Grandma Young's Sugar Cookies

An aroma, identified in our brain's limbic system, can trigger an emotional memory, but it takes hard work in the kitchen to put the right ingredients together in the right proportions to produce the ancestral potato salad, pasta sauce or cookies. Family recipes often originate with a matriarch who isn't around to reveal the kitchen tricks learned from the previous generation. As a result, many of us modern cooks must start from scratch.

The holidays always trigger emotional memories for me, especially when my brain is stimulated by an aroma. This year it was a trip into Yankee Candle that did it for me. Their "Christmas Cookie" candle permeated the store, and I was hit by a wave of nostalgia.  The memories of my Grandma Young's sugar cookies fueled my desire to recreate her recipe for my family and friends.

 

 My Grandma Young was a marvelous intuitive cook. She could feed a crowd with one chicken and some vegetables out of her garden. She passed away at 104, but the whole family and many friends will always remember her wonderful food and hospitality.  They will especially remember the plate of sugar cookies that she lovingly presented to them when they sat down in her living room.

I loved that memory so much that I didn't want to let it go. So, I've been a kitchen detective, working for a month or so, trying to recreate her recipe.   I think I may have nailed it!

Grandma Young's Sugar Cookies

4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon light corn syrup
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
1 cup powdered sugar
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup canola oil
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Sift together flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt.

2. Combine butter, powdered sugar and 1 cup granulated sugar in a large bowl. Beat with an electric mixer.

Add oil, eggs and vanilla, corn syrup, mixing to combine. Gradually add flour mixture. Chill dough 3 to 4 hours until firm.

3. Preheat oven to 350F.

4. Shape dough into walnut-size balls and roll in remaining 1/2 cup granulated sugar. Place cookies on an ungreased baking sheet. Dip the bottom of a glass in granulated sugar and press gently onto each ball. (Do not flatten)

5. Bake 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Remove cookies from pan after about 4 minutes and let cool on a layer of newspaper covered with wax paper, or brown paper grocery bags cut open and laid flat. 

Makes 3 dozen

"The Superbowl is Americana at it's most kitsch, and fun." - Sting

Only in the South is game day more celebrated than any other event, but Super Bowl Sunday, a de facto American national holiday…it's only football’s Biggest Day of the year in the entire country! Flatscreen TV's, brilliant commercials, passionate fans, bigger than life half-time shows, extravagant food.... whats not to love? My favorite part...preparing the food. I like football food to be bold and aggressive, like the game, full of flavor, color and texture, but I don't want people to walk away feeling like a football. This year, I am composing  a menu based on team colors from the Denver Broncos and Seattle Seahawks.

For the raw foodie, carrots, green onions, celery, green pepper, yellow pepper, red pepper, and edamame with spinach/dill dip

An old standby, potato skins with chili, guacamole and salsa. 

You can't watch the  Superbowl without wings. (Of course they have to be orange glazed) 

You've just gotta have dip, queso (with blue corn chips)

Nothing says football like these stuffed gridiron sandwiches. 

By now, one needs something cool and fresh.  Melon, prosciutto bites. 

And fruit kabobs with yogurt dip.

Sweet endings.

Cake pops,

and Macaroons.

 
How about washing it all down with these colorful libations?

or these......

The best part......

 

The post game nap!

Gardening looks mighty easy when your trowel is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the raised bed

     I've tried to embrace my Scotch-Irish roots. I really did. 
Gwendolyn Young/Fairbairn/O'Halloran, just how Celtic can you get?  
Especially after moving to the verdant rolling hills of Middle Tennessee. I couldn't wait to embrace that Celtic love of the land and plant a garden and throw myself into yard work. I wanted to take it literally, you know, grow where your planted. After living in the Sonoran Desert for 8 years, where my weekends were spent by the pool and our gardening was outsourced, I was excited about the possibilities and getting some dirt under my nails. Hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature, that's what I imagined. Jerry was ecstatic about resuming his love affair with Home Depot and some new toys in the form of lawn equipment. 

hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_gardening.html#XXkYb78cJc2ottrS.99

hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_gardening.html#XXkYb78cJc2ottrS.99

    The garden that I had huge plans for this summer ended in humiliation and dashed hope. I spent a year preparing the soil and composting. I researched each plant's spacing needs and growing habits. I built trellises for climbing plants. All the hard work, sweat and weeks of waiting for that first sun-ripened bite of produce… with the hope of many baskets full of peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers and zuchinni to follow. I watered and weeded, feeded and pruned, but my tomatillos barely sprouted. I hoed and tilled, and was rewarded with baskets of rotten tomatoes. Just as they were reaching the zenith of their producing power, the cucumbers died. So much for the salad days of home gardening. I'm thinking that it may be time to throw in the trowel. This could be the sad final chapter to my gardening endeavors.
I did experience this amazing feeling of peace that came over me and grabbed me by surprise at the beginning of the summer when my garden had such signs of promise.  

    Yard work, well what can I say. Lancinate vines that grow back at the blink of an eye, getting flogged by sentient sticker-bushes, awe-inspiring weeds taller that you are, noxious stinging insects that chase you around the yard, and inject you with venom causing bolus reactions and trips to urgent care, limb-severing shrapnel from the brush-cutters,steep grades that cause one leg to grow longer than the other, the inutility of raking leaves on a windy day, and having your hands shake for 12 hours after operating lawn equipment. And grass....! Growing grass is an excercise in futility.

      I am humbled and saddened that I don't have the green thumb or the love of the land of my Scotch-Irish ancestors. I'm beginning to think that This Irish lassie belongs in the warm breezy simplicity of shore life and the understated elegance of a high rise on the crystal sands next to a large body of salt-water.
(With a good farmer's  market nearby!)

     


    

Books

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.  ~Charles W. Eliot

 

 

While weeding through my library, I discovered that both public and school libraries generally do not accept donations of books that are more than two or three years old. Really??? When did this happen? The librarian (media specialist as they are called today) at a local school informed me that they end up throwing out many books every year. I was appalled! 

The thought came to me that America seems to be in a fraught historical moment in our relationship with our books. We are in the midst of a huge cultural shift. As reading declines in each successive generation, and as content moves increasingly into digital form, there appears to be two schools of thought toward what to do with old books. Throw them out or alter them. Over the past few years, I have been seeing more and more altered book exhibits that seem to venerate the object of the book rather than the content

At first, I was bothered greatly about the cutting, tearing, painting, gluing and other mixed-media techniques done to the books, that changes  it to make something else.  The immediate response I had against a threat to books was rooted deep within me. When I was a child, if my mother saw me writing in a book, bending the page, or treating it carelessly, she would scold, “Never do that to a book!  But then the artist in me appreciates the creativity infused in these altered books.  What is it about a book that makes it a respected object and not just an information-delivery system?

I grew up in a house filled with books.  My parents, especially my father was an avid and eclectic reader .  My mother wrote poetry, she loved arranging and rearranging words until they rubbed up against each other in beautiful ways. She dabbled in collage using letters.  Her works had a layered symphonic quality to them.  My parents surrounded themselves with a variety of people who would drop in at our home to give me books, talk about ideas found in books, art, popular culture, philosophy, life, the universe and everything in between, and I was always delighted by their eccentricities- it was a kind of poetry in life.

When I was young, every Wednesday after dinner, my father would take me to the Toledo Heights Library,  a beautiful high -gabled English Tudor building where the books nestled in mahogany shelves. We would get lost there for hours and wind up checking out the limit. The library formed a pretty essential part of my family's culture and lore.We were all addicted, flashlight-under-the-covers readers. Getting your own library card--and riding your bike to the library on your own--was a significant rite of passage.(A fair amount of library fines were a predictable part of my allowance too.)

Books were valued for their words and ideas, we did not cut, destroy or paint over books.  They certainly were not sacred, but  they were respected.   It seems that as our culture values and needs books less for what they really are, we fetishize their form even more.  My question is "What is the place of a bound book or an altered book in a reading society?"

A Taste of Heaven

Some foods are comfort foods because they remind us of our childhoods. They remind us of home.
Other foods are comforting because of what they are. I never tasted Tom Kha Gai when I was growing up. The first time I had the pleasure was at Malee's in Scottsdale, AZ, and every time I tasted it, my heart was made at peace, my stomach ecstatic, and I couldn't help but smile, resting in the comfort of the flavors that enveloped my senses. I craved the soup and I've spent the last 6 years trying to re-create the recipe, and the last 3 years trying to located some of the more elusive ingredients in Nashville.  I think that I might have finally struck gold!  (I swear there are some medicinal properties to this soup because it sure clears your sinuses!)

 Tom Kha Gai Soup Recipe

Ingredients

• 3 cups (24 fluid ounces) sodium-free chicken stock
• 1½ lbs boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite size pieces across the grain
• ¾ lb fresh straw mushrooms (you can also use oyster mushrooms)
• Two stalks lemongrass (fresh)
•  3 chopped green onions
• 5-6 fresh bird’s eye chili
• 3 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 tsp palm sugar
• 2-inch piece of fresh galanga root, sliced thinly crosswise (this TOTALLY makes the flavor of this dish.  If you can't get this locally, scour the internet, buy a pound, then freeze what you can't use now.  It's a floral flavor that you'll definitely recognize if you've had tom kha gai before, especially at Malee's)
• 4-5 fresh kaffir lime leaves
• 4-5 limes
• ¼ cup fish sauce
• ½ cup fresh cilantro leaves
• 1½ cups (12 fluid ounces) full-fat coconut milk
•  1 can baby corn, drained and chopped to 1/2" chunks (optional) (This is in Malee's)
• Red and green Thai bird chiles, sliced thinly as a garnish

Instructions

1. First, concentrate the stock. Put the chicken stock in a wide and shallow saucepan (to ensure fast evaporation), bring it to a boil, and reduce it over medium-high heat until the liquid measures half its original volume. 
2. Quarter the straw mushrooms into bite-sized pieces; set aside.
3. Cut the lemongrass stalks into 1-inch pieces and smash them with a heavy object, set aside.
4. Do what you just did to the lemongrass to the chilies; set aside.
5. Remove the stems and the tough veins that run through the middle from the kaffir lime leaves, and tear them up into small pieces. You can also bruise them a little to bring out the flavor. Set aside.
6. Juice 2 limes; set aside. (You may need more; you may not. It’s better to have more than you need than not enough.)
7. Put the coconut milk into a 4-quart pot, followed by concentrated chicken stock, kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass pieces, garlic, palm sugar and galanga root slices.
8. Bring the mixture slowly to just below a simmer, allowing the herbs to infuse the liquid. (THE SECRET!)
9. Keeping the temperature steady, add the mushrooms and the chicken to the liquid; adjust the heat to maintain the temperature. The liquid should never at any point come to a rapid boil. Don’t worry; at 160°-180°F, your chicken will be thoroughly cooked in about 10 minutes.. (IMPORTANT)
10. Stir gently to ensure that the chicken is evenly cooked.
11. Once the chicken is cooked through, throw in the smashed chilies and baby corn and remove the pot from heat immediately.
12. Add the juice of 2 limes and the fish sauce to the pot, stir, and taste. Add more lime juice and fish sauce, if necessary. I added one additional lime.
13. Stir in the cilantro leaves and garnish with green onion and thai bird chiles
14. Serve your tom kha gai as soup or ladle over a bowl of steamed jasmine rice as an entree.

(You could make a raw version, or a vegan version by substituting tofu for the chicken)

Recipe Boxes are Powerful Things

 “Life is so brief that we should not glance either too far backwards or forwards…therefore study how to fix our happiness in our glass and in our plate.”- Grimod de la Reynière

 There’s a skeleton in my closet—or, more accurately, a recipe box.  A recipe box that I’ve kept unopened in a cabinet since my mom passed away. I moved it from Ohio to Illinois, to Arizona and finally to Tennessee, shuffling it around, unable to sift through the recipes but unwilling to part with it. Finally today, I pulled the box down off the shelf. It's just a plastic index card box, a treasured little box of recipes that my mom had, a fixture of the kitchen counter of my youth.  I finally got to the point where I could open it and run my fingers through the cards. The hand writing, the notes and the food memories were all so overwhelming.

 It holds droves of my mothers life; her handwriting, neat and perfect, my grandmothers severe slanted cursive, on those little recipe cards that reads, "from the kitchen of."  The notes she jotted in the corners, the time worn, tissue thin recipes that I grew up with, faded with time, care-worn and beloved. Memories of years of Sunday dinners, picnics, potluck dinners, the chicken and dumplings she made when the weather was dreary. The "Danny Crisp" chicken that she made every Tuesday when my brothers friend would join us for dinner. Thanksgiving and Christmas recipes that probably belonged to her mother's mother. I also found some mystery recipes and some just plain mysteries. Why is the word “relax” printed on the back of a cookie recipe? It was a wonderful  portal into her world. The love with which she had fed her family all those years was palpable in the recipe box’s greasy, smudged index cards.

Recipes are funny things.  They carry so much with them.  Recipes are so much more than words on a page.  There are some we love not because they are the best, but because they are what we grew up with and fold in memories. 

Autumn Burned Brightly

"Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the hills, a torch flung to the trees."- Faith Baldwin

What a blessing it is to live in Middle Tennessee! Autumn in these hills is quite a spectacle!  Vibrant reds, oranges, yellows and browns, and I've been able to witness it for 3 years!

I love the chorus of color that accompanies the church steeples here as they sing the praises of another glorious fall day.  

After a few days of beautiful weather, it didn't take long before I was doing what I love to do, seeking out the back roads and the countryside.  Every turn brings a new surprise, even for an experienced leaf peeper like me.  

 

The people who work the land here shaped it into a fascinating mix of old and new that is uniquely Middle Tennessee.  Thanks to the abundance of rocks that seems to sprout relentlessly from the land, people built miles and miles of picturesque stone walls.

 

Some of these walls guide you along idyllic country roads, others disappear into the new growth woodlands, croplands and pastures.  

I love how the blazing trees and the red barn vie for attention.  

 

Franklin, Tennessee, a beautiful place to put down roots.