Kitchen Queen of Fish Pot Road

Meditation on Green Beans, part 2

When Emma was 18-months old, my husband and I planted two 20-foot long rows of green beans. We thought we could outsmart her. Up until this time, she wouldn’t eat any green vegetable. Surely, we thought, she would not be able to resist one of summer’s most heralded crops.

Beans are not only one of the most heralded crops, they are one of the oldest. They are about 9,000 years-old and, according to “Eating in America,” the Native Americans of the eastern United States probably developed their own beans independently. The beans were already widespread when the first explorers reached the coast. Within a century after the "discovery" of America, several beans developed by the Natives were being exported to the Old World.

So, those of us that herald the coming of green beans from our gardens, and make its planting, cooking, and preserving a part of our yearly ritual are in essence taking part in an ancient earth practice. (Photo by Living in Monrovia.)

For my family in Pennsylvania, part of the ritual was boiling green beans with potatoes and adding a slab of bacon or ham to it. Now that I am a vegetarian, I add liquid smoke, which adds the flavor without all the fat.

So, when Emma and I began picking beans one sunny Saturday, we were both participating in not only our family ritual, but also an age-old human family ritual. I could almost hear Native American drums beating, and voices rising in unison, singing while picking. Oh, I was feeling my Earth Mother roots and so “at one” with the universe as I watched my baby pick a bean. Well, Emma took a bite of one, set it aside, then took a bite out of another, set it aside, until she became bored and just walked away.  Kind of anticlimactic.

Later, beans cooked and ready for the table, her father and I awaited in eager anticipation—our daughter’s first meal with green beans that we had planted and picked.  It brought back memories for us both. Is there anything better than the first batch of green beans cooked just right? Well, according to Emma, who would not even take a bite, there's plenty—starting with macaroni and cheese.

Emma is almost 12, now,  and still won't eat green beans.

Meditation on green beans

If it wasn’t for the delicious taste of fresh green beans from the garden, I’d have given them up years ago. Between near child-labor conditions of my youth, and the mood swings of my sweaty mother in the kitchen while canning the beans, it’s a wonder I can look at green beans, let alone eat them.

Our garden sat down at the bottom of a hilly backyard, quite a distance from our mobile home and very close to a dense patch of woods in which there was a stream that would rise and make every piece of ground a bit soggy. I really did not mind the physical act of picking beans, but I was afraid of snakes. I don’t know if I saw one near the garden or what, but I was terrified. I remember just sobbing, squatting in the muck, and picking beans.

My father was not one suffer those tears—he thought I just wanted to get out of doing the work. The worst thing the man could have was a "lazy," day-dreaming, ballerina of a child.  We had a lot to work out, my dad and me, over the years. But back then, I picked the beans, and in reality it probably was not that many beans and it was probably only 15 minutes away from my favorite Trixie Beldon book. But it felt like forever.

So, it is with this mixture of memories and attachments that I approach green beans every year. I’m not afraid of snakes anymore, but I am afraid of backaches and just thought of canning in the summer heat the way my Mom and Dad did makes me anxious.

My mom would pull back her unruly red hair, sweat would form in pools on her head, and I could not begin to count the cigarettes she smoked, the Pepsi’s she drank, or the cuss words that came spilling out of her mouth. The kitchen, then, was nothing more than a hall way and we did not have air conditioning. It was stifling. I don’t know how she and Dad put up all the tomatoes and beans they did, but I am sure it helped get us—quite deliciously—through the winter.

Now I often read about the joys of discovering canning and getting back to “simple” living in magazines and on web sites. Who are these people and where have they been? Some city folks, I understand are buying produce just to can. Well, good for them. As for me, I have no romantic notions about canning—especially green beans. I blanch and freeze my beans, so does my Mom.

Passing on my love of green beans to my girls, though, has turned out to be trickier than I thought.

Stay tuned for part 2 of Green Bean Meditation. In the mean time, I wonder: do you have green bean memories?

Mom's Poppy Seed Cake Recipe

In my last post,  I mentioned my mom's poppy seed cake. I received a great deal of response wanting that recipe.  It's one's of the most unusual cakes I've ever had—and of course, it's delicious. We always had it at Christmas—but it's good any time of the year. My mom has been baking it for over 40 years and has perfected this almost blue, hearty cake. I found a great picture of a poppy seed cake here.

Ingredients

3 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

2 cups sugar

10 ounces, vegetable oil (You can use less, she says, but it won't be as moist.)

4 eggs

13 ounces (1 can) of evaporated milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 jar Baker's Poppy Seed Filling (She is adamant that Baker's is the best kind to use.)

Method

Sift all the dry ingredients together. Then mix in all your liquids and eggs. (You can add nuts if you want; Mom never did. I think black walnuts would be fabulous.) Mix for 2 minutes on medium speed.

Pour into a well-greased and floured tube pan. Bake at 350 for 50 to 60 minutes.

Cool the cake at least five to 8 minutes before taking it out of the pan. Mom sprinkles powdered sugar on it because, as you know, if you've been reading this blog, "Icing is for sissies."

Roots and Wings

 Sitting in an overstuffed chair in a hotel room in Boston in 1995, I looked out the window 
at one of America’s oldest cities. With breakfast in front of me on the polished walnut table—a dense granola loaded with fresh berries thickly thrown in, along with a huge bran muffin, lathered with butter, and I smiled. Mom would approve. No fake butter for her, ever.                           (Photo by Liz West.)

I was years and miles away from our little mobile home on Fish Pot Road, yet with a lick of the butter dripping from my muffin I was transported. I saw the hills and valleys outside of our kitchen window, and the tiered curtains billowing in the cool Pennsylvania breeze. One moment I’m thinking of mom’s oven—opening like some forgotten gift and displaying poppy seed cake or pumpkin pie—the next minute the scent from long ago and faraway fades. But somehow the food of home is easily recalled, as if it’s seeped into my blood and pores and into my core. 

I looked around at my luxury-filled room—overly plush, deep blue linens, art framed in gilded golden carvings—even stylish phones and clocks glistened. “This is no Howard Johnson’s Ma,” I suddenly said out loud to the air, or maybe to the ever-present form that is my mother living in my head, the voice that warns me, comforts me, chides me. Howard Johnson’s was the place my mother worked for 15 years, scrubbing floors and toilets for the other half—the half that had the money to travel.

I celebrate in my writing and my life the cooks in the restaurant kitchens, the grandmother keeping her family tradition of handcrafted Polish sausage alive, the struggling organic farmer with dirt beneath his nails, the Cistercian nun making cheese in a secluded monastery. Sometimes it’s pretty, sometimes its not. Sometimes it only takes a moment of readjusting my eyes to see the beauty in the simple line of a calloused finger as it glides along hand crafted cheese or in the way a burly, apron-donning man gracefully stirs huge vats of sausage gravy. My mother, the hotel maid, danced and sang in her kitchen, and created majestic pies, lasagna and haluski, even as hotel travelers did even see her as she quietly moved in and out of their rooms. 

So back to Boston, my elegant hotel room, and thinking about the maids. I have no idea if their lives are as hard as ours were. Or as happy. I looked out of the window, offered a prayer of thanks to the universe, along with a prayer of hope, and left the maid a  tip on the shiny walnut table. 

Now, as I think back to that day in Boston, I see that my life is completely different than what I thought it was, even then—that my small success is a process of growing both backwards and forwards and sometimes in completely non-linear, unexpected ways. I remain firmly rooted in Pennsylvania in a little mobile home on Fish Pot Road, but it is here in Shenandoah Valley of Virginia that I make my home between the blue mountains and red earth, and yes, in my own kitchen, with my own food, my own words, with the kitchen queen always in the back of my mind.

Do we always have our mothers’ ways and words in our hearts and minds?

(Stay tuned next week for my mom's poppy seed cake recipe!)

Almost Homemade

When I dreamed about having children, one of the things I imagined was making baby food, nursing them until whenever, canning, and gardening, and making all the food from scratch. Especially bread. Well, let's just say it hasn't worked out that way. (Photo by Andrew. )

Sometimes, I find myself making three different meals for my family, just so the girls will eat something and not go to bed hungry. (This is something my mom would never understand. As the Kitchen Queen of her domain, she and her food were never to be questioned.) But this is a reality of my life. I simply try my best.

When it comes to feeding my family, I've found that it's a matter of give and take and being willing to settle for the best I can do at the time, instead of my pie-in-the-sky notions of what family eating should be.

Case in point: I "baked" bread the other day. Not from scratch, but still. I bought frozen bread dough loaves. I was happy to find whole wheat in the grocer's freezer. And even though I did not mix the dough myself, I reaped some of the benefits of baking bread. All I had to do was pull the frozen dough out of the freezer, place it into a greased pan, and let it rise all morning. When we came home from the library, my kitchen had a homey, yeasty smell. Then it went into the oven and filled my home with its glorious smell. 

The scent of bread baking is right up there with the homespun, warm smells of cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla. For me, these are the scents of home. When I smell them, I think of Fish Pot Road and my mother in her green and blue kitchen, sweating over something in the oven or stirring something in a big bowl on the green counter. The funny thing is, my mom was not a bread baker. (She is a magician with pumpkin pies.) But the scent still takes me to her.

Okay, so, my bread didn’t look as perfect as it could. There was a big air bubble in one side of it. But, as I ran my hand across the top of it and felt the heat, it seemed to me that even the warmth flowing from it has a different quality than, say, the heat coming from a cake, or from just-cooked macaroni.

When my daughter came bounding in the house from school that day, she grinned ear to ear as she saw the loaf of bread on the table. (Not on a wire rack--I don't have one.) "Look what you did, Ma," she said, as if I had written the Great American Novel, or scaled Mount Everest.

Making this bread, like so many things in my parenting life, was not quite the way I had imagined it. My high ideals give me something to strive for. But in the mean time, who could ask for more than the grinning pride on my daughter's face and the hunger in her belly?

Blackberry Summers

Summer is on my mind. I enjoy spending long summer days with my daughters. But when I think of the season on Fish Pot Road, I think of blackberries—my favorite part of summer. Not only were the little purple berries tasty and offered juicy treats, but hunting for them was cause to explore the winding fields and dense woods around our neighborhood.  Most of our berry picking was done in groups and would last all day long. Our parents had no idea where we were and would not worry unless we didn’t show up for supper. (Can you imagine?)

I rarely went into the woods ALL by myself, but on occasion I squirreled off to one of my two favorite places. In one of my favorite spots—about half a mile from my home, blackberries dotted the hilly landscape. Part of its magic was that it wasn’t that easily found. It was the clearing at the end of a path, which looked like a dirt road, littered with old cars and farming equipment. (photo by Steve) Blackberry bushes grew lavishly around there.  At the end of the path was a huge clearing, in either direction, a clear, steep path of pipeline-hills. I could sit and watch out over those hills for hours, after picking mounds of blackberries that I knew I would be eating later on, still  helping myself  to a few as a I sat there.  It was nice when I had my best friend, Brenda, with me, but it was even better when I was there alone.

The first treat I made myself after berry picking was a bowl of sun-warmed berries with cream or milk poured over it and sugar sprinkled on it. I liked to squeeze the berries into the milk and watch as the purple juice made purple milk. I didn’t wait for my mother to make a cobbler or pie to taste the goodness of earth in those berries. I can still smell those baking, juicy berries, and see my mother opening the oven door, pulling out a perfectly-shaped pie, with a little purple ooze cascading off the sides. The reward for all my hard foraging was the first bite of that sweet summer treat, still fresh and warm in my mind. Do you have favorite summer food memories?

Blackberry Pie
Nothing is quite so satisfying as picking your own berries. Perhaps it’s the knowing where the food came from and taking part in this ancient practice of foraging. If you don’t have access to fresh blackberries and must use frozen berries, it’s best to measure them while still frozen because they shrivel as they thaw. Thaw and drain the frozen berries before placing them in the pie shell. Otherwise, the pie will be watery. Use cornstarch or potato starch, which gives a clear, jewel-like color and has less flavor than cornstarch. This recipe is from my second cookbook, Mrs. Rowe’s Little Book of Southern Pies (Ten Speed Press 2009).  While it’s not my mom’s recipe, it certainly has become a part of our family pie pantheon. And yes, I know it's not quite blackberry season, but that's no reason not to dream about it.

Makes one 9-inch pie
1 prebaked pie crust

4 1/2 cups blackberries
3 tablespoons cornstarch or potato starch
1 cup sugar

In a small saucepan, mash one cup of berries with a fork. Cook over medium heat until the berries begin to break down and give off juice. Mix 3 tablespoons of potato starch or cornstarch with 1 cup sugar. Add to the berry mixture and cook until thick and bubbling. Sugar will be dissolved, mixture will coat a spoon and a finger run along the spoon will leave clean edges. Cool to lukewarm. Place the remaining berries into the baked pie shell.  Pour the mixture over the berries and stir around gently to distribute evenly. 
Chill for 3 to 4 hours or overnight. 

Serve with whipped cream.

Generations of Lemon Lime Refrigerator Sheet Cake

This cake is one of my all-time favorites—and it's not even from scratch. In fact, my mother started making this cake after she had gone back to work, no longer having the time to bake from scratch. The Kitchen Queen always felt a little guilty about not baking from scratch. But we didn’t mind this cake at all. It's a refreshing, gentle cake that gives your taste buds a sweet lemon-lime joy ride, along with a nice play of textures—the jello, the Dream-Whip-pudding topping, and the cake. Mmmmm.

I was so pleased when my daughter Emma asked for this cake for her eleventh birthday this year. Of course, it reminds me of my working mom and all the love she poured into whatever kitchen creation she managed. 

Also, I made and served it for Emma’s first birthday.  Most of it ended up on her face, rather  than in her mouth, but I loved it when a fluffy bit found its way in and loved watching my baby enjoy this tasty, light, cake that my mom made for me all those years ago.  

Lemon Lime Refrigerator Sheet Cake

1 box of lemon cake mix 1 small pack of lime jello
1 envelope of Dream Whip
1 pack lemon instant pudding
1 1/2 cup cold milk
Follow the instructions on your cake mix box.  Dissolve jello in 3/4 cup of boiling water. Add 1/2 cup cold water and set aside. Cool the cake for at least 20 minutes. Poke holes with a fork about one inch apart from each other.  Pour the liquid jello into the holes, carefully. It's okay if some of the liquid jello spills on the cake. It will solidify, as well. But try to keep it in the holes. Chill the jello and cake in the refrigerator.

To make the topping, blend the Dream Whip, pudding and milk until it's stiff.

Depression Cake Sundays, part two

The truth is if my grandmother weren’t ever in my life, I’d never had any church experience. My parents rarely agreed on anything, but they seemed in perfect union about this one matter—they both hated church. I went with my grandmother every Sunday because I liked the stories, the music, and the churchyard.

Service United Presbyterian Church still sits out in the country, (photo by J. Caron )  off a dirt road, next to a reservoir of pristine water, its sparkles and reflections called out to me every Sunday. And if I could, I’d be in my bare feet on the soft grass, with “How Great thou Art,” rolling over in my mind, looking out over the water.

A simple, yet beautiful, one-room red-brick church, was all anyone needed on a Sunday morning. I am grateful for the years of uninterrupted faith I found in this church’s walls and on its lawn. It’s the only time in my life that     I’ve been so certain and felt so comforted, including right now, this moment as I write this.

As I grew, I questioned statements like “the Jewish people are God’s chosen people,” on the one hand, while on the other hand, I was told that if you did not accept Jesus as your personal savior, you were a sinner.  This was just the beginning of my questions and wandering, much to my grandmother’s heartbreak.

She was a woman of faith, a woman who knew the order of the world, knew her place in it, and her relationship with God. She knew that an innocent heart, like mine, should not use words like hate and God (in vain) and she told me and my sister so.  She knew that sex should be only between a man and a woman and that it should only happen after you are married.

I admired her knowledge and faith, but it seemed that what she knew and what I saw (and felt) were two different things. I wish I had the chance to discuss all this in more gentle terms, rather than in my impassioned teenaged voice. Even though we disagreed on many things, I never doubted my Gram’s love for me. It’s something I still feel almost daily and she’s been gone for years.

Once, when my daughter lay in a hospital bed, I heard my mother's and sister’s soothing voices over the phone, but it was Gram’s voice that woke me from my restless dreams, healed my fears, and strengthened my resolve in the wee hours of the morning. “It will be all right,” her voice said, clearly. I was in that place that  parents know so well when their children are sick. I was asleep, lightly. I knew it every time the nurse came in the room, yet I didn’t lift my head from the pillow.  In a sort of state between waking and sleeping, my grandmother’s voice came to me very clearly. “It will be all right.”

It was as if her words filled me with light and energy. I was immediately alert, energized, soothed and confident. Ready to deal with the hospital and my coughing daughter. It’s amazing what dreams and memories of such a strong love can give you.

Some people think of food memories and memoirs as nostalgic and touchy-feely. And maybe this story is just that.  But I know what the scent of Depression cake recalls for me. Perhaps that’s the only thing that matters. Do you have a food memory that fills you with strength, comfort, energy, or light?

Depression Cake Sundays, part one

My grandmother was a saver of paper things—checks stubs from fifty years ago, Christmas cards with notes attached, and programs from every play she ever attended were just a few of the items her storage boxes held. One sunny afternoon, as my children were playing outside, I sifted through boxes of her papers. The sounds of my girls’ laughter  mingled with the creaking of their swing sets. Suddenly a little yellowed slip of paper floated to the floor. The blue ink was a little smudged in places, but it was still legible and in my grandmother’s unmistakable neat printing—it was a recipe for Depression cake. 

As I read over the recipe, I realized that the cake I had been eating on Sunday afternoons at her house—and at all of the family gatherings—had a name. And an interesting name at that.

When my grandmother moved in across the street, Mom considered it a victory of sorts. Gram had always hated mobile homes, thought that only “gypsies” and “riff-raff” lived in them. I don’t know where her gypsy ideas came from, but she also called my sister and I “little gypsies” when we finally were allowed to pierce our ears. Gram and Grandpap purchased the land across the street from us and one day, their big mobile home came traveling down the gravelly Fish Pot Road, where it sat for about 30 years, next to my greatgrandmother’s mobile home, which was surrounded by climbing red roses.

During Sunday afternoons, I liked sitting on stool at my grandmother’s kitchen counter. It was a high stool with gold and brown flecked plastic covering. The wicker fish she hung above her window sill danced in the breeze, either from the window, or from the stir she created moving back and forth in her tiny kitchen. I sat at the counter eating a sandwich—usually pimento cheese, or ham salad on white bread, while she made a Depression cake. When I was a little older I helped her, I poured in the raisins, or the flour, but she really preferred to do it as I sat at the counter.

It was so much her cake to us that we came to call it the Irene cake. She brought it to every family function, usually doused with a maple icing she created. As children, we loved it and could not get enough of the sweet icing. As we grew older, we grew to hate it and were reluctant to tell her because she took such pride in it and we didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

I loved the way that earthy cake smelled as it baked and to this day when I catch the scent of a Depression-like spicy cake I think of long Sundays with my grandmother.  Please note that the recipe on this little piece of paper does not work—or at least it doesn't work for me. I have yet to try the chocolate cake recipe on the same paper. Old recipes, especially for baked goods, are often  a challenge. Have you ever tried to make an old recipe you found?

Haluski Marriage

I used to know it would be a good night when my husband came home and said, ”Honey, I smell your haluski and it smells SO good.”  Just what every woman wants to hear after a long day at the office. But since we’ve had children—only one of whom will eat the Polish cabbage and noodle dish—carefully picking out the chunks of cabbage—I can only yearn for the days of eating supper and “letting the dishes go. ”

I have often secretly wondered if my husband fell in love with me a little because of my haluski. Oh, I know there’s more to me than that. But I‘ll always remember the spark I saw when he first took a bite of it when were we dating—back in the days that I had the luxury of frying the cabbage in a cast iron skillet in real butter. Now, since we are frantic middle-aged parents, we can barely fit in steaming our cabbage and boiling our whole-wheat noodles between homework, soccer games, and carpool to ballet lessons. 

I grew up eating haluski—another one of the Western Pennsylvania mainstays of my 
youth. It's just cabbage and noodles, with butter.  You can fry the cabbage, as my mother insists is the best way. (See the Kitchen Queen rules.) You can also boil it, or steam it, which is how I make it.  It gives the cabbage a subtler flavor, and your arteries might thank you for it later. My mother thinks its impolite to talk about arteries and food in the same conversation, and when the topic of frying anything in butter comes up, she likes to say, “All things in moderation,” meaning “Go ahead and fry the cabbage in real butter, hon, it won’t hurt you.” 

                                                                                (Photo by Jennifer Causey http://www.jennifercausey.com.)

I love the way my husband loves my haluski. By the time I met Eric, I had my fill of dating men who wanted to impress me with their knowledge of French food, wine, or truffles—not that there’s any thing wrong with that perfectly fine food, but it’s hardly the kind of food from which to form a relationship.

Haluski is exactly the kind of food on which good relationships can be based. If you fall on hard times, it’s a dish you can rely on— it’s cheap and fairly nutritious. When family life gets harried, and it’s difficult to find the time to have a meal together—there’s always quickly put-together haluski. When you need a good dish for a potluck to share with friends and extended family, there’s haluski.

My mother recently confided to me that my father—a man who sprang from the Appalachian coalmines and farm fields—did not appreciate haluski when they were married. He was a man who wanted cast-iron fried potatoes at least twice week, along side any kind of meat and vegetable. She tried to harness all of her creativity and curiosity to create a meat and potatoes lifestyle for him—and she did so willingly. But the truth is some of my parents worst disagreements were, indeed, about food.

Funny, how time mellows people. I can’t imagine Dad turning his nose up at any dish, let alone haluski, that my stepmother would set on the table in front of him. And I can’t imagine that my mother would even try to squash any of her own culinary impulses to satisfy anybody else. She lives alone and likes it that way.

Mom still makes huge pots of haluski and eats it for days. Sometimes even for breakfast. At this point in my life, I prefer to live with my husband, a man who appreciates a good, earthy, haluski every now and then, but I am not sure just what he would think about haluski in the morning—at least not before coffee.  

Is there a special dish you can relate to your relationship?

Haluski

If you don't have the time or patience to make your own noodles, you can substitute prepackaged wide noodles, such as egg noodles. Remember, you can steam the cabbage and add the butter or margarine in when the noodles are drained and ready.

1 egg

2 cups flour

Salt

1 teaspoon, milk

1 medium onion

1 cabbage

Beat your egg well. Stir in 2 cups of flour and a pinch of salt. Gradually add 1 teaspoon of milk, continuing to stir as you go, until the dough is stiff. Roll out thin (1/8-inch thick) on a floured board. Cut dough into 1-inch by 2-inch strips.

Drop the strips, one at a time, into a pot of boiling water and cook for 3 minutes. Drain, rinse and let dry. While the noodles are drying, saute 1 medium chopped onion in a tablespoon of butter. Chop a head of cabbage into thin strips, add to the onion, and cook until tender. Add the noodles to the cabbage and stew for about 30 minutes.