Coffee Chocolate Brownies

Living with a great cook gives me the freedom to learn how to cook by making fun food - no one starves in the process.  When I decided to conquer one of El Punko’s favourite vices, the chocolate brownie, I didn’t expect the brownie to fight back. 

There was the-pan’s-too-big-so-I’ll-double-the-recipe fiasco.

Too brown & dry around the edges.

The turned-on-the-grill-not-the-oven debacle.

Burnt on the outside, raw on the inside.

And the Thanksgiving vegan brownies topped with icing, which weren’t too bad but weren’t kickass brownies. 

Thanksgiving Day Brownies

Every couple of weeks, I’d research & practice.  Eventually, I developed my own recipe which is heavily influenced by the real cooks who came before me. 

400g cooking chocolate

250g butter or baking margarine

2T instant coffee

3 eggs

125g caster sugar

125g muscavado sugar

1t vanilla extract

90g self raising flour

200g chocolate chips

For vegans, check that your chocolate & margarine have no dairy products in them, then substitute 1C applesauce for the eggs (standard substitution of ⅓C applesauce per egg).

Preheat oven to 190C/170C fan/Gas 5.  Grease a 30x23cm baking tin, line the bottom with greaseproof paper, then grease the paper. 

A note about baking paper.  I’ve found that store brand paper doesn’t usually come away from the baked goods very well, regardless how many surfaces I faithfully grease.  Siobhán has long used a silicon coated parchment paper that she found in the local farm shop.  It can also be ordered online.

My double boiler set up.

Set up some type of double boiler apparatus to melt that chocolate & margarine together.  For mine, I pour a bit of hot water from the kettle into a small saucepan, set it on a medium heat, then use an old Christmas pudding bowl that rests perfectly without falling in.  

Put the margarine in first & break the chocolate into it to make all the melting happen faster.  The first time I did this, I broke the chocolate into the pre-fab sections, then cut each of them in half.  A total waste of time.  The chocolate melts fast enough in pre-fab segments.  

So while you’re preheating & melting . . .

Let this cool slightly before adding to mix.

In a large bowl, dissolve the coffee in enough hot water to make it liquid.  2T of coffee give the brownies a nice caffè mocha under-taste, but you could use more for a stronger coffee flavour.  Add the vanilla extract, sugars, & eggs or apple sauce, & stir well.  Mix in the slightly cooled chocolate & margarine.  

Lastly, stir in the flour & then the chocolate chips.  If you like walnuts bits in your brownies, add about 175g now.  (I find this recipe too rich for walnuts.)

Pour into your lined tin & bake for about 45 minutes.  Properly cooked, brownies are still soft in the middle of the pan with a light crust over the top.  Let sit for 10-15 minutes in the tin, then turn out onto a wire rack like so:

Put the cutting board on top of the pan.

               Flip so the cutting board is on the bottom, then lift off the pan.

Put the wire rack on top of the brownies.

 And flip again.

You could remove the paper before the final flip, but because I was using the cheap stuff, I waited until the brownies cooled in order to have fewer chunks come off with the paper.  You can see that a hunk came away when I flipped the brownies, so I was very brave & ate it.

Icing.  In my early trials, I used this Mary Berry icing (from Mary Berry's Cookery Course):

I used a tea strainer because I'd already washed the sieve.

Add 3T of sifted cocoa powder & 4T of boiling water to 25g of cubed unsalted butter.  Stir until smooth.  Sift in 225g icing sugar.  Leave to cool, then spread over the uncut brownies with a palette knife.  Allow to set, then cut into squares. 

The Europeans in my fold loved this icing, but I suspect Americans have a different idea about what constitutes suitable brownie frosting.  

Mary Berry icing.

By the time I got to my vegan Thanksgiving brownies (see photo above), I’d switched to Betty Crocker frosting (what else) but in my opinion, this current recipe is way too rich for anything but a little dollop of vanilla ice cream.

Cut into squares (1.5” square is the perfect size for me) & keep in a sealed container or freeze.  An easy, slightly decadent dessert that’ll please all your chocolate lovers!

If There's Cheese in the Refrigerator

Mary Berry's HUMONGOUS cheese straws.

When I was a kid & we pestered Mom for snacks, her favourite answer was, ‘There’s cheese in the refrigerator.’  

If you’ve got cheese, Parma ham, & a roll of puff pastry, you can eat this instead.

1 packet all-butter puff pastry

3T Dijon mustard

75g Gruyère cheese (grated)

4 slices Parma ham

1 beaten egg

flour for dusting

(from Mary Berry's Foolproof Cooking)

Before you uncurl the pastry, let it sit at room temperature for at least 10 minutes, or it'll break.  Gentle spread it out on a floured surface, then take a rolling pin to it until it’s at least 10x14”.  You’ll be folding this over twice, so if, like myself, you’re no fan of more pastry than filling, make your rectangle slightly larger.  Be sure it’s thick enough that the innards you’ll be putting into it won’t burst out of the pastry.

Slap on some mustard, going as close to the edge as you can.  You’ll need some for later, so don’t use it all.  I never measure how much I use, but then, I like my mustard, so it can't be too much.  Dijon will give a nice subtle complement to your straws, but if you like a stronger mustard taste, experiment with your favourites. 

My own Hag Improv is to sprinkle fresh herbs (parsley, dill or chives) onto the mustard, so I can kid myself that I’m getting Siobhán to eat some greens.  Crushed garlic or little chilli flakes’ll give this a nice kick, too.  Whatever you add, spread it over the entire surface & gently pat to make it stick to the mustard.

Sprinkle about ⅔ of your cheese on next, again as close to the edge as possible.  I have to admit that I use about 4 times what the recipe calls for, cuz I do love my cheese even more’n I love my mustard.  I also mix cheeses, depending on what’s in my crisper.  The best combination for me to date is half Gruyère, half Parmesan, both freshly grated.   Give the cheese a pat to make it stick, cuz you'll be moving things.

Single layer of very thin Parma ham.

Fold the pastry in half with the cheese on the inside.  Like jumping in a pond, do it quickly – you can tidy up the edges once you've folded it.  

Roll this folded bit enough to the seal the pastry, refreshing the flour dusting as you go, then slap this new surface with some more mustard.

Line up your parma or other spicy meat in single file across the whole pastry, then pat it a little so it stays in place.  If you like your meat, you may scoff at only one layer, but you’ll be folding the pastry again which will double it – you don’t want to knock out the other flavours.  But hey, if you like your meat as much as I like my cheese, double away.

Fold the pastry over for the last time, then roll it again.  Brush with beaten egg, & sprinkle about ⅔ of the remaining cheese on it, then press down to get that cheese to stay there.  

6 long strips.

Here, Mary Berry cuts the pastry into 6 sections, but I find that enormous.  

Instead, I cut the pastry into strips of about 1½” in width, then cut those strips into 3 or 4 smaller sections.  However big or small your strips are, transfer them to a paper-lined baking sheet.

A pan of the little guys.

If doing the 6 longer strips, give them 3 or 4 good twists to hold them together.  With the smaller strips, you can twist twice or pinch them together in the middle.  Mary Berry stops here, but I dab all the newly exposed surfaces with the beaten egg & add the last of the cheese to these surfaces.  Chill for about 20 minutes while the oven heats itself up.

Bake at 220C or 200 fan (Gas 7) for 20 minutes, then reduce to 160/140/Gas 3 for about 10 more minutes.  I haven’t found a difference in cooking time between the long & short strips, but since it’s cheese, keep an eye on it.  You know yourself how no oven cooks the same.

Cool on a wire rack.  Mary Berry says they’re best warm, but the small ones are great finger food at a party or for a quick snack.  In fact, this is the first recipe Siobhán has asked me to stop making.  If they’re in the house, she simply can’t stop eating them. 

Where would I be without my Mary Berry cookbooks?

Mom, I’m hungry!  

There’s cheese (straws) in the cupboard!

Mary Berry Gets Thugged

My mother was a big believer in giving her kids a hot breakfast before school.  When I took charge of my own larder, my aversion to cooking led to discovering granola.

Match made in heaven.

Since that time, the granola permutations in the cereal aisle have grown to beat the number of fleas living in your bachelor uncle’s couch.  The problem is, I want the nuts from this version, the sweetening in that one, & the dried fruit in the one over there, third box from the left. 

So even before I got carried away with all this learning how to cook craic, I made my own granola just the way I liked it.  My current permutation is a combination of Thug Kitchen and Mary Berry.

Granola base uncooked.

Thug Kitchen Granola Base

300g rolled oats

½ C maple syrup

⅓ C olive oil

½ t vanilla extract

½ t ground cinnamon

Hag Improvs:  The Thugs add salt & ½ a cup of millet in their base.  They say if you don’t have millet (I don’t even know what millet is), then add extra oats.  I tend to use rape seed oil instead of olive oil.  Low on maple syrup?  You can top it up with golden syrup.  The end product will be stickier but just as nice.

Mix the maple syrup, vanilla extract, cinnamon &, if you use it, salt.  Stir in the oats & millet.  Cook on a baking sheet at 150/130 fan for forty minutes, stirring every 10 minutes.  Really keep an eye of this & DO stir because maple syrup easily burns.

Now how easy is that?

The Thugs add nuts, seeds & dried fruit to their recipe, about half a cup each type.  Those extras are what customise your granola, but don’t limit yourself to squirrel food.  Look inside your cabinets & see what you’d like to experiment with – coconut, chocolate chips, chilli flakes.  And of course, any type of fresh fruit & honey can go into the bowl when you actually get around to eating it.

So where does Mary Berry come into this?  Well, I found that while the seeds did just fine being cooked with the mix, the nuts lost their crunch.  The obvious solution seemed to be cook the nuts separately for less time, but then I had the daunting task (for me) of how much of the maple syrup mixture did I need for just the nuts?

Mary's toasted nuts & seeds, enter stage right!

Precision work.

MB's Toasted Nuts & Seeds

300g nuts

150g seeds

1 t olive oil

1 t soy sauce

1 t maple syrup

Add caption

Hag Improvs:  Again, I use rape seed oil.  This is also where I add the salt, as the nuts really need it.  And what  nuts are we talking about?  Cashews, pistachio, almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts or anything else that suits your fancy.  I find that pistachio loses its crunch if in for the full time.  Seeds could be flax, sunflower, pine nuts, pumpkin, sesame, nigella, nasturtium, etc., etc., etc.  Use less of the smaller seeds, such as sesame, as there's so many more of them per gram.

Mix the oil, soy sauce & syrup, then coat your seed/nut combo with the goop.  Spread in a paper lined baking tray, salt them bad boys & bake at 200/180 fan for 10 - 15 minutes.

Keep an eye on these, as maple syrup easily burns.

There you have it, your own customised breakfast cereal, easier'n falling off the bed.  Pour on your milk or soy and tuck in!

Excuse Me. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

I never noticed it before, how often women apologise, but I suspect it’s always been like that. 

Look at me, for example.  Here I am with a real live diagnosis, for which there’s an actual NHS clinic they let me attend only because I was probed and prodded & bled to prove I’m medically in need.  Nevertheless, a diagnosis I never name here because I secretly believe I’m malingering. 

I’m sorry.  I have a tall, long-eared imaginary illness named Harvey. 

Graffiti in Canterbury

Maybe this general propensity to apologise is more obvious to me because since the election, more women have stopped sitting with ankles demurely crossed, waiting for Rhett to give us equal pay.  They’ve begun to unapologetically ACT,  & when they do, they tell their stories – the dramatic plot arcs that rise & fall on the commute home.  The times they themselves were Boudica, or the times they froze in the face of unfairness.  The small day-to-day heroes & villains that are only known because women tell other women about them.  Wonderful stories that Harvey & I never getting tired of reading, ever scrolling for more. 

Yet when some women talk about themselves, whether they’ve physically protected another person, or bought some bigot his lunch, some women preface what they say with an apology.  They’re sorry for speaking out, sorry they aren’t deprived enough.  Aren’t non-white enough.  Aren’t glass-ceiling-ed enough.  Aren’t verbally abused enough.  Terrified enough.  Isolated enough.  Sexually assaulted enough. 

They often say they didn’t do enough.  Like we’re not ever supposed to be tired.  Never supposed to get ground down.  Never supposed to be too afraid or too inexperienced or too out of our depth to know what to do. 

Women are supposed to fix everything.  A helluva price to pay for not having a penis.

When my son El Punko first transitioned a dozen or so years ago, he said that he didn't want trans-advocacy eating up his life.  He felt guilty about that, especially because as an FtM, he’s a minority inside a minority.  But he simply wanted to transition & get on with being.

I remember we were walking down a side street in Galway when he said this.  I remember the smell of wet pavement.  I remember how anguished he seemed. 

El Punko

I told him a story about my mother who raised 7 kids while working outside the home, running a 200 acre farm, being active in her church & community.  One Sunday after the animals were fed & the kids dressed, she threw on some clothes herself & took us to church where she directed the choir.  After the service, women thanked her for being the first one to wear a pantsuit to church.

My mother hadn’t thought about what she wore that day.  She’d been too busy trying to get through her morning.  And that’s what I told my son to do.  Be the best advocate he could by living the best life he could.

All these long years later, El Punko lives his life.  He’s never been a professional advocate, but he’s supported his share of transfolk along the way.  Several months ago, a straight white man spoke up in defence of transgender people, & claims he did so because he knew my son.

You might be tempted to think I practice what I preached.  But it’s Harvey who's taught me what El Punko knew way back then.  Every moment you spend doing something, is a moment you can’t spend doing something else.  But it’s not weighted equally, moment by moment.  Something you do now may take so much from you, that you don’t have anything left to give to later.  You have to choose.

So if ‘all’ you can do is raise your chillen to be decent human beings or sweep the floor without killing the bigot ranting hate in your work place, if all you can do is talk to a woman being harassed on a train or smile at someone who calls you a bad name or stop a LGBTQ+ kid from killing themselves or invite a refugee family to dinner, if the only thing you can do is sign a petition or give another person hope, then that’s your part of the story. 

Motto of St Francis of Assisi

Each little part done by each separate person, eventually gets the whole job finished.  Someday, someone’s going to do something good because you did what you were able to do.  

No one should apologise for that.  Not even you.

Sleeping On It

Today I’m writing about lentils & disappointment. Both get stronger if you let them sit a while, but maybe not in the way you expect. 

From Mary Berry’s Foolproof Cooking.

A couple of days ago, my younger Sis & I got tagged by a Rogue Sibling into a group email sent by another sib I’ll call Bro.  

Bro’s an old hat at excluding us.  I don’t know why he does this to Sis, but he’s ghosted me since a minor disagreement we had about 8 or 10 years ago. 

I could see in Rogue Sib’s reply that Bro’s original email was about a phone call he’d had with our mother’s nursing home.  It shocked me that Bro’s grudge now eclipsed my access to our mother’s health issues.  I needed to think about my reaction to all this, so decided to try a new recipe full of stuff I love – red lentils with chilli & ginger. 

Heating the oil for the strong stuff.

I get all my ingredients together, convinced this’ll be great.  As always, I added more of the strong stuff to the recipe – a couple of chillis, 4 or so garlic cloves & about 3 inches of ginger.  Chopping & grating & flinging into the pan, should I or shouldn’t I confront Bro for throwing his weight around?

After heating all those colourful things for a few minutes in a little itty bit of oil, I tossed in a tablespoon of cumin & cooked those numscious things a bit longer.  With 500g of red lentils, that was all the official dry ingredients, but in deference to my Hag Improv tradition, I threw in some spring onions that looked a bit lonely sitting in the crisper. 

Once all these bad boys got coated in oil, next came ladling in 2 pints of veg stock.  I’d seen Mary Berry do this on one of her cooking shows, maybe even the Foolproof Cooking series itself.  She found it soothing, this slow ritualistic ladling of stock, spoonful by spoonful.  It did nothing for my mental state.  Maybe when you’re thinking about a Bro like mine, there isn’t anything short of drink or drugs that’ll calm you. 

 I didn’t time it, but Mary Berry says this ladling craic takes around 20 minutes, during which the lentils get nice & tender.  And that’s it, Fort Pitt.  Can’t get a recipe simpler than that, can you?

A mint garnish.

Talk about disappointment.  I’d never tasted anything so bland in my life.  All that ginger, all that garlic, all those chillis to no avail.  Bummer.  I stuck the rest into the fridge, resigned to using it as bulk in soup.

On top of that, I hadn’t decided how to react to Bro’s email.  To be honest, it’s not like I killed his dog all those long years ago.  I’d apologised back then.  He got abusive.  I walked away.  Electronically, at least.  The entire exchange had occurred from separate continents via email.

Nobody called Bro on shunning me.  Not back then, not now when he hoarded info about my mother.  Nothing more than a Rogue Sib quietly tagging me into group emails.  That disappointed me, but it didn’t surprise me.  

Bro has a lot of power in our family.  I have none.  I used to comment on the various power imbalances in our family, but was told the act of pointing it out showed what a hostile shit I was.  Which is obviously why the family couldn’t give me any power.  Now there’s a mind fuck if I ever had one.

But this present situation wasn’t about who did dishes & who watched the game after Thanksgiving dinner.  I decided to sleep on it.

Next day, I got the lentils out, but before slapping them into the soup bowl, I gave them a taste.  Oh my good golly, the ginger & garlic & chillis . . . I cannot even begin to tell you how wonderful those lentils were after stewing in their own juices.  I chowed down, contemplating the wondrous way disappointment changes if it’s let to sit overnight.  

Therapeutic ladling.

Nothing like a full belly to make me think I could take on Bro gently enough to not bruise his gossamer ego.  Flip open the computer, there’s 8 email exchanges between Sis & Bro.  The sheer volume made me glad I slept on it.  Yup, I’m 60 goddam years old & yet I thought those emails were going to be about vital mama-related information. 

Well, they started out that way.  Sis is the only sib who lives in our mother’s community.  She went to the nursing home to flesh out what the staff’d told Bro over the phone.  In her first email, she included some funny little stories about our mother’s carers who are doing a bang up job but have a couple of idiosyncrasies between them.  Sis made the mistake of saying she was on the list of people who had access to info about our mother’s care.

Bro writes back that there’s no ‘list’.  He & no one else has legal power of whatever, so he’ll make any decision he thinks best, based on what the doctors say after he forwards Sis’s email to them. 

Homegrown mint.

With the dignity that only sisters who have no power ever have to muster, Sis asks him not to embarrass her by sharing her emails with the very people she’s making fun of – she’ll see them when visiting our mother, when she goes to church or the grocery store.  She asks that she be included in discussions about our mother’s care.

Bro says he’s already forwarded her email, & in terms of including people in future, he shares info about our mother with people who pay for her care.

That confused me.  When had paying for our mother’s care been discussed?  Then it sinks in.  Bro has legal power of whatever, which probably means he gets the bills, which perhaps means that if he doesn’t share that information with us, he can be angry that Sis & I don’t participate. 

It was also the last in a long line of slaps to the face about our earning power.  Both Sis & I took on student loans while our parents paid for everyone else’s tertiary education, including Bro’s tuition at one of the New Ivies.  Our adult lives started thousands of dollars in debt to schools we could afford, not ones run by Jesuits.  Little remarks at family gatherings about how much food we could afford to bring, how much money we owed our sibs for what we subsequently ate.  We shared the same DNA, but it was never meant to be a level playing field here.  Sis & I had been set up for this moment decades ago.

Lonely spring onion.

Something inside me shifted in a direction I really didn’t want to take.  A direction that alarmed me.  I decided to let the time difference move us through a second night, just in case anyone wanted to support Sis & me while I slept.    

And no one did.  Nobody.  Not one person said Bro, it ain’t cool to exclude your sisters because of money.  Not a one.

I’m Appalachian.  Family is huge for me.  But no getting around it, the deal had always been that in order for me to have a family, in order to be part of what I’d been taught was sacrosanct, I had to allow myself to be treated less than.  I’d done that for 60 years as my duty.  To breathe the same air as people whose mores had me gritting my teeth every time we met.

These flavours are mine.

Whatever it was that tied me to them, the thing that said you have my mother’s hair & I have your father’s mouth, I am yours and you are mine – it fell away like there’d never been anything between us.  I could no longer cast my figurative lentils & chillis & ginger before blood strangers.

And that, my dear, is what disappointment tastes like when you let it sit overnight.

Don’t Let The Laksa Stop Your Gob

Warming the bowls.

I’m cooking chicken noodle laksa this week, & thinking about people who tell other people to shut up.

In these post-election weeks, I hear rational voices advise liberals, men & women alike, to not get over it.  To not be so politically correct, to stop politely looking away, stop being tolerant of people with bigoted opinions, stop giving dangerous people a chance to be better.  Instead, call them out for what they’re doing when it’s wrong.  I hear liberals, men & women alike, admit they have to consciously make eye contact, make themselves speak up, confront, complain about the outrageous, as if that’s outrageous in itself. 

I look for myself on that spectrum, think about all those male voices that’ve told me to tone it down, get back in the femininity box, & I wonder how much of that was about them not wanting to hear something true, rather than about me being a jerk. 

Because, you know, I got myself a veritable talent at being a jerk.  Or as I’d rather call it, being an enfant terrible (French for jerk).  Did I ever mention El Punko’s poor 7^th grade teacher . . . I probably scarred that girl for life.

She was one of those ‘90s fresh face, big hair, all American middle school teacher types who, despite living in rural West Virginia, didn’t know there was any side but the bright side.  Imagine the assault to my misanthropy when at our first (& only) parent-teacher conference, she went all Judy-Garland-Mickey-Rooney-let’s-put-on-a-show because she saw a physical resemblance between El Punko & myself. 

I kept it together for about four choruses of, ‘I can’t get over how much you two look alike.’  Then my mouth simply opened & said, ‘Really?  Because he’s adopted.’ 

See the non-flinching resemblance?

El Punko's father threw me under the figurative school bus for lying.  El Punko himself politely asked that I never attend another parent-teacher conference. 

Twenty years later, El Punko doesn’t flinch at the type of person his mother is.  Well, there was the time I asked the guy on a Dublin bus how much fucking room he needed, but usually my son takes me with a grain of salt.  I sometimes wish his message of self-acceptance had come earlier for me.   Mostly I wish I had a better filter between my brain & my mouth.  At 60, I’m only slightly better.  I don’t swear as fucking much.

When we decided he’d host Thanksgiving this year & invite a few of his friends whom I hadn’t met, it sat in the back of my mind, that little demon of insecurity who asked me => how are you going to not be an asshole?

One of El Punko's friends agog
at our Thanksgiving bounty.

Neither said demon nor myself came up with an Asshole Prevention Plan, so I focused on sharing the fruits of my new cooking lark with El Punko.  No better place to start than chicken noodle laksa.  

As it turned out, I learned something more than cooking from that soup.

I can’t find a link to the recipe I used, but it came from Mary Berry’s Foolproof Cooking & was developed by one of her staff, Lucinda McCord.  Here I say – Lucinda, you’re my Soup God.  Fantastic recipe, but being me, I had my wicked way with it.

Spicy paste fixin's.

You'd think that since Siobhán now includes my ingredients in her weekly shop, I’d be done with Hag Improv, but no.  There were a gaggle of shrivelled up limes in the crisper at the time, so I didn’t order more.

A thinking person might consider whether shrivelled up limes have as much juice as fresh limes.  Me, well I didn’t think about that until I got to the squeezing part.  My first Hag Improv was to juice six* wrinkly ole limes for the spicy paste, after which I promptly forgot myself & doubled both the chillis & the ginger, then threw in an extra garlic clove or two.  Just to be on the safe side, you know.

The recipe suggests a mortar & pestle to mix this bad stuff,
but I used the chopper thing.

The paste also includes peanut butter & muscovado sugar, in case you’re wondering what else is in it.  Too yum!

Hag Improvs out of the way, there came one of those, well-shit moments.  Someone who knew what they were doing would’ve taken the chicken breasts out of the freezer ahead of time.  However, after making that kickass spicy paste & smelling that kickass spicy paste & yes, tasting some of that kickass spicy paste, no rock solid chicken breasts were going to stand between me & my laksa.  

Problem solved.

Hmm . . . so, I got me a big-ass ole knife & what do you know?  It cut through that frozen bad boy like it was butter on a summer day.

There's also the upside of not having to grab squishily old dead chicken flesh.  

Defrosting the chick chick.

I put the bowl of sliced chicken on the plate warmer & they defrosted themselves nicely.

Browning the pasted chicken.

The chicken got pasted & browned, after which the spring onions got themselves fried a little, so then it’s time to put in all the liquid stuff.  

I opened the first tin of coconut milk, saw this thick white gunk inside, turned the can over & gave it a hefty thwack into the wok.  If, like me, you don’t know anything about coconut milk, then you might not’ve expected this result:

Spilt coconut milk.

Fortunately, Siobhán threw herself between me & the 2^nd tin of coconut milk.  

Adding the 2nd tin
of coconut milk.

In addition to more lime juice & Thai fish sauce, you use one lemon grass stalk.  Mary Berry suggests that you beat the feck out of it before putting the lemon grass in, so that’s what I did.  

Medium rice noodles.

The recipe uses medium rice noodles, but this soup is so delicate in flavour that after my first batch, I switched to fine noodles.  I hear there’s even extra fine rice noodles out there somewhere, so if I ever find those, I’ll try them next.

Lastly, my brain says coriander tastes like soap.  Since in this instance, coriander’s only used as a garnish, I skipped that part & didn’t look for a substitute.

Chicken noodle laksa.

Isn’t this fantastic looking?  

I made that.  I did.  

Despite how well my Hag Improvs turned out, when I cooked the laksa for El Punko’s pre-Thanksgiving lunch, I obediently followed the recipe, used fewer limes, chillis & garlic, grated less ginger, & didn’t even freeze the chicken.  El Punko thought the flavour was good, but not strong enough.  

I’d toned things down so he’d like it, & he didn’t.

Now there’s a life metaphor . . . here’s me, who sometimes (a lot of times) says things that I shouldn’t.  As a result, people’ve told me to tone it done, to shut up.  A lot.  Enough that my little black heart believes my voice is something too caustic to take out of the box.  And even though I haven’t shut up, the idea that I should is the single belief by which I define myself.  I measure myself against a standard I can never in my wildest dream hope to meet.

And I shouldn’t measure myself in only that way.  As a card-carrying introvert, I’ve never really mastered the art of social finesse, that's true.  But I’m kind & generous, occasionally tolerant, funny (at least in my mind), a great problem solver & a kickass good listener.  I love my dogs & brush my cats.  My garden is my biggest vice, I recycle like a crazy thang, & there are actually 3 digits in my I.Q.  Oh, & if I’ve known you for more’n 30 seconds, there’s a good chance I’ll knit something ugly for you.  So why shouldn’t I speak?  Why shouldn’t you listen?

Besides all that, if those yappity rational voices are right, speaking out is a trait a lot of Americans are going to need over the next 4 years.

Anyway, the day after Thanksgiving, El Punko & I wake up to a kitchen full of turkey & brownies, cinnamon swirls, apple crumble, the world’s best cornbread, stuffing, ice cream, candied carrots, cranberry bread.  He looks around at all this food, then says to me, ‘I’m hungry for your soup.’

El Punko at work.

You gotta love that guy.

*After making this recipe several times, I’ve learned that 3-4 limes work fine, depending on size & freshness.

What a Fine Mess

Plenty of garlic!

This week I learned how to make garlic & cheese scones, then wrote to the Electoral College.  Both were a little itty bit messy.

When I was little, clearing up after dinner was the sole responsibility of my older sister & myself.  At the time, I didn’t wonder why my 4 brothers were exempt from this chore; I was concerned with how messy it was to scrape dishes.  My sister, eternally 9 years older & 9 years wiser, said, ‘Lora, you can always wash your hands.’

Oh, if only all life’s messes were so easily dealt with.  Now, onto the mess in my country, the mess in the kitchen, how I’m reacting to both.  Let’s start with the Electoral College. 

They call it a Hail Mary plan, but being 3000 miles from home means there’s limits to what I can do.  So, when a link came up on Facebook to all the Electoral College email accounts, I filled in the template & sent off my request, thinking I’d done a little bit of my bit.

My only reply came from Alex Kim, a Texan College member, lucky me.  Without any salutation, not even a rude one, this is partially what followed:  

The good citizens of Texas have voted for Donald Trump.  The voters of this great nation have rejected HRC, and I have no desire for her to become President . . . The fine people of Texas really have no interest in the opinions of someone from your state . . . We all have our own political process, not to be interfered with (sic) others.

You cogitate on that a while & I’ll tell you about Life With Scones.

If you look at the recipe, it seems to be made of normal cupboard stuff.  I whacked off the butter I needed, put it on the plate warmer to soften & went in search of my normal ingredients.  

I can hear you laughing.  

Hag Improvs 1 & 2 - mustard seed & baking powder.

The first Hag Improv, no mustard powder, but I did have mustard seed, so in it goes.  I trebled the garlic as usual, cut fresh chives from the garden, then dearie me, the flour isn’t self-raising.  What does that mean for my scones?  

Google told me that for every 150g of ordinary flour, add 2 tsp of baking powder.  The recipe already called for 2 tsp, so this would increase the amount to 8 tsp.  I have no idea now if all that were needed, but since I’m writing this, you know I didn’t blow up the kitchen.  At least not fatally so.

How do people live without parmesan?

Now for cheese.  Grater in hand, I fling open the crisper drawer only to discover we had no cheddar & that the little tub in there isn’t parmesan at all.  How do people live without parmesan?  I can’t stop now, so what cheese do I have?  Bleu & Babybel Light.  In they both go.

Can I help?
(I smell cheese.)

Beat the eggs, add the milk to them, pour that mess into the dry ingredients, & learn that a whisk is not my friend.  There I stood, holding my clogged whisk, looking at the unmixed dough.  Mary Berry had blended this scone gloop with her hands.  She touched that cold, wet, icky stuff.  Eggs & junk. 

When I cook, I clean as I go, kitchen roll & hand towels always nearby, sometimes so fastidious that the utensil I used 10 minutes ago & need again is already in the dishwasher, the dishwasher already turned on.  I like order because it makes the what-happens-next easier. 

And not just in cooking, but in social interactions as well.  I value the order of social etiquette in first social contacts, in all professional contacts, because etiquette is a prophylactic for both sides of the situation.

This whisk i not my friend.

But when public officials such as Alex Kim or, in my own state, Pam Ramsey Taylor of the ape-in-heels comment, when they ignore basic respect in their interactions with people different from themselves, it’s only a matter of time before words become actions.  I see Alex Kim & Pam Taylor as not just insulting, but as dangerous.  First, because they’re shits in responsible positions & second, because they get applauded by more powerful shits.

In my heatless kitchen, I meticulously unclogged the whisk, put it in the sink, then mixed the gloop by hand, Mary Berry style.  Except with gritted teeth.  After forming 22 irregular blobs, I added my last Hag Improv, a sprinkle of dill, then into the oven with them.  The scones turned out so well, Siobhán got me the proper ingredients, & more batches were made with less gritting of teeth.  You can get used to most things.  But not everything.

Cheese & garlic scone w/dill sprinkled on top.

In my country, compassionate, sensible people are saying, take the moral high ground, give things a chance, work with the system, it won’t be as bad as it looks, there are checks & balances.  They think the whisk can be unclogged by playing nice.  

I think they delude themselves.  I want to be wrong.