that isn’t being considered very carefully is the changes in society and availability of food over these same years. 1931? Yeah, that was the Great Depression when my father in law frequently had a single raw onion on white bread sandwich to see him through from the time he woke until dinner, when he got beans or macaroni and cheese sans any veggies or meat because his family couldn’t afford them. According to Wansink , the rise in calories in his handful of recipes started in the second half of the 1940’s…about the time that WWII rationing was being phased out and there was easier access to sugar, meat, and other high-calorie items. This is also a period in which huge advances were made in learning how to preserve and transport fragile foods across the country. Instead of seeing how the economy and science might be affecting what people were able to get,Wansink sees this, apparently, as the spur to restaurants increasing portion size in the 1970’s…some thirty years later.
What’s more, he seems to see it as a universally negative thing…something I’m sure my late father in law would have been happy to argue with him, despite the fact that he continued to consider those onion sandwiches a taste treat.
Wansink further seems to ignore the possibility that the original portion sizes were out of step with what and how people were actually eating. Anyone who has ever made a recipe according to instructions and wondered how anyone managed to get six dozen cookies out of it in the test kitchen knows what I’m talking about.
In short, Mr. Wansink has determined that eating out makes us fat and eating in makes us fat, and being fat makes us die. So where and how shall we eat, Mr. Wansink?
And by the way, I would consider that bowl of chicken gumbo a nice dinner in and of itself. I don’t think 576 calories is at all unreasonable for a one-dish meal, do you?
No, I didn’t think so.
February 20, 2009
Don’t Do This (Danger Pudding)
So we here at Manolo for the Big Girl and everyone ever involved with Shoeblogs LLC are telling you right this very second to NOT do this. Don’t. It’s dangerous and if you do it, it will explode and you will die and that would be sad because mama doesn’t get paid when all her readers are dead, plus you probably have families or whatever, I don’t really care about that, but there’s a recession on y’all, and Miss Plumcake has needs. SO. DON’T DO THIS OKAY?
In Texas they call it dulce de leche or cajeta (although cajeta is technically a different thing) in France they call it confiture de lait but in Virginia it’s just plain old Danger Pudding.
Of course you should NEVER MAKE DANGER PUDDING so I will list the recipe for purely academic reasons.
You will need:
1 can sweetened condensed milk (non pop-top, label removed)
some foil
a big pot
water
a can opener
Make three little balls of foil and put them in the bottom of the pot. Take the can and stand it on the balls of foil so it’s sitting off the bottom of the pot (it makes a racket otherwise). Fill the pot with water, enough to completely cover the can, preferably by a good inch or two. I cannot stress enough how important it is to cover the can completely with water. If the water boils off and exposes the can, the change of pressure could cause an explosion which is why it’s called DANGER PUDDING.
Bring the water to a boil and then take down to a simmer. Simmer for two hours or so, being sure to add water to the pot as it evaporates. Again, you do NOT want that can exposed to air. If you like a firmer caramel, simmer it longer. If you want something runny; an hour and a half will do.
Turn off heat and let sit until the water gets lukewarm. Remove the can and let it cool entirely. Seriously. Let it cool. You do not want hot caramel spurting up at you.
Once it’s cool, open the can carefully. You will then have a glorious can of Danger Pudding. Some people eat this right out of the can but those are the sort of girls who probably put glads in the altar flowers and are thus to be categorized as People Who Don’t Know (blesstheirhearts).
I like to stir a little Noilly Prat in my DP because I’ve got to use that vermouth for SOMETHING. It’s lovely warm over berries, spread on pound cake or crackers or it can be dropped by spoonfuls onto waxed paper, frozen, then dipped in melted chocolate and sprinkled with sea salt. Divine.
But, uh, don’t do it.
January 22, 2009
The Big Question: Gummi Bears and Cocaine Edition
Okay, here’s the deal. I went to a party last night at a friend’s house. It was a “Game Night” which apparently is just like a cocktail party except without cocktails.
Or happiness.
I kid.
(not really.)
I was hesitant to go because after the Drunken Bible Charades Incident of Aught Eight I placed a self-imposed moratorium on parlor games (YOU try making people guess “You are the priest of Melchizedek” in five-inch alligator sling backs after your third caipirinha. NOT THAT EASY. Although I must say all in all the folks at the seminary were VERY understanding) so as I said…hesitant…but I make it a priority to attend any party hosted by any man with a building named after him and so I went.
Yeah.
So anyway, there were gummi bears there. Three pounds of gummi bears. For twelve people. That’s a quarter pound of shiny German ursine confection per person (that’s right; I said ursine. You think I don’t know stuff but I KNOW STUFF OKAY) I’m not a candy person –I prefer my junk food fatty and salty, thank you– but for some reason I thought “Hey! Gummi bears! I haven’t had those in years!” and ate a handful –by which I mean two handfuls– of them.
Friends, now I remember why –aside from my annual day-after-Easter black jellybean bender–I don’t eat candy.
To explain why I’ve devised this handy little SAT-style analogy:
PLUMCAKE : GUMMI BEARS :: VERY SMALL LAB MONKEY : 2 KILOS OF COCAINE
Y’all it was Not Good. I’m hoping to be able to blink again sometime before Saturday.
Today Miss Plumcake wants to know:
Is there a food or food group that turns you into a crazy person? If so, tell me and if there’s an embarrassing story; all the better!
December 30, 2008
12 Days of Plumcake: Six Geese a-laying
And now back to the @%^#& birds.
Six geese a-laying.
Actually, I’ve got some REALLY fantastic ideas for this one, but I’m pretty sure none of my ideas are safe for work or a family website, so I guess I’ll just annoy the vegetarians and other people whose “social consciences” trump delicious goosey goodness.
This, in case you were wondering, is what $1600 of foie gras looks like.
OM to tha @#%’ing NOM.
I love foie gras so much. How much?
When Andre declared his intentions to me and I screamed and ran to lock myself into the bathroom in a blind panic (what can I say, I’m a romantic) I made sure to grab the piece of bread with the foie gras on it on my mad dash to safety. Hey, I figured I was going to be in there for a while.