Holiday Prep – Already?!? October 31, 2009

By Julia Pantoga

Don’t come complaining to me about those crowded mall parking lots in December. I’ll be home drinking hot chocolate or cranberry vodka with friends. You can be there too, with a little advance planning.

Last year I went all out to give you timely holiday prep tips and I have little to add this year, so here’s a list of all the holiday prep articles from last year:

Giving Away Baked Goods

Holiday Roll-out Cookies – Part One
Holiday Roll-out Cookies – Part Two
Holiday Roll-out Cookies – Part Three

Packing for Holiday Travel

Holiday Entertaining Made Easy

Great Baking Gift Recipes

Decorating Your Home

Handmade Gift Ideas

Super Yummy Fast Fast Party Snacks

In order to kick back in December, here’s a list of things to start this week:
     
1. If you are going to give away baked goods:

             a. Decide what you are going to make (last year I gave away little gingerbread cakes, this year is all cookies, I’ll share my recipes with you in a few weeks.)
             b. Start collecting containers for putting the baked goods in (see photo below)
             c. Keep your eye out for sales on specialty ingredients (If you are using commercial candy in your holiday baking, you will probably find it on sale on Sunday, November 1, the day after Halloween)

Containers I have accumulated so far, for less than $30

     2. If you are going to make decorated holiday sugar cookies, make the dough and freeze it now.

     3. If you are going to send holiday cards:
              a. Go through your list to make sure you have complete addresses for the entire list.
              b. Pick out the holiday cards you are going to use (I KNOW you have them because you bought them right after the holidays last year like I told you, right?) Put the card box next to where you sit to watch TV. Put a pen in the box and print out a list of everyone you will be sending cards to. During commercials, address the envelopes. Be sure to put the pen back in the box. I have learned over the years that addressing the envelopes is a big job and there is no reason you can’t do it in advance and make writing cards that much more pleasant.

Finally, it is never too early to begin making bags of Super Yummy Fast Fast Party Snacks and start storing them in your freezer to grab on your way to a party!

Domestic Goddess – Old School October 12, 2009

 

By Julia Pantoga

You may harbor the fantasy that your domestic goddess spends her days cooking and reading cookbooks (I sometimes entertain that fantasy, too), but that is far from the case. Actually, I am in graduate school and I spend most of my time reading and writing. Truthfully, those of you with children or spouses at home probably spend more time cooking and planning meals than I do.

 

 

Anyhow, once every two weeks or so, about six of us students take a break from our studying and watch two episodes of “The French Chef” starring Julia Child, from the DVD set I was given for my birthday. This is high entertainment, especially for those of us who scrutinize cooking shows regularly and spend a fair amount of time in our own kitchens.

 

The first thing I noticed when we started watching is that the age spots on Julia Child’s hands are plainly visible. Does the Food Network use hand models or do all their actor-cooks have perfect hands? The next thing I noticed is how Julia Child dresses in the kitchen:  she wears her glasses and an apron and tucks a towel into her apron ties.  Hey, that’s how I look in the kitchen!  I thought I was the only one who doesn’t wear fashionable clothes that flatter my figure and reveal cleavage when I bend down to taste the broth.

 

Speaking of tasting, we just about died laughing when Julia Child tasted her potato dish, then returned her tasting spoon to the drawer!

 

Not only does Julia Child wear a sensible apron in the kitchen, she wipes onion juice off the counter, splashes milk on the stovetop when she pours it and has to put a casserole on the dryer to cool because she has run out of counter space. Remember, this was the first cooking TV show, before the invention of such familiar TV tricks as turning the camera off for clean-ups, multiple takes and advance space planning.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The best cooking show on TV today (in my opinion) is America’s Test Kitchen (ATK). Although the chefs wear appropriate attire in the kitchen, even they edit out their mistakes. I once saw one of the ATK chefs live at a bookstore, where she was promoting a cookbook and she summed it up this way: “Of course we always cook 10 of the same things at once. Turkeys are cheap. Television crews are not.”

 

You wouldn’t watch “The French Chef” today to learn how to cook; it’s really dated. For example, no one, but the most skilled professional, would cut ten cups of onions by hand today. Most of us would drag our food processors out. The amount of butter and cream used is laughable to our cholesterol conscious eyes and Child talks at length about how to take care of a carbide steel knife, which I have never even seen. But these old shows are amusing and I can pick up tips from watching anyone in the kitchen. (Did you know you can poach eggs ahead of time and store them in water in the refrigerator for future use?) Most of all, it was terribly re-assuring for me to see that other people look a bit dorky in the kitchen and spill, drop and splatter things too.

North American Smocking: The easy and elegant way to gather July 9, 2009

While we were learning the traditional smocking, we also learned a quick form of smocking, no doubt developed by resourceful pioneers short on supplies. Check it out:

Canadian (aka North American) smocking is a very quick and easy way to elegantly gather fabric. Use it in home dec projects, accessories, bags, or clothing.

You can find Canadian smocking in the SavvySeams Tudor Rose Purse pattern. You can find some examples of beautiful costumes that use Canadian smocking at the Padawan’s Guide to Star Wars Prequel Costuming. Check out Padme’s nightdress and robe in particular.

Learn North American smocking here …

Fix furniture nicks in a flash July 6, 2009

I’ve been moving a lot lately, as I transition from an apartment into a house, and the moving invariably involves a lot of stressing about furniture protection. It seems that no matter what you do, something always gets nicked, particularly nice wood pieces. I may be the last to know, but I recently discovered a cool repair trick. Guardsman makes a nick repair magic marker in all shades of brown, plus black and even white. It’s the coolest—you just color in the knick with a marker that matches your wood (test on a hidden area first.). Voila, stress gone and many dollars saved in refinishing costs. Buy Guardsman markers here ($5 for a multicolored 3-pack) or at Bed, Bath and Beyond stores.

Domestic Goddess Reads: Home Cooking April 27, 2009

By Julia Pantoga

 

The other day I took my favorite book off my cookbook shelf to show to someone. This book is my favorite book—not just my favorite food memoir. The book is Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, who died suddenly and completely unexpectedly at age 48 in 1992. Of course, I’ve read the chapters with recipes that I use all the time often enough to have memorized them, but when I showed the book to my friend, I realized that I hadn’t read the entire book in about a decade. So, I’ve been reading my favorite book again. If you read this book now, I have no doubt that you will say to yourself, “Aha! The original Domestic Goddess!” It is uncanny for me to realize how much my life has turned out to be modeled after hers. I’m a writer who likes to hang out in the kitchen, too. I prefer to stay home vs. travel, too. Like Colwin, I’m always looking for the easiest way to get the most credit for the domestic skills that I have .

When Colwin advises the novice cook to call an experienced cook, take his or her advice about a dish that works, then stick with that dish, I hope that you will say to yourself, “Where have I heard that before?” If you cook, or have ever tried to cook, I dare you to try not to laugh out loud when you take the two hours it takes to read this book. Her recipes are introduced with statements such as, “Here’s an amazing dish that you will never want to serve to your cardiologist …” When I reread her chapter on cooking disasters, after wiping the tears of laughter from my cheek, I thought, “Clearly, I do not take enough risks in the kitchen …” More later, I have a lot stored in my head for you. These days I am thinking about cheesecloth and pastry bags.

Homemade Soup Stock: Mystery solved March 5, 2009

By Julia Pantoga

One of the ways to “trick” people into thinking that you’re really a pro when it comes to cooking is to make the same thing over and over again and stock your freezer with it. This is what I do with soup stock. I’ve been making soup stock from the same two recipes for years now; and since I make soup once a week, I end up making soup stock over and over again.

Making soup stock isn’t really easy, but it isn’t really hard either. The word I’d use is “satisfying.” Making soup stock involves chopping, making a mess and squishing vegetables with your hands, all good things in my book. In the end, you have at least three quarts of homemade stock in your freezer, which I guarantee will gain you instant domestic goddess (or god) status.

Vegetarian cookbooks of the seventies will have you believe that all you have to do to make vegetarian soup stock is save the cuttings from your vegetables and boil them. I haven’t found that to be true. For one thing, your stock will always taste different depending on the scraps you have. For another thing, it’s just not likely that, in these days of packaged bite-sized carrots, you will ever have enough carrot scraps. Most importantly though is that soup stock made from a recipe is an awesome addition to soup; it makes a huge difference flavor-wise.

What follows are recipes for stock, not broth. What is the difference, you might ask.  Stock is an ingredient in soup, broth can be eaten alone.

The first step to making soup stock is assembling the equipment. When I tell you what you will need, you may think this is going to be complicated. This is where doing the same thing over and over comes in handy—after you do this once you will always have the equipment on hand.

Here’s what you’re going to need: 2 eight-quart stock pots, a colander or strainer that fits on the top of one of your stock pots without falling in, cheese cloth (enough to generously line the colander) and containers to store 3 or 4 quarts of stock. The two types of stock I make are vegetable and chicken, which look exactly alike, so I also have packing tape and a permanent marker on hand to label each container “V” or “C”.

Here are the recipes I use:

Chicken Stock

4 carrots – chopped into 2 inch pieces
4 stalks of celery – chopped into 2 inch pieces
4 onions – cut into eight pieces each
15 parsley stems
2 bay leaves
10 peppercorns
1 small chicken

In addition to the equipment listed above, you will need two bowls for sorting the chicken from the bones.

sorted chicken

1.     Put all the ingredients in a pot and cover with water.
2.    Bring to a boil and skim off the foam that rises to the surface. Reduce heat and simmer for four hours.
3.    Turn the heat off and let cool.
4.    This is the messy part. Put your extra stock pot in the sink. Put your colander on top of the pot and line the colander with cheese cloth. Go change into a T-shirt that you can splatter chicken grease on and wash your hands. When the stock is cool enough to put your hands into, pull the chicken out and plop it into the colander. I’ve tried using tongs, big spoons and other devices to remove the chicken from the pot and found that good old hands work best. Over the colander, to catch any broth that drips off the chicken, separate the chicken meat from the skin and bones. This step is a mess, but totally worth it. The chicken you will gather is great shredded chicken for chicken salad and/or to put in soups.

5.    Once you recover from that step by throwing the chicken bones away, putting the shredded chicken in the refrigerator and washing your hands again, strain the rest of the stock by pouring vegetables through the cheese cloth and colander. Squeeze the cooked vegetables with your hands to get the juices out. Wrap the (now smashed and sorry) vegetables in the cheese cloth, give the whole thing a final squeeze and throw them away. At this point, I move the stock pot to the counter, wash my hands again and have a cup of coffee.
6.    Pour the finished stock into freezer containers, label and freeze.

 

straining the vegetables

Vegetable Stock
(much neater, but involves more shopping and chopping – and no great shredded chicken leftovers to show for your efforts)

3 tablespoons butter (for vegan broth, use olive oil)
3 large onions
3 big carrots
1 broccoli stalk
1 large leek
2 stalks celery
1 small zucchini
1 ¼ cup white wine
1 tsp. thyme
1 tsp. rosemary
1 bay leaf
1 garlic clove – cut in half
1 whole clove

1.     Cut the onions into rings and sauté in butter.
2.    Add broccoli, leek. Carrots, celery and zucchini and sauté.
3.    Add wine and 4 quarts of water.
4.    Add thyme, rosemary, bay leaf, garlic and clove.
5.    Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 2 hours.
7.    Put your extra stock pot in the sink. Put your colander on top of the pot and line the colander with cheese cloth. Strain the stock by pouring vegetables through the cheese cloth and colander. Squeeze the cooked vegetables with your hands to get the juices out. Wrap the (now smashed and sorry) vegetables in the cheese cloth, give the whole thing a final squeeze and throw them away.
6.    Pour the finished stock into freezer containers, label and freeze.

Yeah! Easy Rice Pudding February 26, 2009

Rice pudding for company

By Julia Pantoga

 

 

Here’s something easy to do with leftover rice—it works with the rice leftover from your Chinese take-out order, or the rice you have left over from last night’s dinner. Rice pudding can be dressed up in cups with some fresh berries and nuts for guests or spooned right out of the casserole dish into a bowl for breakfast (which is what I do). It’s mostly eggs, rice and milk—doesn’t that sound breakfast-y?

 

 

 

 

Easy Rice Pudding

2 eggs
2 cups milk (I use whole milk)
½ teaspoon vanilla
½ cup sugar
½ teaspoon salt
2 cups cooked rice
½ cup raisins
ground nutmeg

1. Heat oven to 325°.

2. In an ungreased (music to my ears) 1.5 quart casserole dish, beat eggs.

3. Add next five ingredients in the order listed, beating lightly after each addition.

4. Add raisins. Don’t stir, they will sink.

5. Sprinkle nutmeg on top.

6. Bake for 60 min. or until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Ready for the oven

Rachel Ray Never Has These Problems.  I had a friend coming over for lunch in 1 hour and I was planning to serve rice pudding for dessert. Since I had yet to mix the ingredients, you can do the math and figure that I was already running late. I really love rice pudding, so all morning I was thinking about the rice pudding and looking forward to eating it. I followed steps 1-3 above (you’ll note that the rice is the last item on the list). Committed to rice pudding now, I took my leftover rice out of the fridge (which I remembered as only a few days old, but I obviously remembered wrong) and it was moldy. I had no choice but to throw it out and make a new pot of rice. My garbage can was full, so I had to take out the garbage before I could throw out the moldy rice. I’m sure that when Rachel Ray makes those 30-minute meals, she never pulls moldy rice out of her refrigerator, leading to more dishes to wash and trash to take out.  I love RR, but even she would have to admit that she and I live in completely different worlds.

Everyone makes rice differently. Here’s how I make 3 cups of rice: In your pot dump 1 cup of rice, 2 cups of water and 2 tablespoons of oil (Any oil will do. For main dishes I usually use olive oil; for desserts, I usually use sesame oil). Cover and bring to a boil. Turn down to a simmer and cook until the rice is done, about 30 minutes.

Making rice is easy

Get Ready for Valentine’s Day with Pretty Easy Cookies! February 11, 2009

By Julia Pantoga

Someday, the domestic goddess will have a staff and her days of making roll-out cookies for holidays will end. Until then, the dg will don her Valentine’s Day tiara, open a bottle of beer, take out her rolling pin and make cookies at her kitchen table the same way that she tells you to do it.

I went through all the details of these cookies with you before the winter holidays, so I’ll refer you to my previous columns: Holiday Prep: The Easiest Holiday Cookies Ever, Parts 1, 2 and 3 and tell you what to do differently for Valentine’s Day. The first difference is that you will use heart-shaped cookie cutters. Wilton has a great set of six different sizes of the exact same heart . Having the same shape in different sizes will give you more creative opportunities when you get to decorating.

Make the same frosting, but this time you need only three colors: light pink, white and dark red. White, you will have; light pink is made by putting a small amount of red dye in white frosting, and dark red is made with several drops of red dye and one drop of blue dye (be careful with the blue, or your frosting will turn out black).

The technique for decorating heart cookies is the same one I used for my Christmas trees in December. Frost each heart with light pink frosting. Paint a few strokes of dark red on each heart. Paint a few of the small hearts plain white or dark red. While the frosting is still wet, decorate the large heart cookies with the small ones.

Remember, on Sunday or Monday, go to your local craft sale and stock up on 75% off Valentines Day merchandise for next year. Keep in mind that anything you find in a solid color (red, white, silver, gold) can be used for other holidays.

Start Your V-Day Cookie Dough Now February 8, 2009

Domestic Goddess Reminder: Next Saturday is Valentines Day. I’ll have a cookie-making post on Tuesday. If you are going to make heart-shaped cutout sugar cookies (as I am in this column), use the recipe from my column, “The Easiest Holiday Cookies Ever! Part One,” to make your dough and freeze it this weekend.

Helping a Pre-Teen Clean a Room February 8, 2009

By Julia Pantoga

Last month, I had the great experience of helping my 11-year-old nephew clean his room. Maybe you think that it would have been more fun to take my nephew to the fair, but I was much happier helping him clean his room.

 

 

 

 

Here’s a list of advantages to helping him clean his room over taking him to the fair:

1. It was less expensive (by far).

2. I got to focus on nothing but him and his life for two hours.

3. None of his siblings were “jealous” of our alone time.

4. We accomplished something important to him.

If you were to look at the “before” and “after” (no photos, to protect his privacy), you might suspect that I actually cleaned his room for him. Not true. For most of two hours, I sat in a chair with a garbage bag and bossed him around.

Here’s the progression of what we did: The Lecture. I sat with Sam on his bed and told him what I’m sure his mother (my sister) has told him hundreds of times, “This is your private space; you should be proud of it. Every time you come in this room, you should be happy to do so and you should easily find anything in this room. Your younger siblings look up to you; if you set an example of keeping your room neat, they will keep their rooms neat, too.” Etc., etc. You get the picture.

I followed up the lecture by laughing with him about the sign he could put on his door (he has his own room) to keep the space private (“Keep Out!” with a drawing of a skull and crossbones, for example—well, that’s not the way I would put it, but he is an 11-year-old boy).

Preparation. Before we started, we got set up for some serious room cleaning. First we found a blank sheet of paper and a pen and cleared a place for them on his desk. We would use this paper to write a list that he could share with his mother of the things he needed to keep his room clean. The first item on the list was a “Keep Out” sign for his door.

Next we looked around the room and identified what big containers we would need. This is a variation on the “three container” advice I gave you in one of my first columns, “Order = Calm, Part 3, Down To Business!” We needed much bigger containers though: 1) for garbage 2) for dirty clothes and 3) for things that belong to his brother.

I sent Sam for a yard-size garbage bag. He didn’t have a hamper, so we decided to throw dirty clothes in the hall for now and add “hamper” to his list. He already had a basket started for his brother’s things, so we used what was familiar (THAT was good practice. If his brother and his things are in his room often, he should keep a basket in his room of his brother’s stuff.)

Cleaning. This part was the most miraculous and the most fun. As I’ve said before, while Sam cleaned, I pretty much sat in a chair and held the garbage bag. My method was simple: “Don’t waste energy moving around.”

We made an exception for clothes that needed to be hung up, but, for the most part, when Sam was working on one part of his room (like the top of his desk), I didn’t let him move from that area. For example, if he encountered something on his desk that belonged in his closet, I had him put it on the floor somewhere in the direction of his closet and stay put at his desk, rather than walking over to his closet.

My job was to take care of the three big containers and the various piles. Sam would crawl under his bed and hand me things and say, “garbage,” “laundry, “brother” or “closet.”

Of course we eventually needed far more than three containers. But we kept at it for almost two hours and, by the end, (if you closed the closet door), the room was clean indeed.

Encouraging Note. The final step I took was when I was left alone in his room. I left him an encouraging note with:

1. A repeat of the lecture (This is your private space; treat it with pride).

2. Reminders of the tasks he had left to do (show his mom the list we made, clean his closet, go through his desk drawers).

3. Tips for keeping his room clean (clothes never go on the floor—they are either clean and get put away or they are dirty and go in the laundry, make your bed EVERY DAY, nothing goes under your bed unless you are storing it there).

I loved that I had the opportunity to be so helpful—certainly for a week or two for Sam and his mom, but maybe, just maybe, for the long term too. I guess what I’m trying to remind you is that it isn’t housekeeping skills that make you a domestic goddess; it’s using the skills that you do have to be truly helpful. That’s why I’m certain that we all have the capability to be domestic goddesses.