baking

the holiday is upon us!

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I started this post two weeks ago to say that holiday preparations had begun and were progressing nicely. In between now and then the sprout got his first cold and needed to be held all the time, making it oodles more challenging to get ready for Christmas and leaving no time for actually writing about it. So, here it is Christmas morning: I’ve brought Mr. Sneezy downstairs to nap so that my partner can get a bit more sleep before we spend the whole day opening the gifts that have been arriving for the sprout from near and far and I have time to recap all that led up to today.

I know some people put up their Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving, but I didn’t grow up in that kind of family. I was lucky to negotiate the tree going up for my birthday, and I still consider it a treat to have a tree up in the second week of December. This year the tree went up and stayed undecorated for a good week while we sorted out the lights that didn’t light on one side. Once the lights were replaced or repaired, I decorated the tree in spurts during the day (and then rearranged the ornaments at night, since when you are using tree decoration as a baby-entertaining activity, things don’t always end up where you’d like them). Even with (what seemed like) days and days of decorating, I still didn’t get all of the ornaments up: we use little metallic balls as tree bling (no garland, no icicles, no ribbon bows), and I just didn’t have the time or the desire to group them together on hooks. The tree is still very full, just not as sparkly as usual. Oh well. I also didn’t have the oomph to clear all of the side tables, so all of the freestanding Christmas decorations (the felt penguin, the frogs that croak Jingle Bells, the wooden snowmen) are grouped on the hope chest in the corner of the living room rather than being artfully spread about. I’m pretending it’s a diorama.

The main reason I had little time to spare for decorating is that I was using all the time I had to spare in the evenings to do the baking. Or maybe that should be The Baking, since there’s something of a canon that must be produced each year: roll cookies, spice cookies, meat pies, mince tarts, and cornbread for the stuffing (plus any other cookies I feel like making that year; this year we added jam thumbprints into the mix, using blueberry jam from our trip to Maine last year). I can rely on my mother for fruitcake, so I haven’t had to master those yet. Much of the baking can be done ahead, it’s just a matter of spending several evenings in a row making dough and sticking it in the freezer. That was last week; this week entailed thawing the dough out and actually making the cookies and pies. Despite a few mishaps (very soft molasses cookies as a result of only half the flour, for example) everything was ready for Christmas Eve! With Nana on hand, I was able to make cornbread, cookies, and tarts during the day, providing us with plenty for ourselves, friends, and Santa (who I am pretty sure was too tired to actually eat them before bed, after spending most of the day making runs to the store and wrapping presents while I baked).

Now it’s time to drink the coffee, get the sweet potatoes roasting, and try to get a shower before we all take turns opening the sprout’s (enormous) pile of gifts. Merry Christmas!

the holiday is upon us!

Dark Days : birthday tourtière

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My Week 3 meal for the Dark Days Challenge was a bit of a surprise: we ate one of the Christmas tourtières for my birthday! Never fear, there is a whole pie in the freezer for Christmas Eve, which will be more than enough for three people. I always planned to make the pies this week and use the Christmas Eve dinner as my local dinner next week, but we just couldn’t resist the smell of the pie and went ahead and had one for dinner.


Day 1: Potatoes and meat filling cooking on the stove.


Day 2: Pies ready to go into the oven.

As with the beef stew, this was also a two-day meal. On Friday I made the filling with local pork from Smith Meadows, local venison from our friend in Frederick (which arrived over the course of two days in the form of giant sacks of ground meat, which probably deserves a post of its own), organic spices from Frontier, and onions, garlic, and potatoes from our CSA (the last of those; we’re back to buying from the store). On Saturday, I took the dough that I had made the weekend before out of the freezer and assembled and baked the pies. The recipe makes two, and since we are only having a small gathering this year, I wasn’t sure what we were going to do with the second one. Eat it for my birthday, apparently! We had it with last year’s home-canned pickled beets (made with beets from Larriland Farm), cranberry sauce, and Farmer Brett’s Garlic Fire Sauce, and it was delicious.


Dinner: tourtière, pickled beets, and cranberry sauce.

Dessert was another imperfect gingerbread. What can I say: babies are hard on cakes! Last time, the pan didn’t get properly floured because I was foggy-headed and used the wrong flour. (It didn’t help that I was rushing through it to get the cake in the oven before I needed to feed the baby again.) This time, I just need five more minutes to butter and flour the pan and mix everything together and…the baby needed me for an hour. Sitting on the counter for an hour is not good for the rising properties in cake ingredients (just a note for the future, in case there were any doubts). This cake fell down in a ring through the middle. Now I know why people think making cakes is difficult: they have children! It was still a perfectly good gingery gooey delight, and we loved it. I’m hoping that our friends who are having some tonight will agree.

Dark Days : birthday tourtière

food : imperfect gingerbread

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Cake prep.

Gingerbread is one of my favorite foods. I love it in all its incarnations: spice cookies, upside-down cakes with fruit, gingerbread cookies, molasses cookies, and just good old-fashioned gingerbread cake. Last year I discovered the Gramercy Tavern recipe for gingerbread, and it is quite easily the best gingerbread I have ever eaten. Yes, even better than the gingerbread from Marvelous Market, DC folks! I don’t know if it’s the beer (I like to keep it all NYC by using Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout, another semi-local and seasonal favorite) or the two tablespoons (!) of ground ginger that make it the best; whatever the reason, the cake is awesome. I couldn’t wait to make it again this year; I usually foist it upon the women’s club, as I can’t really justify making a whole cake just to keep it at home and eat it. (I know I said I did that with the sweet potato pie, but I am giving some to our neighbors after all.)


Cake missing a top.

Sadly, this year’s cake fell victim to sleep deprivation: I used the wrong flour (white whole wheat) to flour the pan and did a completely inadequate job, resulting in the bottom (top?) of the cake sticking in a nice ring nearly all the way around. Since I’m tired and really can’t face making another, I am going to just slice it and serve it all weird looking. Not to mention that we have followed up apple pie, pumpkin pie, and pecan bars at Thanksgiving with sweet potato pie at home just for the heck of it, multiple desserts at the town holiday potluck last night, and almond cookies from the farmers’ market today for no good reason except that it was cold, windy, and actually snowing for a while there. It’s all well and good to be running on sugar, but it’s only the first week of the month and there are many more sweets to come and we really don’t need an extra gingerbread cake thrown into the mix! At any rate, the cake is going to a holiday party, so I’m hoping the lights will be dim and no one will really notice the oddly-shaped slices. It is seriously delicious, though, and I have nothing to be embarrassed about when it comes to the taste.


All sliced up and ready to go.

food : imperfect gingerbread

food : sweet potato pie

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Three varieties of sweet potatoes.

Sweet potatoes are one thing we never have a shortage of around here. They are one of the reliable foods grown by our winter farmer, and this year we received them in the autumn months of our summer CSA as well. Because they store so well, we gladly swap greens for them whenever we can. Swapping requires commitment and being the first to pick up your box on delivery mornings; I find it worth it to get to have some choice about what you take home. In our case, we have five straight months of oodles of greens in the winter, and I’ll take almost anything else during the summer season. In any event, we have three varieties of sweet potatoes piling up around here: Beauregard orange, O’Henry white, and Japanese (Satsuma-imo) purple. With more than usual on hand this year, I’m going to be trying all kinds of different recipes.


Prep: crust and filling.


Sweet potato pie.

First up: sweet potato pie. I had never made a gingersnap crust before, but it’s the time of year when there are always some Sweetzels in the cupboard (which are apparently not just local but seasonal; I never realized you could only buy them in the fall and winter!). Besides those, the sweet potato, and the eggs, not much else can claim to be local. The ingredients are organic and ethically sourced, though, with the exception of the rum. I could pretend this pie is going toward some common good, like the town holiday potluck dinner on Saturday or the women’s club holiday potluck lunch on Monday, but that would be a lie. We’re just going to eat it as we pretend that the protein in the sweet potatoes, eggs, and soy milk make it a healthy dish and not a dessert. Maybe I’ll make another one for one of those events; more likely, I’ll bring an apple crisp or pie from the freezer.

To get back to this pie, it was good. It was not the dreamy delectable delight that I thought it would be, but it wasn’t half bad. It was a little soft (maybe too much filling, maybe the soy milk substituting for whole milk, maybe a bit undercooked) and the crust was more chewy than crispy (maybe also a bit undercooked). It also has a distinctly rummy taste, and is not overly sweet. I know the not overly sweet aspect is a feature of this pie, as it’s meant to highlight the natural flavorful goodness of the sweet potatoes. Which it does, that’s all true. I’ll have to see how I like it after a night in the fridge before I commit to making another. It was a hit with my partner, but then again: it’s pie.


Mmm, pie.

food : sweet potato pie

food : Dark Days Challenge

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What better way to kick off the month of December than join in a local food challenge! It’s dark, it’s cold, the growing season is over, right? Wrong! At least, not completely so. Thanks to Even’Star Farm‘s commitment to year-round farming, we receive a CSA through the winter. It consists of cooking greens, salad greens, and root vegetables (turnips, rutabaga, sweet potatoes, and radishes). As a result, we are cooking with local foods all through the winter; historically, the challenge has not been finding the food but rather finding new recipes to make that take us beyond our beans-and-greens rut.

For the purposes of the Dark Days Challenge, I am going to work on minimizing the non-local ingredients used in my cooking. The challenge is not only to use local food, it’s to keep as many ingredients as what the originator refers to as SOLE: sustainable, organic, local, and ethical. In this framework, the staples I buy that can’t be (easily) sourced locally fit the bill. Our organic oils are from Spectrum; I am particularly committed to their canola oil, in an effort to push back against the GMO-rapeseed that has become dominant in the United States. Sugar is certified fair-trade and organic, supplied by Wholesome Sweeteners; cocoa and coffee are also certified fair-trade and organic, from Equal Exchange. Organic spices are from Frontier, a member cooperative; butter is from Organic Valley, a regional farmers’ cooperative (milk, eggs, and cheese are from specific local farmers). Organic flour is from King Arthur, a regional company if you count Vermont as at all local to DC (I don’t necessarily, but still value East Coast products over West Coast ones); Bob’s Red Mill is another option for a (now) worker-owned company.

To supplement the vegetables in our CSA, I’ll visit the year-round farmers market in Takoma Park and shop the local items at My Organic Market (typically from Pennsylvania, from many of the same farms who supply our summer CSA). Already I know that I want to make a sweet potato pie, and am hoping that my favorite made-in-Philadelphia gingersnaps qualify as “local” for the purposes of the crust. Truly, with a new little person in the house, I don’t have the time or energy to go searching out more local sources for flour and grains and the like. For me, this challenge is about making the most of what we have readily available to us in the winter and instituting some regularity in blogging about it. For inspiration, I can always turn to recipes tried out by those who’ve done this before.

To start us off, I’ve compiled a list of the produce we already have on hand in the house:

  • sweet potatoes (orange, cream, and Japanese purple)
  • shallot, garlic, and onions
  • green tomatoes
  • Italian sweet peppers and Cubanelle peppers
  • potatoes (red and white)
  • squash (butternut and acorn)
  • greens (arugula, Chinese thick-stem mustard, salad mix, stir-fry mix, and parsley [more of them were destined for the composter than I realized])
  • turnips, carrots, and radishes
  • apples (Pink Lady, Gala, and Stayman)
  • mushrooms (cremini and shitake)
  • cranberries
  • lemons (organic, but not local)
  • pumpkin and squash puree [frozen]
  • persimmon puree [frozen]
  • tomato puree and juice [frozen]
  • chopped kale [frozen]
  • blueberries, cherries, rhubarb, and peaches [frozen]

There are probably things I’m forgetting, and we’re getting more tomorrow (our last summer delivery) and Thursday (our regular winter delivery). But that will do to get started.

food : Dark Days Challenge