caroline

About caroline

Caroline is the editor-in-chief of Literary Mama, the associate director of The Sustainable Arts Foundation, and co-editor of The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage as well as Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008).

Posts by Caroline Grant:

The San Francisco Treat

August 1, 2009 By caroline in Uncategorized Tags: baking, chocolate, comfort food, cooking with kids, dessert, ice cream, snacks, sweets

by Caroline

It’s not, despite the jingle, Rice-a-Roni. No, the true, old school, San Francisco treat is an It’s-It, a chocolate-covered oatmeal cookie ice cream sandwich, originally invented by George Whitney in 1928, and sold for decades at San Francisco’s Playland-at-the-Beach. Now that the playground is gone, It’s-Its are made in a small factory near San Francisco airport. We’ve been driving past the factory for years, and finally the other day I looked at the website to see if they offer factory tours. Sadly, no. We drowned our sorrows in homemade It’s-Its:

Want a closer look? I thought so:

One Flat of Apricots. No Jam.

July 20, 2009 By caroline in Uncategorized Tags: baking, breakfast, dessert, fruit, ice cream, produce, sweets

by Caroline

I know I should make jam. Every summer the local paper runs an article about jam making, with lots of delicious-looking recipes and helpful instructions. Every summer my good friend invites me over to her kitchen to make jam with her. I know it’s not hard, and the fact that I don’t have good tongs for lifting jars out of a hot water bath shouldn’t stop me. My grandparents all made preserves of various sorts (jams, pickles, jellies), and now my parents do, too.

But somehow the insistent chorus of “It’s easy!” is not having the intended effect on me, and I continue to stick with the oven, not the stove.

Occasionally, the farmer who sells our biweekly mystery box offers little extras, produced by her friends and other farmers, for sale. A pound of homemade lard for instance (pass), or a dozen farm eggs (yes, please). Sometimes it’s cheese or honey (sign us up), and this past week it was flats of apricots.

I thought about it. A whole flat is an awful lot of apricots. On the other hand, apricots don’t need to be peeled; they don’t even need a knife to slice them — you can just crack them open at the stem end with your thumbs. Apricots can be frozen easily, or pureed, baked into things and of course, eaten fresh by the handful.

I signed up for a flat. We probably ate a dozen the first day, and continued to eat lots of the apricots fresh out of the box over the next few days. And here’s what I did with the rest of them:

And then I froze a tray in order to capture some of this summer gold for the rainy winter to come.
frozen

The Expedient Picnic

July 14, 2009 By caroline in Uncategorized Tags: eating out, fast food, lunch, road food, travel

by Caroline

Eating with kids is often all about expediency, and so although it was difficult, in Oxford, to set aside my romantic, Evelyn Waugh-inspired visions of country picnics, I have been at this long enough to know that when the kids are hungry, they need to eat. Now.

So we make or purchase nice sandwiches, collect cold drinks, perhaps add a bag of crisps and some carrots or an apple. Sometimes, I pack the picnic while they are eating breakfast, and they start asking for it shortly after we leave the house. (I have learned to pack enough food for six.) Or we collect the provisions on the road, in which case the kids see no reason not to sit right down and eat it. They plop down in a grubby doorway, hardly waiting for me to kick the cigarette butts out of the way; they enjoy a pretty view, but they don’t need it. So while I keep expecting to picnic in a place like this:

Inevitably, we wind up in a place like this:

And I’ll keep reminding myself that while a nice setting might improve the meal, it’s the food and the company who make the meal.

Ode to the British Sandwich

July 12, 2009 By caroline in Uncategorized Tags: fast food, London, lunch, road food, travel

by Caroline

I love sandwiches. Although I will eat a nice salad for lunch, or keep you company with Thai noodles or a rice bowl, just as breakfast is cereal for me, all I ever really want for lunch is a sandwich. In Paris, the sandwich is all about the baguette–as it should be, of course; the baguettes are wonderful–spread thinly with butter and layered with meat or cheese (not, I think, both). I watched French school kids tear into their lunches and remembered my husband’s childhood year of the same daily lunch: baguette with butter and salami. But for me, the sandwich on baguette is, as Eli began to complain, a little big in the mouth.

In England, the bread isn’t the star player, but nor is it an afterthought; whether white or whole grain, dense and malty or tangy with buttermilk, it plays its supporting role well. As for the fillings, we won’t talk about the betrayal that is the peanut butter and butter sandwich (I’m not sure Ben will ever recover from that), nor the extravagant use of the shudder-inducing salad crème. No, I glory in egg and cress, ploughman’s, brie-walnut-cranberry jam, cheddar and chutney, carrot and wembley (that’s a cheese), red cheddar and tomato– and those are just the vegetarian options! Every train station, every Sainsbury’s, Tesco, and Marks & Spencer has their own array of sandwiches, made fresh at least once a day and sometimes more often than that. I could happily eat a different one every day for a month.

Let’s have a little Feast!

July 8, 2009 By caroline in Uncategorized Tags: chocolate, comfort food, dessert, ice cream, junk food, London, road food, snacks, sweets, travel

by Caroline

England is not generally known for its ice cream, and that’s ok — having contributed clotted cream (not to mention many fine cheeses) to civilization their dairy reputation is secure. Still, as in Paris, there’s ice cream everywhere here. From trucks that dish up soft serve cones (and, for an extra 70p, how can you resist the addition of a nice chocolatey Flake bar?) to corner store freezers with a fabulous assortment of frozen treats.

Meanwhile, after days of suggesting brightly (usually as a procrastinatory, “I don’t want to go into this museum” kind of tactic), “Let’s have a little feast!” Eli was delighted to find in Oxford an ice cream bar called Feast. He will never think of feasts the same way again.

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