A Gift of Food: Vivian Wayland’s Cookies

Many years ago when the ingredients she had at hand fit no cookie recipe, Vivian Wayland created her own and shared them with friends. The result was declared a real winner and she jotted down the recipe for all who asked. I still have the small page from a tear-off recipe pad on which her penciled instructions have faded to pale grey.

Though it wasn’t December when Vivian Wayland turned out her experimental cookies here in the Arkansas Ozarks, they are well suited to the Christmas season, and her dried fruit cookies quickly became a part of our family Christmas. They make a good foil to the more standard sugar cookies. Packed with dates and raisins and pecans, they are also a good alternative treat for children careening into colored sugar overload. Plus they taste terrific! I include the Vivian Waylands in my Christmas cookie gift plates and have been asked for the recipe many times.

Like the breakfast muffins I wrote about earlier, this is a very forgiving recipe. You can tweak the proportions of dried fruits and nuts without damage.

Here are the instructions pretty much as Vivian Wayland wrote them, but I’ve added some parenthetical comments as well as suggestions at the end.

Vivian Wayland Fruit Cookies

Cream
1 C light brown sugar
2/3 C softened butter

Add
2 eggs
to make a batter

Add
1 C flour with 1 tsp spices*
1 tsp soda dissolved in 1 T hot water

Mix fruits and nuts with 1 C flour so they won’t clump.
1 ¼ lbs. chopped dates (use some of the flour to facilitate chopping**)
1 lb. raisins
2 C chopped pecans

Mix into batter.

Drop by spoonfuls onto greased cookie sheets and bake at 350º for 10 to 12 minutes. Be sure and don’t over cook. Makes approximately 10 dozen.

*This is left up to the cook’s taste. I use more than a teaspoon total—probably a tsp of cinnamon, ¾ tsp nutmeg, two shakes of ginger, and one to three shakes of cloves. The amount of dates, raisins, and nuts don’t have to be exact. I often use 1½ lbs dates because they come in 8 oz. packages.

**Because of their stickiness, dates can be difficult to chop, but don’t let that tempt you into purchasing them pre-chopped. Those packaged chopped dates are rolled in sugar and who knows what else to keep them from clumping together. This increases the sweetness of the already sweet fruit and affects the taste of any recipe to which you add them. Those date pieces are also tough, unlike the softer, more flavorful whole dates.

You can use the 2^nd cup of flour to make the task easier. Chop the dates in batches. Spread them on a cutting board and sprinkle liberally with some of the flour. Chop into chunky pieces; I tend to average three cuts per date. Whenever your knife starts to get sticky, add more flour. As each batch is chopped, scrape it into a large bowl along with any flour left on the cutting board. Add the raisins and pecans to this bowl as well as any flour remaining in the measuring cup. Mix with your hands to distribute the flour.

Not every kitchen experiment is a success. Not every food gift brings more than momentary pleasure. But some take root in the lives of the recipients, become part of family ritual, and are baked and passed on by an ever-widening circle of cooks. Vivian Wayland’s gift is one to treasure.

Happy Holidays!

What to do with that leftover turkey

One of the Thanksgiving treats at our house is the pot pie I make using leftover turkey. I’ll tell you how I make it but this won’t be a precise recipe as amounts and ingredients will vary with your circumstances.

From the Thanksgiving meal leftovers you may use turkey, dressing (the term for stuffing cooked outside the bird), gravy, and reserved pan drippings, but only the turkey is indispensable. And you don’t have to use cognac or even the wine though the pie won’t be as rich tasting without them. I make my own stock the Friday after Thanksgiving from the turkey carcass and various scraps but if hearing me say that makes you weary, use store-bought stock. For the pastry, I make a standard pâte brisée, but whatever recipe you customarily use will be fine.

Thanksgiving Turkey Pot Pie

Sauté 1 small onion, chopped; 3 or 4 sliced carrots; 1 or 2 ribs of celery, sliced; and 1 small turnip, cubed. I usually don't include potato, but if you want to, add a cubed potato now.

Deglaze the pan with two tablespoons of cognac. (Deglaze: pouring a small amount of liquid into a hot pan after sautéing then scraping to release any browned bits stuck to the pan) Add a bay leaf and 3 or 4 chopped sage leaves. Pour in stock to come to top of vegetables. Simmer until tender.

Meanwhile in another pan sauté a bunch of green onions, sliced, in a tablespoon each of butter and olive oil. Add 2 or 3 cups of mushrooms and cook until they begin to wilt. I like the combination of sliced shiitake mushrooms and chunkily cut portabellas. Deglaze the pan with ½ cup red wine.

Add any leftover drippings you’ve saved from the Thanksgiving turkey’s roasting pan. Pour in stock to come to top of mushrooms. Stir and add this mixture to the cooked vegetables. Grinds of pepper and salt if needed.

Dissolve 3 tablespoons of corn starch by stirring into ½ cup of room temperature stock (not hot). Pour this into the vegetable/mushroom mixture and bring to boil while stirring to thicken. Reduce heat and add any leftover giblet gravy. Remove from burner and set aside to cool, at least until close to room temperature. At this point add however much of cut up turkey meat you have and stir to distribute.

Line a deep baking dish with pie pastry. If you have any leftover dressing/stuffing, spread some on the bottom of the pie. Pour in the turkey and vegetables. Sprinkle more dressing on top if you have enough. Top with pastry, trim edges, fold over bottom pastry and crimp to seal. Cut a few slits in the top for steam release. Bake at 375º for 50 minutes or until golden.

You may serve this at room temperature, in fact we prefer it that way. It won’t cut into neat slices so use a large spoon for serving.

This makes leftovers something to look forward to!

The Frost is on the Pumpkin!

Pumpkin Bean Soup, that is.

Fall is my favorite season. And though frost hasn’t yet arrived this far south, I’m looking forward to brisk mornings and brightly colored trees. With October here, it’s a great time to make Pumpkin Bean Soup, a delicious combination that is very easy to prepare if you make use of canned ingredients.

Pumpkin and beans along with tomatoes are foods that don’t suffer from the canning process and are readily available without additives. I also often rely on prepared broths—chicken, beef, or vegetable. There are a number of these on the market that are simple and good for cooking. Some brands come in 32 ounce cartons while others are available in 14 ounce cans. For the recipe below, use 2 cans or 1 carton. Half a cup won’t make that much difference. But don’t be afraid to juggle the proportions to suit yourself. Though I prefer chicken broth here you could use vegetable broth.

Pumpkin Bean Soup

Chop into small dice 1 small onion, 2 bunches of scallions, 2 carrots, 1 small turnip, 2 celery stalks. Sauté them in a small amount of olive oil until they begin to soften.

Pour in chicken broth and a dash of Tabasco. Cook a few minutes. Add 3 cans of drained white beans such as navy or great northern, 4-5 fresh sage leaves finely chopped or a fat pinch of dried sage, and 1 can of pumpkin. (This should be plain pumpkin, not pumpkin pie mix which has sugar and spices.) You might need to add more broth as this cooks.

When vegetables are nearly tender, add 2 or 3 large Portabella mushrooms, cut into chunks. Shiitake mushrooms are also very good if you like their strong flavor, but chop them more finely than the Portabellas. Add several grinds of black pepper and salt if needed.

Pumpkin has an affinity for the flavor of Gruyère cheese so I grate some over the surface of the soup after I’ve ladled it into the bowls. We have a bakery nearby that bakes a rough, crunchy 8-grain loaf that is particularly good with this hearty soup.

When I served Pumpkin Bean Soup to an informal gathering last winter, a friend brought a simple salad that was the perfect accompaniment. She assembled the salads directly on the plates. Here is what she did.

Sandy’s Salad

For each salad: On a bed of leaf lettuce slice a quarter of an unpeeled pear. Scatter on a few pine nuts. (You may roast the pine nuts for fuller flavor.) Strew some Gorgonzola over the top. Sprinkle with a very few drops of an excellent Balsamic vinegar. Top with a grind of pepper.

Let’s make peach cobbler!

Nothing makes a better cobbler than summer peaches. At its best the fruit has a complex flavor—lusciously sweet with an underlying sourness and a tiny grace note of bitterness imparted by the peel.

Peach cobbler is a perfect summer dessert, but my family also loves having it for a weekend breakfast along with strong, milky coffee. You don’t have to wait until the morning to make it—I certainly don’t! Bake it the afternoon or evening before (don’t refrigerate), then the next morning pop it into a warm oven for a few minutes while you prepare the coffee and assemble bowls and silverware.

Be sure to taste the peaches as you peel and stone them so you can judge how much sugar to use. You’ll notice I use brown sugar in the thickening liquid. This adds even more depth to all those taste layers and since it’s such a small amount you don’t get a heavy caramel taste at all.

I don’t specified whole wheat flour for some wacky health reason. Its stronger nutty flavor really does taste better here. If you don’t believe me, try the biscuit topping with white flour. The resulting cobbler will seem bland compared to the more muscular whole wheat version.

Peach Cobbler

Serves 6

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Peel and slice enough peaches to make 4 C.
Toss with some lemon juice, 2 or 3 teaspoons, as you’re slicing them.
Sprinkle with a little regular white sugar to taste. The amount will depend on how naturally sweet your peaches are. (One of the benefits of this recipe is the cook has to keep tasting those peaches, so make sure you have plenty!)

Mix
1 ½ T cornstarch
¼ to ⅓ C brown sugar (again the amount depends on how sweet the peaches are and your personal taste)
½ C cold water

Combine this mixture in a saucepan with the sliced peaches.
Cook and stir until thickened.
Remove from heat and add
1 T butter
1 tsp almond extract
Stir to mix and pour into a baking dish. I use a 2 quart casserole because the filling often bubbles up while baking. The larger dish prevents spills on the oven floor.

Top with
Biscuit topping:

Stir together
1 C whole wheat flour
1 or 2 T sugar (according to how sweet you like it)
1 ½ tsp baking powder
dash of salt

Cut in
¼ C cold butter until like coarse crumbs

Mix
¼ C milk
1 slightly beaten egg
and add all at once to dry ingredients.
Stir just to moisten.

Drop by spoonfuls atop hot fruit. Sprinkle with sugar to give a little sparkle.

Bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes or until topper is done. It will have risen and be lightly browned.

We like this served warm with whipped cream or with a glug of plain thick cream poured over. It’s also good with a dollop of thick Greek yogurt. If you are serving this as a dessert, a scoop of your very own home-made vanilla ice cream sends it into the stratosphere!

Locally Grown Tomatoes Say Summer!

Whether you buy them from your farmers’ market or grow them yourself, richly flavored tomatoes are summer’s gift. One way to take advantage of this bounty is to make the incredibly simple but oh, so delicious dish variously known as pasta caprese, fresh tomato pasta, or summer pasta. Whatever you call it, the ingredients are the same: tomatoes, basil, fresh mozzarella, olive oil and garlic. The success of the recipe rests in their quality. Each must be bursting with flavor, so please, no cardboard-tasting supermarket tomatoes or dried basil from a dusty corner of the spice shelf.

Outside of the quality of the ingredients, you’ve got a lot of lee way here. Tweak the recipe to your taste, but don’t complicate it. Some say seed or peel the tomatoes; I say why bother. And it’s best at room temperature. Heated, the mozzarella can turn to rubbery strings. Chilled, it becomes a slick salad of muted flavor.

Here are rough proportions for 6 servings.

Place ½ C olive oil in a large bowl.

Finely chop or mince cloves of garlic. I only use a couple but my Italian friend Donna would throw in half a dozen. Stir the garlic into the olive oil.

Stack several fresh, good-sized basil leaves, a dozen or more, and cut them crosswise into little ribbons. Drop into the olive oil.

At this point, you can proceed or set the bowl aside, even for several hours. In fact, it will benefit from letting the basil and garlic flavors develop in the olive oil for a while. Do not refrigerate!

Sometime within an hour or two of meal time, chop six or seven of those lovely big tomatoes into bite-sized pieces and put them along with their juices into the bowl.

When you’re ready to eat, or fairly close to it, cook a pound of pasta. Use any kind with a short stubby shape like penne or rigatoni or fusilli. When it is al dente, drain it, sprinkle with salt and grinds of pepper, then dump it into the tomatoes and oil and stir everything together.

Cut a pound of fresh mozzarella into small cubes and gently mix them in.

Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve this in bowls so the juices puddle in the bottom and you can mop them up with a good chewy sour dough bread. I like to grate some Parmigiano-Reggiano over the top and sprinkle with extra basil. You also could get cute and throw on a few pine nuts but you don’t need to.

This dish can stand up to a light to medium bodied red wine, but a chilled crisp white seems more summery. Serve it as a company meal or an indulgent solitary repast, but enjoy it often while summer and the tomatoes last.

Charlene Scores With Breakfast Innovation

“Great looking muffins!” I exclaimed when I walked into Charlene’s kitchen one morning last winter.

“I made them yesterday,” she said. “Kind of an experiment.”

Charlene and I both enjoy tasty whole grain breakfast breads. For years whenever I visited her, we breakfasted on sumptuous hearty bagels. Then our favorite bagel shop closed and the search for a suitable substitute was on.

I tucked into the experimental muffins. They were wonderful! Hearty, full of grainy flavor, and with a subtle crunch that was hard to identify.

“These are great! How did you make them?”

Charlene pushed over a tattered copy of her old cook book.

Yes, some of you may remember that Charlene put out a cook book—lo, these many years ago. It includes healthy recipes drawn from friends and fans. The muffins I was enjoying were inspired by High Fibre Bran Muffins contributed by Debbie Sergeant.

But Charlene was out of many of the ingredients, so she got creative and we learned just how flexible Debbie’s easy recipe is. Charlene didn’t have all-bran cereal so she used Grape-Nuts. That was the crunch! For wheat bran she substituted oat bran. And honey in place of molasses. She added dried cranberries instead of fresh blueberries. Substitutions for four ingredients had been made with no ill effects!

Here is the original recipe with Charlene’s substitutions in parentheses.

High Fibre Bran Muffins (or Charlene’s Grape-Nut Specials)

1 C whole wheat flour
1 t baking soda
1 C all-bran cereal (or Grape-Nuts cereal)
1 C wheat bran (or oat bran)
1 C skim milk
½ C molasses (or honey)
1 egg, beaten lightly with a fork or whisk
¼ C blueberries (or dried cranberries)

Mix together the dry ingredients. Add the milk and honey or molasses to the beaten egg and stir well. Pour this into the dry ingredients and stir just until mixed. Fold in the fruit. Spoon into muffin cups.

Bake at 375 degrees F for 15 to 17 minutes or until they feel firm to the touch.

This makes a baker’s dozen of big muffins. Tip: As muffin tins only have a dozen cups, use a ramekin or oven proof custard dish to bake extra batter for the thirteenth muffin.

Since that morning, I’ve played fast and loose with other substitutions and the muffins still shine. I’ve used a combination of wheat bran and rolled oats and used Uncle Sam’s as the cereal. I’ve even substituted sorghum as the sweetener. And any kind of fruit works, dried or fresh.

Homemade muffins are a great breakfast food. When you bake them yourself, you control the ingredients—no chemical dough conditioners or strange fats or hidden sugars. You make them whenever you have time and after they’re cool, pop them in the freezer. The night before you want muffins for breakfast, take out two per person and by the next morning they’re thawed and ready to eat. Split and toast them in the toaster if you want.

Even if you aren’t familiar with baking, these muffins couldn’t be easier. They are stirred up with no special equipment. They are healthful and freeze well. And most important—they are delicious!

Real Food

“But what do you eat?” a new acquaintance asks, perplexed to learn I never order fast food or buy processed convenience fare.

I try to explain that the list of what I eat is very long since it includes virtually all consumables in the natural world, but she remains unconvinced.

What have we North Americans come to when those among us who refuse to eat manufactured or non-food foods are considered strange or unusual? What does it tell us that “non-food food” is an actual food industry term applied to artificial concoctions like whipped topping or processed cheese food and that millions eat these fabrications?

Europeans who visit this continent are appalled by the dismal quality of what most of us accept as food. "Have Americans no taste buds?" they wonder. And, indeed, excessive sweetness, unrelenting saltiness and heavy oiliness can actually dull the sense of taste so that only sweet, salty grease satisfies the palate.

The sad thing about this, aside from the well documented health consequences, is that food is such an ubiquitous joy. And it doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Sure I can spent days creating a complex and delicious cassoulet, and there are times I want to do this. But I’ve also had a simple bowl of pinto beans from a tiny Mexican restaurant called Mia’s that I still dream about years later. And the summer I was fourteen I stood on a street in Manhattan and bit into what was surely the most perfect peach in the world. Sweet and tangy, it was so exquisite that the memory of the gaudy fruit stand, the hot pavement under my sandals, the raucous clamor of the traffic are forever affixed in my mind by the radiant taste of that peach.

Good food is a primal joy of life. I shudder to think of being deprived of it.

But how do we avoid being seduced by the illusion of convenience? Food preparation (or non-preparation) habits form and harden and make real food seem beyond reach. Let’s encourage one another—share not only recipes but tricks and ideas for welcoming real food, glorious food, into our lives.