Archive for September, 2011

Lagniappe: Throwdown!

Sep 18

Posted by Laura in Lagniappe | 7 Comments

Exciting news! I’ve been asked to be a judge for the 2011 Westside Chef’s Throwdown next Saturday in Katy, Texas. It’s a culinary competition event to raise funds to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

MDA is a national voluntary health agency working to defeat more than 40 neuromuscular diseases through programs of worldwide research comprehensive health and community services and far-reaching professional and public health education.

For more information about the event, look here.

For a list of participating chefs and restaurants, look here.

And for more information about MDA Houston, check out their Facebook page.

If you’re in the Houston area next weekend and want to taste some fabulous food while helping a great cause, I would love to see you there!

Tags: events

Long Distance (Food of) Love

Sep 12

Posted by Laura in Baking, Food of Love | 10 Comments

Before and after streusel-fication.

A few weeks ago, Leah came to visit.

It wasn’t long after we moved back in from the Great Flood Recovery Project. Boxes abounded. Stuff was missing. Everything was askew. Not the ideal time for house guest, but Leah isn’t a house guest. She’s my sister, except she’s my cousin — but in my heart, she’s my sister.

One thing the Great Flood taught me is how much I’ve changed in the past decade or so of my life. I used to thrive on chaos and thirst for change. During college and early adulthood, I can’t tell you how many times I moved, changed jobs, changed majors, changed everything. I still have that visceral need to have lots of balls in the air, but I require a heck of a lot more order and predictability than I did back then.

When The Boy was The Baby and had just learned to crawl, it took him 0.002 seconds to find those little padded foamy cushion thingys on the inside corners of our kitchen cabinets. He plucked them from their highly functional placements, and then he ate them.

Now, had he been a second or third child, I can easily see how this might be regarded with some level of tolerance. Or overlooked with a little humor, even: Oh honey, let the boy have his fun and ingest inedible objects. They’re clearly not a choking hazard! But being a first-born to ~~two left-brained dorks~~ — err, one left-brained dork and an actually very cool engineer/entrepreneur who knows pretty much everything about almost everything — this was not to be.

The Baby was informed that he was heretofore NOT to ingest any more of those foamy cushion thingys. I swear he looked me in the eye with defiance as he plucked the next one and popped it into his mouth like a Tic Tac.

Apparently babies don’t really observe authoritative mandates, even from those upon whom they are 100% dependent. Huh.

So, all the foam cushion thingys were removed, much to my chagrin. Chagrin for two reasons: 1) I’m not big on removing each and every little thing that might tempt a kid, because I generally think children can and should learn their boundaries, and 2) the members of my household, present company included, apparently enjoy slamming cabinet doors. SCHLAP! I jumped a little every time it happened. So. Annoying.

Fast forward two years, and one of the The Boy’s favorite pastimes is opening cabinet doors and seeing how hard he can slam them. And dang if he doesn’t wear that same look of defiance when he does it.

One recent day, he and I were out running errands. On a whim, I made an unannounced stop.

Mommy, are we going to the Orange Store?

Yes, Baby, we’re going to the Orange Store. It’s called Home Depot.

MAMA! I toleyoo, don’t call me Baby!

If you’d like to say that with nice words, I might listen.

Mama, don’t call me Baby.

Please?

Please.

That’s better.

(This is my life now.)

So, we marched into the Orange Store, located the Padded Foamy Cushion Thingy section, and we bought replacements. I have to admit, I got a little excited.

We went home and both had a little treat. The Boy climbed into his chair at the kitchen table and had his way with a popsicle, and I went around my kitchen, sticking Padded Foamy Cushion Thingys any- and everywhere they might belong. Then I test-slammed some cabinet doors, and reveled in the fact that the SCHLAP! had been downgraded to a dull thud.

I swear, my heart skipped a beat.

It skipped a beat because I had the presence of mind to run an unscheduled errand that I’ve been meaning to get to for months. It skipped a beat because I had the time to devote to such a menial-yet-meaningful task. It skipped a beat because it was a sign that maybe — just maybe! — life was getting back to normal. Hell, my heart skipped a beat. It had been a while.

I made some with blueberries...

But Leah visited before all that order had been restored. And in her perfectly wonderful sister-cousin way, she said, “Laura, this is the messiest I’ve ever seen your house. And I like it.”

She and I somehow managed to spend hours together that we didn’t have during that short weekend trip. It was wonderful, actually.

Somewhere along the way she passed by my fruit bowl, which was full of peaches. Her back was to me, and I knew before she turned what she would say.

Oh, Lawwra. (She’s one of the few people in my life who pronounce my name correctly.) Do you remember those muffins?!

I smiled, because I knew it was coming. She mentions them any time we are both in the proximity of peaches or muffins.

Oh yes, I said, I remember.

A couple of weeks later, I shipped her a baker’s dozen of those peach muffins, the ones she loves so much. They weren’t as good as the time she ate them fresh from my oven, but no matter. I remember, my gesture said. And I get you. Thank you for loving me.

Friends, I’m sure someone you love lives farther away than you’d like. Maybe a special kid you know is away at college for the first time. Maybe you have a Leah who lives a couple of hundred miles away. Maybe you have a neighbor who could use a pick-me-up.

And maybe you’ve thought about dropping them a note in the mail.

Maybe you should drop them some muffins, too.

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And some without.

The guy manning the FedEx desk kind of flipped out over my Food of Love package. I placed before him two zippered plastic bags full of muffins, lined with paper towels.

Can you box these up and send them to someone for me?, I asked.

Wait, did you make these?!, came the reply.

Yes I did, actually.

Do I smell cinnamon?

Yes. And vanilla bean.

Wow, someone really special must be on the receiving end of THIS.

Why yes. Yes, she is. How much do I owe you?

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The first time I made these years ago, it was for no better reason than to test a good-lookin’ recipe. Leah was in dental school nearby, and dropped in to say hello. Not having a better use for a couple of dozen muffins, I gave them to her to share at the dental office where she was working. And now, they are the stuff of legend.

Breakfast Muffins
from Martha Stewart Living, June 2002

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 1/4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
10 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1/2 vanilla bean, split and scraped
2/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup milk, room temperature
1 large egg, room temperature
1 1/4 cups fruit and/or nuts, such as blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, or peaches
Streusel (see separate recipe below)

Preheat oven to 400°F. Butter a standard muffin tin. Combine flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt in a large bowl; whisk to combine.

In a medium bowl, combine butter, vanilla bean scrapings, sugar, milk, and egg; whisk to combine. Fold butter mixture and fruit into flour mixture; use no more than ten strokes.

Spoon 1/4 cup batter into each prepared cup; press 2 tablespoons streusel on top of each. Bake until tops are golden, 15 to 17 minutes. Remove from oven; let cool in pan 15 to 20 minutes before transferring to a wire rack. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Yield: 12 standard muffins

Muffin Streusel

5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
2/3 cup confectioners’ sugar
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Pinch of salt

Combine all ingredients in a medium bowl, and mix with your fingers until mixture is moist and crumbly.

Yield: enough for 12 standard muffins

Tags: baking recipes, bread recipes, gift ideas, memoirs

Remember This… and Prepare for the Next One.

Sep 11

Posted by Laura in Food of Love | No Comments

Everyone knows that today is the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Like most people, I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the news, and later watching in horror as the second tower fell. The details are as clear to me as if they had happened yesterday.

Stress produces adrenaline, and adrenaline enhances memory. That’s a mighty handy trick, considering that stressful events are usually the ones you want to remember and avoid in the future. It’s a survival weapon, and it’s why most people can remember with great detail where they were when a particular tragedy struck.

While the 9/11 attacks were horrific, and changed the mindset of an entire nation, September 11 is also the anniversary of another disaster — one that happened much closer to home.

Fifty years ago, on September 11, 1961, Hurricane Carla roared ashore in Calhoun County, Texas. With a central pressure of 931 mbar and estimated wind speeds of 150 mph, it was the most intense landfall of any Atlantic hurricane on record. Let me say that again: It was the most intense landfall of any Atlantic hurricane on record.

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale hadn’t yet been introduced, but Carla is now considered to have been a Category 5 when over open waters, and was a Category 4 at landfall.

We obviously didn’t have our modern day forecasting models for hurricanes back then, either. So while meteorologists knew this monster storm was out there — in fact, it covered the entire Gulf of Mexico — they had no accurate sense of where it might hit. To make matters worse, the weather planes couldn’t safely venture into the massive 110 foot wide eye of the storm because of the thousands of birds that were trapped inside of it. Consequently, Texas officials enacted an evacuation of over half a million residents all up and down the Texas coast, which at the time was the largest peacetime evacuation in U.S. history. Those efforts are credited with the fact that only 46 lives were lost.

Although the eye of Carla made landfall near Port Lavaca, Texas, my hometown of Danbury (about 100 miles up the coast) was pummeled by the “dirty” side of the storm, which brought a 22-foot surge and spawned one of the largest hurricane-related tornado outbreaks in recorded weather history, including an F4 tornado that ripped through Galveston.

To read a harrowing eyewitness account from a Texas highway patrolman who was on duty in Brazoria County for Carla, look here. For other recent coverage about Carla, look here and here.

My parents were both thirteen years old at the time. I don’t really know what Mom’s family did during the storm (which reminds me that I should ask Aunt Denise), but Dad evacuated with his mother and his siblings to his mother’s family’s house in Houston. Grandpa stayed behind to ride out the storm and mind the house and the farm.

It took several days for the floodwaters to recede, during which there was no way for them to know how Grandpa had fared — no phones, no news, no nothing. It had to have been a tense few days for Grandma, being holed up with all those kids at her parents’ place (no video games! no Internet!), and no word from her husband.

Dad recalls making the one-hour drive home from Houston, and says that the car got more and more quiet the closer they got to home. I know from experience how drastically a landscape can change from a storm — lakes where yards and pastures had been, trees completely absent from their long-held posts, blown over fences opening up unnatural-looking panoramic views. It is a sudden, surreal, and eerie feeling, and for them, it was coupled with suspense: what about Daddy?

Almost immediately, the kids spotted Grandpa’s favorite straw hat floating in the floodwater across the road from the house. My dad, the baby of the family, remembers feeling a pang of shock, thinking, Something must have happened to Daddy — he’s never without that hat.

They parked and rushed into the house, where they found Grandpa, without a scratch. And with his typical demeanor, he brushed off all their concern… What’s all the fuss about? It was just a storm.

But actually, it was much more than that. The crops growing on the acreage around the house had all been blown over and destroyed. The financial impact of losing an entire season was too great — it was the last cotton crop he would ever plant. The family farming business was gone, and life would never quite be the same.

I’m reminded of an article I just read in Business Week about catastrophes, which mentioned: “In Japan, stone tablets mark the high-water marks of past tsunamis. They all send the same message: ‘When we are gone, remember this flood. And prepare for the next one.’”

My generation knows full well about Rita, Ike, and their ilk. But are we really aware of the devastation a storm like Carla can bring? And are we prepared for the next one?

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There were two ways to go for choosing a recipe for this entry. The first was the hurricane party route, where friends and neighbors gather to share the contents of their thawing refrigerators and freezers. (The smart ones cook as much of it as they can before the power goes out, and manage afterward by mastering the finer points of cooking on a grill.)

The second, and perhaps more obvious route, was the classic hurricane cocktail. When the options are freezer-burnt mystery meat vs. delicious and historic cocktail, which would you choose? Yeah, I thought so.

According to this article from nola.com, the Hurricane came to be thusly:

In the mid-1940s, … there was a shortage of bourbon and scotch, and the whiskey companies sent “missionary men” out with regular salesmen and coerced bar owners into buying large quantities of a not-so-popular, hard-to-unload booze — rum — in outrageous amounts, 50 cases or so, in order to get the bourbon and scotch they wanted.

Four ounces of the booze nobody wanted, through trial and error, made its way into a glass shaped like a hurricane lamp with fresh lemon juice, passion fruit syrup and crushed ice — and became the most famous drink in the most famous bar in the city.

(You know, I’ve had my fair share of Hurricanes, and it never occurred to me that the glass was shaped like a hurricane lamp. DUH.)

Pat O’Briens World Famous Hurricane
from the Pat O’Briens website

1 oz vodka
1/4 oz grenadine
1 oz gin
1 oz light rum
1/2 oz Bacardi® 151 rum
1 oz amaretto almond liqueur
1 oz triple sec
grapefruit juice
pineapple juice

Fill a hurricane (or any other tall glass) 3/4 full with ice. Pour all the alcohols in first, then follow with equal parts of grapefruit and pineapple juice. Serve and enjoy!

Tags: beverage recipes, memoirs, party food