Technically, I suppose, apple butter is smooth.  I originally made this recipe last winter and pureed it afterward. Since, however, my main use for this particular condiment is in my morning oatmeal, I have found I much prefer it to be left chunky.   Recipe is adapted from one I found at The Art [...]]]>

Technically, I suppose, apple butter is smooth.  I originally made this recipe last winter and pureed it afterward. Since, however, my main use for this particular condiment is in my morning oatmeal, I have found I much prefer it to be left chunky.   Recipe is adapted from one I found at The Art of Homemaking.

SLOW COOKED CHUNKY, SPICY APPLE BUTTER

Apples enough to fill a crock pot–about 10-12 good sized apples.
2 T cinnamon
5-6 whole cloves
1 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 vanilla bean, scraped and broken into pieces
6-8 oz hard apple cider

Wash, core, and peel the apples.  Slice them into good size slices and fill the crock pot. Add the spices, salt and cider, and cook on low for 18-24 hours.   Smell it like every good thing all night long, and stir sometimes to keep the spices moving.  When they’re very dark and soft, use a potato masher or two butter knives to break the apples into small chunks.  Ladle into jars and freeze, or if you eat it as fast as we do, just pile the jars in the back of the fridge.  Also very good on French toast or buckwheat pancakes. 

Do you have an easy winter recipe to share with us?

At thirty-seven, Tessa Harlow is still working her way [...]]]> PRE-ORDER NOW

Coming your way January 5, 2010:

At thirty-seven, Tessa Harlow is still working her way down her list of goals to “fall in love and have a family.” A self-described rolling stone, Tessa leads hiking tours for adventurous vacationers–it’s a job that’s taken her around the world but never a step closer to home. Then a freak injury during a trip already marred by tragedy forces her to begin her greatest adventure of all.

Located high in the New Mexico mountains, Las Ladronas has become a magnet for the very wealthy and very hip, but once upon a time it was the setting of a childhood trauma Tessa can only half remember. Now, as she rediscovers both her old hometown and her past, Tessa is drawn to search-and-rescue worker Vince Grasso. The handsome widower isn’t her type. No more inclined to settle down than Tessa, Vince is the father of three, including an eight-year-old girl as lost as Tessa herself. But Tessa and Vince are both drawn to the town’s most beloved eatery–100 Breakfasts–and to each other. For Tessa, the restaurant is not only the key to the mystery that has haunted her life but a chance to find the home and the family she’s never known.

One Christmas season, I was at loose ends.  I was finally, officially divorced after a fairly long marriage.  My sons were working and traveling, or out with their friends. There was a man I’d been seeing, but he was traveling, too, and anyway, he was never going to be My Guy and I [...]]]>

One Christmas season, I was at loose ends.  I was finally, officially divorced after a fairly long marriage.  My sons were working and traveling, or out with their friends. There was a man I’d been seeing, but he was traveling, too, and anyway, he was never going to be My Guy and I knew it. 

I was alone. A lot. And Christmas was bearing down on me with all the traditions I would not be indulging this year. No vats of cookies or Christmas morning bread. Not much shopping. So I wrote journals and surfed the Internet, and focused on mainly just getting through this boring, lonely Christmas. 

One night, I stumbled over the Julie/Julia Project.  It’s hard to remember now exactly where I entered the whole thing.  I opened it at random somewhere around the middle, led by some link from somewhere else. She had already finished it, but being a reader who wants the whole story, undisturbed, I waded my way back to the beginning and started to read from Day One.  I read until my eyes gave out that night, in my dead-quiet living room.  

And I came back the next night, and the next, and the next and the next, reading and reading and laughing at her misadventures, thinking, “If any editor on the planet has read this, surely she has a book deal by now.”  (And of course, by the end of the blog, she did land a book deal. A very good deal. Just as Julia did, with Mastering the Art of French Cooking.) 

I didn’t suddenly start cooking as I read. There was a pretty big wound in my kitchen, waiting to devour me. I hadn’t cooked much in a couple of years because cooking was family and my family was all in pieces. Also, my ex had fancied himself to be THE cook in  the family, so I was relegated to making great cookies and loaves of bread, and the workaday meals everyone could eat five days a week.  These days, there was almost never anyone home at dinner, so I ate Cheerios and Lean Cuisine and sometimes nothing else.

That hushed season, Julie Powell’s bad language and ineptness and moxie and honesty kicked my heart awake, and I told me mother I thought I might buy a copy of Mastering the Art of French cooking. To, you know, just mess around.  I don’t know that I really intended to do it.  But my mother (who has always seen me much too clearly for my comfort) beat me to it: she gave it to me for Christmas. 

It’s a luscious book. It’s impossible for a cook at any level to resist the kitchen once she starts to read, so I found myself cooking again. Not the breads and cookies and meals I made as mother/wife. Now I explored Julia Child–starting with vegetables, mostly, because no one in my family had ever really liked them, and I do; and eggs, and chicken breasts.  All through the dark days of winter, while things devolved more and showed me that I wasn’t dating the right person or living in the right place, or maybe even writing the right books, I cooked.  I cooked and wrote, wrote and cooked.

It turns out, I am not terribly interested in the French method. There are things I enjoy about it–who doesn’t like mushrooms sauteed in butter, or chicken breasts cooked in wine?–but I began to see that I was already an excellent cook with a clearly defined method of my own.  My ingredients are chiles and fresh tomatoes and avocados and spinach.  My style is more California than Paris; I’m not a huge meat eater (though I’ve failed at repeated attempts to become vegetarian, too); prefer olive oil to butter and fresh lemons to Hollandaise. 

During those long dark days of winter, cooking, I finally heard my own preferences and desires and voice. Cook spinach, it said. Write about tamales. Move to Colorado Springs.

Yesterday, I went to see Julie/Julia and absolutely adored it.  It’s a very rich story with brilliant acting and wonderful visuals and a great storyline about how wonderful cooking is, but it’s also the story of two women falling in love with their work, finding themselves in words and cooking, cooking and words. 

I had not expected that I would remember that lonely winter, but as I cheered Julia in her pursuit of her cooking and cookbook, and cheered Julie in her pursuit of the year of cooking, I found I was also cheering myself, that woman pursuing herself with bravado and then calm.  Because I, too, cooked with Julia and Julie, and cooked up myself and wrote a book which became THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS.  That circle, Julia to Julie to me, me to you, each of them to millions of others–seemed so lovely that I came home and cooked.  I made sauteed mushrooms in honor of Julia, and I cooked the chicken breasts in wine, but I also added grilled lemons to the mix, because I love them, and served them with steamed yellow squash which is fresh and particularly perfect right now.  

I think Julie and Julia would approve.

————————

If you’re interested, the Julie/Julia Project is still online.  Here is a link to the first page, which has a lot of comments, but if you go to the next few days, you can see that nobody read her blog for ages.  It’s fun to watch the evolution, see the backstory: http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/2002/08/25.html

Or something.

Yesterday, I really hit a wall. I talked with my editor, who is smart and helpful and knows my work [...]]]> I haven’t been posting many cooking blogs lately, mainly because I honestly haven’t been cooking anything of interest. Obviously, the work is satisfying and enjoyable and I haven’t hit any plot snags.

Or something.

Yesterday, I really hit a wall. I talked with my editor, who is smart and helpful and knows my work and voice very well, since we have worked on many books together. I took the dogs for a walk. Washed some clothes, which I then hung meticulously on the line in the spring winds.

Then I found myself, bewilderingly, in the kitchen as if I had sleepwalked there. I was pulling out pans. Peering at ingredients. Digging through recipes. I put on my Ipod and let Patty Griffin wail while I mixed up some dough and started it rising for krautburgers (the one thing I still must make with ground beef–they just don’t taste very good with anything else).

Tossed through the box of notebooks my mother has only grudgingly, worriedly, let me borrow for inspiration for the MIP (yes, there is food in it, I discovered. Is there ever not food in my books these days?) The borrowed notebooks are filled with the usual tattered stained beloved (and not so beloved) recipes that fill every kitchen. They belonged to my grandmother. There are many of her recipes in there, and some of my uncle Jimmy’s and quite a few of my grandpa’s, who was a good enough cook that he once had his own restaurant in Temecula, California called Ed’s Kitchen. On a big white card, I found Ed’s Carrot Cake. I remembered it as something luscious. It seemed perfect for my mood.

The recipe was written in my in my brother’s handwriting, circa 1976. To make the cake, I had to flip the card back and forth, reading ingredients, then figuring out how to use them. The first ingredient was 1-1/2 cups of Wesson Oil. That should tell you something. I thought, “Hmm,” but I wanted to make this recipe, not Barbara’s Riff on Ed’s Carrot Cake.

It was a perfect brainstorming recipe because it had lots of steps. Grating carrots, mixing the dry and wet ingredients separately, chopping pecans and plumping up some raisins. It smelled good as it was baking, very slowly for an hour.

Meanwhile, I scribbled notes on the book and started chopping cabbage and a giant sweet onion that smelled green across the entire room. “I had to live with the story of my parents meeting my whole life.” And “boy could Peggy dance” and “sisters divide up qualities between themselves.” I thought about the fact that all my food has southern roots, and how mixed up life gets in the food our beloved ones cook for us.

When I was a girl, I loved krautburgers. I was always, always starving and would come home from school and see those little loafs rising beneath a dishcloth and my heart would start humming. This batch turned out beautifully, lightly golden and steamy rich with onions and cabbage and beef tumbling out. I ate three, in honor of my girlhood self, though I should have stopped at two.

Good thing, because Ed’s Carrot Cake was so bland and boring I couldn’t imagine how I loved it as a child. All that tasteless oil! Not enough spice, and I would rather add some molasses or brown sugar to give the sweetness some heft. I nibbled enough to analyze it, but not even CR, who loves dense cakes, could get very excited about it.

But I loved thinking of my brother, writing down this recipe when he was ten or eleven, loved imagining my grandfather (with that lock of darkest hair falling on his handsome forehead and his rascally grin and his mechanic’s split fingers) sharing the ingredients with his grandson. I loved imagining my grandmother tucking it into her notebook. I loved making it, exactly as it is, as I mulled over the plot of a book about families and how they work together.