Maple Easter Candy

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by Caroline

Every year, I hope that maybe our Easter trip to my parents’ home in Connecticut will line up with sugar season, that window every New England spring when the temperatures sink below freezing at night but rise into the 40s during the day, with enough sun to warm the trees and encourage the maple sap to flow. Even though I don’t really like that kind of weather, I want my boys to experience what I did as a kid, tramping along in the mud and snow in my grandfather’s booted footsteps as he gathered maple sap and boiled it down into syrup. It takes 40 gallons to make a single gallon of syrup, so a couple energetic helpers would be useful, I know, but so far we’ve missed all the work, instead always getting to enjoy the sweet results of my dad’s labors.

At Christmas time, we make sugar on snow; now that the snow is gone, we made maple candy inside, with nothing but syrup, some simple kitchen equipment, and — because after a visit to Old Sturbridge Village we were feeling old-fashioned — a great deal of arm strength. You can make this, too, with any maple syrup and even an electric mixer.

Pour 2 cups maple syrup into a large pot and bring to a boil. Let it boil gently until it comes to 240 degrees on a candy thermometer (soft ball stage: test it by letting some of the boiled syrup drop off the end of a spoon into a glass of water; if it forms a ball, it’s done). Pour it out into a large mixing bowl (or two) and start stirring:




Here’s a close-up action shot of the stirring:



Stir the syrup until it lightens and thickens to the consistency of peanut butter, about five minutes. You can use a hand mixer if your arm gets tired (or your children refuse to stir anymore). If you want to add some toasted walnuts or pecans (a fine idea) stir them in now.

If you have candy molds, by all means use them. We just spread some waxed paper on the counter and experimented with different dollops. Let the candy set at room temperature for about ten minutes. For long-term storage, you’d want to keep it in the refrigerator, but it likely won’t last that long.

The Spirit of Food

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by Caroline

I’m on vacation with my family this week before Easter, traveling around New England visiting my niece, various cousins, my parents and brothers. I’ll have some food to write about soon enough, but in the meantime, I want to offer a very short post, a passage from an essay by Nancy Nordenson, “Things that Fall and Things that Stand.” The essay is in Leslie Leyland Fields’ wonderful anthology, The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God, and later this spring I’ll post a full review of the book, but for now here is a passage that speaks to me as I start planning the many meals for this week with my family.

“The pancake stack disappears. The last of the coffee sits in the mugs. A few drips of syrup and lingonberries glisten on the wood’s surface. We are happy about each other and we are full. …

“I know not to waste suffering and fear. I know to use them as hard lessons, to extract the nugget of what I have yet to learn or what I need to learn yet again or what I can only hope to someday learn. But how not to waste these moments?

“We’ll soon get up from the table and do who knows what and drive who knows where for all the rest of our lives. But here, now, the wholeness of this moment, dense and round as a concrete piling driven deep into bedrock, anchors our paths. This is what it feels like when all is well. A mnemonic of experience as real as any. Might not a person just tip right over from the weight of fear or angst without this ballast at the other end?”

Easy as Bread

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by Caroline

So, remember how I told you about my new pet? The sourdough pet that I hoped would be the source of much delicious bread?

Well.

It was a little finicky.

I should have known when I set the cookbook down and waded into the virtual sea of blogs offering advice on how to feed and care for this particular style of homegrown sourdough pet. I tended mine for a couple weeks but it never turned into anything able to leaven bread and so I did, as I threatened I might, pour it down the drain.

And then I remembered another bread technique that had swept the internets in the last couple years and made a bestselling author of its creator: Jim Lahy’s Sullivan Street bakery no-knead bread, popularized by the fabulous Mark Bittman. I had looked at this recipe so many times since it was first published but rejected it for two reasons: I didn’t have the required 6-8 quart pan; I like to knead.

Well, duh.

I have two 3-quart pans.

And I figured I could knead the bread a little bit if I wanted to.

So I made it, and it’s wonderful.

I really (uncharacteristically) followed the recipe, exactly as written. I let it rise about 12 hours the first time I made it, more like 18 the second time, and that timing works well: mix up the dough before bedtime one night, and you’ll have fresh warm bread for dinner the next day. Your interaction with the dough is minimal — maybe 30 minutes total, depending on whether you knead it at all, but really, the dough is so soft it’s pretty impossible to knead, and the resulting bread is fabulous: crisp crust, tender crumb.

first look at the new dough
the dough after about 18 hours
very wet dough after its 15-minute rest
finished loaves with their baking pans
sliced bread

Not only does this recipe easily produce a delicious loaf (or two) of bread, but it gives you something you can’t get from a bakery: a house smelling of freshly baked bread. But if the long process puts you off, here’s another no-knead recipe that comes together much more quickly. It’s not a sourdough, but it’s a very tasty sandwich bread. Or want to avoid kneading and rising? Try a soda bread; Ben devised a recipe a few years back that works pretty well, too. So what are you waiting for? Make some bread this weekend!

Feeding Myself

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By Lisa

Caroline does a lot of things right, and her post yesterday drove home one more thing I admire about her: she feeds herself well.  I read her post with admiration and a little dismay because I, for one,  don’t take the time or expend the energy to cook for myself when I’m alone. I simply don’t bother.  I realize that Caroline made something very fast, very fresh, with minimal mess or clean-up, but I can barely get myself to make any lunch at all,  much less breakfast, much less something different, now that the kids are in school.  I just don’t want to take the time or expend the effort. These days, I subsist on bowls of cereal,  grilled sandwiches, tuna, and, if I’m lucky, some leftovers–but the latter is very rare. I do eat a good, balanced dinner with lots of variety and that generally makes me feel better. But it doesn’t solve the problem of the rest of the day.

I know I should drink more milk or take my calcium, but I forget. I should grab pieces of fruit, but I don’t.  I should bother to make a salad, but I don’t. My pantry is really well stocked, but I don’t use it for myself.

I have finally come to a truth: These days, my kids eat better than I do. Some days much better.  I would never feed them the way I’ve been feeding myself lately. Why is it, for instance, that I buy $10 worth of fruit and don’t eat any of it?  This week it was strawberries, the first of the season. Out of 3 pints I brought  home, I ate maybe 3 strawberries.  Come summer, it’s not unusual for the kids to eat every pint of berries.

And I wonder if this is a problem for other parents out there? Do your kids eat better than you? What do you do to take care of yourself foodwise when the kids are away from home? Do you care?

I like short term, focused projects, so for the next week, I’m going to make an effort to feed myself better. I’ll report back.

Transition Salad

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by Caroline

Continuing this week’s foraging theme, lunch the other day required a bit of refrigerator rummaging, since there were no good leftovers with which to construct a garbage salad. I wound up with a meal that tasted a bit like winter, a bit like spring, just right for this transitional season.

I found some garlicky cannellini beans from a recent pasta dish, a bunch of kale, a sweet potato, and a big carrot from last week’s wintry CSA box, plus some green garlic from this week’s more springlike assortment. So I turned the oven on to 400 and got to work with the vegetables. Usually, I save roasted vegetables for dinner, when I can slow roast them and give them time to caramelize. But the sweet potato and carrot, diced into smaller-than-bite-sized pieces, drizzled with olive oil and blasted at high heat for 10 or 12 minutes, turned crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. I left the stalks of green garlic whole while they roasted; they were ready after about 5 minutes, and I diced them up, too. While the vegetables were cooking, I washed and shredded the kale leaves, and then put them in a big bowl with the roasted garlic, which started to wilt the kale nicely. Once the carrot and sweet potato were done, I tossed on top of the shredded kale with the beans, a splash of vinaigrette and some toasted almonds, for a perfect and relatively quick clear-out-the-refrigerator lunch.

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