Comfort

Whether you call it seasonal affective disorder, seasonal depression, winter blues, or whatever, it's a real problem up here in Northeastern Ohio, where the sun has taken its annual leave from our days and isn't expected to return until a few months of 2012 have passed. The monochromatic blanket of fleecy gray has been tossed over our landscape and, already, our bodies are struggling to produce enough vitamin D to get our tired and achy frames out of bed. 

I think this is where winter food traditions become more than just a way to pass the time--they become an anchor, a reason to haul ourselves out from under the piled quilts and let our feet make contact with the cold, wood floors. And it's not just hunger, which will do its part to drag us into the kitchen eventually, but the making of something that makes us feel good--I think there's something really important to that.

Obviously, this week's big to-do, Thanksgiving, is the archetypical example of cooking for and by tradition, and we'll be knee-deep in flour by mid-morning Thursday with the rest of ya'll. But this past weekend, when dusk and noon were pretty much identical, Carla and I both ended up in the kitchen, letting the oven do the furnace's job and dropping foods ranging from staples to sweets onto the kitchen table.

Am I going to get fat? Oh, hell yeah, but if eating homemade comfort foods actually "comforts" me, it's a lot better than ingesting the nasty chemicals in processed foods or going straight to the source and popping a pill every day to keep that dull ache off my emotional palette.

 

The fountainhead of food traditions in my life starts  with popcorn balls. When I was a kid, as soon as the weather turned cool, my mom would pull out the popcorn and corn syrup and fill our house with the smells of air-popped corn and stovetop candy. (And the popcorn tradition goes back further with her, too, as she told us stories the other day about her dad slipping into the other room and popping up a bowl of fluffy, white goodness for his wife and five children when my mom was knee-high to a grasshopper.) 

I asked my mom for her recipe, but she emailed it to the wrong address and I lost the printer paper she eventually handed me, so I'll have to get her index card and transfer the recipe to an index card of my own. But I had some Amish popcorn and all the ingredients so, yesterday, I Googled "popcorn balls" and tried my hand at Paula Deen's recipe. It kinda worked--I have some kinks to work out, but the exploded kernels did hold together, so I'll call them a qualified success. I'll feed them to the kiddos this afternoon and feel all self-satisfied in passing on a family tradition.       

  

If popcorn balls are an old tradition revisited, then these brownies with whipped cream are the tradition du jour in our kitchen. The brownie recipe is solid--I've been thinking about adding some white chocolate chips to the mix to change things up, but there's really no need to mess with that recipe. I can't stop fiddling with the whipped cream, though--I added cinnamon the last time I made the brownies, and last night, thinking of an orange mocha that we make at the shop, I grabbed a bottle of orange extract and the food coloring out of the cabinet and made an orange whipped cream. My goodness, they were good and they looked pretty in candlelight, too.

Whadda day

Yesterday, the kids and I tromped down to the raised bed to check on our little box of crops inside the hoop house cold frame. We lifted up the plastic and peeked inside to see our carrots, their stalks grown tall and gorgeous; our spinach, green leaves bunched and beautiful; our chives, looking delicious as always. I lowered the structure back over our plants, commented on how great they'll taste at Thanksgiving, and headed back inside.

Then the wind started up. We get a lot of wind up here, so it was no surprise, but I hadn't prepared the hoop house--which is pretty much just a big box kite--for the gusty gales. I checked on it throughout the evening and, despite whipping around, it stayed put for a long time...until it didn't. I handed the baby to my wife, slipped on some sandals, and ran outside in my pajamas to discover a tangle of plastic sheeting and lumber laying in the grass. I sighed, gathered them up, and deposited the mess in the garage. 

It didn't frost last night, though, and I'm in no way ready to give up on that garden bed so, after work, I headed to the hardware store and bought five dollars worth of screws, brackets, and clamps and, upon arriving home, immediately set myself to repairing the thing. It didn't take long, the kids were being okay, and there was still light in the sky, so I went ahead and made a few improvements to boot, most notably adding a beam across the top to firm up the structure and securing it with some stakes and rope to keep it grounded the next time the winds start a-whippin'. Just in time, too, because the evil weather people are tossing around the "snow" word in tonight's forecast.
  
We'd decided to finish off the pasta dough from the other night and, oh boy, it went so much better tonight. Rolled out the dough, fed it into the pasta machine, and cut myself some perfect fettuccine noodles. And, just for the heck of it, I made them crazy long--a few easily measured over two feet long.

Wee!

Our new discovery that homemade noodles make the box stuff pale in comparison held firm tonight--fettuccine alfredo with homemade pasta? Gah, so good.

We grew that broccoli.

 I love this thing.

After dinner, the kids asked me what was for dessert and Carla mentioned that she could go for some cookies. What was I gonna do? Not make those brownies again? We were out of margarine so, with permission, I used the homemade butter, and I added some cinnamon extract to the whipped cream. These little changes created a dessert that was...transcendent? sublime? I can't settle on an appropriate term, but I can tell you it was too good. Too, too good.

This is where the picture of the brownies would be if we 

hadn't eaten them all up before I could reach for the camera.

Oh my

As much as I love the gorgeous piece of machinery that is our new Kitchenaid mixer, I can certainly see a down side to owning it. It's just so easy, on a cloudy, chilly night like tonight, to think, "Oh, man, I want some brownies" and then just make some brownies.

Here's how it went down: I googled "brownie recipe". I saw "Best Brownies" recipe. Then, a few minutes and a messy flat beater later, I had a pan of brownies in the oven. And who could blame me? It's so easy.

But, earlier today, I saw a picture of homemade whipped cream and I was like, "I should make some homemade whipped cream." So while the brownies were baking, I pulled out the whisk attachment, stole a lil' bit of Carla's heavy cream she uses to make butter from the fridge, and whipped up a half batch of whipped cream. And, oh my, I have to say it was a fine decision.

You know I licked this thing clean one second after the picture was taken.

Just a bowl of whipped cream, waiting patiently.

This is too easy. You probably already know how to do this.

1. A cup of heavy cream goes into the bowl. Whisk it until it starts to get thick.

2. Drop in 2 tablespoons of powdered sugar and 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract.

3. Whisk until peaks start to form, but not too long or fast or you'll end up with butter. I whisked on 8 for about a minute and the results were perfect.

Oh my, yes.