'Twas the Week Before.....

A brief entry on preparations for holiday cooking.
Between now and Christmas Eve, I intend to post entries on Holiday dishes.....among them, stuffing, cranberry salad.....perhaps even a bit more on the bird itself.

In the meantime, start your bread drying for stuffing.......and get that bird out of the deep freeze and into the refrigerator for thawing......Now!

I use a whole loaf of bread. I generally use a 1 1/2 lb loaf of whole grain bread.
You can use any kind of bread you want to.
In years past, when I made batches of stuffing that used two and four loaves of bread, I added cinnamon bread, cinnamon raisin bread, even a cinnamom apple flavored bread. The point being that you can use any sort of bread your heart desires.
What is most important is that the bread be not merely stale but bone dry......so as to thoroughly absorb the broth and fat and flavorings and seasonings that you will add to it.
We will talk about those things later in the week, in a timely way.......in the meantime, here is a photo of my bread drying to give you an idea.



Layer the bread in a bowl or basket and put somewhere the mice won't get it.
Shuffle the bread around from day to day to expose all the surfaces to the air.

Get that Turkey out of the freezer and into the fridge......you're going to have to make an overnight place for it after you've cleaned it and seasoned it, so you might as well make room for it now......besides which, it's going to take at least 5 days to defrost to the point that you can work with it.

Bye for now.
Thus endeth the lesson...........

The Captain and the Cookie Monster........

Okay, so I've been away for a while...........now that we've adequately dealt and dispensed with that issue, let's get back to the kitchen!

Much of what I set out to do and have done so far, is to debunk food myths, de-mystify the process of cooking and offer some simple basics to those who just don't cook......for whatever reason. Perhaps you don't have a very well supplied or equipped kitchen, or the time or inclination. Perhaps you feel that you lack the skills or talent or whatever magic (white thumb)that Mom or Grandma seemed to be born with. Maybe you don't know where to start or become dismayed by the waste that seems to be a part of cooking for one or two........when everything seems to be packaged for families of four or more. There haven't been, at this point, so many entries posted here that a bit of a review would constitute a particularly onerous task.........and that might be helpful as a way to sort of pick up the momentum with me as we launch into the swing of things once again.

If you read my sidebar message, you know how I got started cooking. Simple, really, if you are given, at an early age, the opportunity to learn how to cook, you will cook. Kids are naturals, they are enthused about learning, they adore their parents and grandparents and want to be a part of everything they do. They'd rather help you with the dishes than sit and play with their "leap pads" or watch Sesame Street.....and in the end they will have learned more if you exercise the patience to accomodate that enthusiasm.

The secondary issue I'd like to address here is: Where are the recipes?

I happened to catch an episode of "Friends" wherein the Phoebe character brought in some delicious chocolate chip cookies made from a "secret" family recipe and then, somehow, wound up losing the recipe. The whole episode centered around trying to figure what the ingredients of this recipe might be............the joke at the end being, of course, that it was the recipe from the back of the Nestle Chocolate Chip package. The other day, my brother came by and said something about getting Mom's recipe for pumpkin pie.............I told him it was the recipe from the back of the Libby Pumpkin can. The only thing she did differently was to substitute Eagle brand sweetened condensed milk for the Carnation condensed milk that the recipe calls for. In that same vein, my son wanted to get a recipe for pumpkin rolls........if you tear the label from the pumpkin can, it is on the inside.
So many of the comfort foods that we remember from our childhood are like that and thus it is with the cookies that I am going to make today.

Without further ado..........Oatmeal Raisin Cookies......straight from inside the lid of a box of Old Fashioned Quaker Oats.

.....and introducing my assistant in the kitchen, my "guest chef" if you will.............
my grand-daughter, Cheyenne.

Once a month, each child in her kindergarten class is responsible for bringing a snack for all the kids to share. At the beginning of the school year, I suggested to Cheyenne that we make home made cookies together for her to take.......she thought that was a great idea. So far we have made ginger snaps and snicker-doodles.

You've all heard the old joke about the guy who asks the plumber how much he will charge for his services and how long does he think the job will take. The plumber replies; "Thirty bucks an hour.....should be able to do it in about 2 hours." To which the guy responds; "Wow, that's pretty steep. How about if I help you?" The plumber thinks for a second and says; "Well, in that case, it'll be 50 bucks an hour and you better figure on about 4 hours."

If you are going to let a child help you in the kitchen, it's going to take longer.....allot the time. Give it a chance to be fun. Don't let yourself get so frustrated that you start taking jobs out of their hands, don't sweat the small stuff, and for god's sake don't give a hint to them that it would be easier to do it yourself.

The Recipe

1 cup (two sticks)margarine or butter, softened....[important note: do not use the low-fat spreads, like Country Crock, They are about 30% water and are not suitable for use as a substitute in recipes that call for butter or margarine.]
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt (optional)
3 cups Oats, uncooked
1 cup raisins

preheat your oven to 350 degrees



Here Cheyenne measures the sugars, and adds them to the bowl with the butter.


The next step is to cream the sugars and butter together. Cheyenne knows that she can't handle the mixer by herself yet......but it is her job to turn it on and off......(and don't you dare get in a hurry and forget it!!!)

She can, however, help with scraping the mixture from the sides of the bowl and holding the bowl. I'm not sure if I've expounded upon the addition of an assortment of stainless steel bowls to your kitchen. They can be heavy and pricey if you go to a "foo foo" cooking shoppe to purchase them........but the Walmart, Target type of bowl is inexpensive, easy to keep clean and extremely valuable as a kitchen tool. A couple of large ones and a couple of medium sized ones will handle a variety of jobs, rinse clean easily in between jobs and give you plenty of elbow room for mixing ingredients that might overwhelm and spill over the sides of the largest mixing bowl in a typical set and make a mess.



Here, Cheyenne adds the eggs and vanilla extract.........She does a good job of cracking the eggs.......every once in a while we have to go diving for a bit of shell and from time to time we miss a bit............Don't sweat the small stuff...she's five. I know people my age that can't heat the water to boil an egg without it sticking. Likewise with the measuring, if she has the dexterity to fill the measure I let her do it.....in the case of a liquid, she holds the measure while I pour the ingredient. I encourage her to handle raw meats and eggs (under my supervision) so that I can inculcate the habit of habitually cleaning hands, tools and surfaces to avoid contamination. In a complete aside...........she is starting to learn fractions and how to work with fractions without even knowing it! How's that for a bonus?

When I am working with spices and seasonings around Cheyenne, I like to let her smell them, get familiar with them, so that she will be able, in time, to sort of picture what the addition of these things will do to what she is preparing. She will be more likely to experiment, tweak recipes and make them unique to herself.....more able to work "from scratch" and put something together out of leftovers and the foodstuffs she has on hand in her pantry. Thereby saving herself a ton of money, sparing the earth some of the packaging and debris that accompany pre-packaged foods and choke our landfills, not to mention cutting down on irresponsible, gluttonous waste in the face of pockets of deprivation, want, and outright starvation that still plague whole populations across the globe.
Frugal, green, tasty, healthy, easy to prepare, educational, esteem building, conscientious.......show me a down-side to this, Folks.

Climbing down off the soap-box...........we once again employ the mixer to incorporate the eggs and vanilla into the sugar and butter mixture.




We now measure and mix in the flour, cinnamon, baking soda and salt and mix it together well.

Things get a little stiff at this point, the small hand mixer is not up to the final stages of dough making. So, unless you've got one of those nifty .. and pricey.. and space eating stand mixers, you're doing the rest of this by hand. Your junior assistant will want to help with this............it won't hurt a bit to let them try it for a while to see for themselves that this is a job that will have to wait until they are a bit bigger.....like handling the mixer on their own.



Cheyenne can, however measure the oats and add them to the bowl......we mix them in.


Here we give the same treatment to the raisins.
Cheyenne and I both like raisins..........you may not. If that is the case, leave them out and proceed to make just plain ol' oatmeal cookies, or add some other dried fruit, or mixture of dried fruits, or chunked nuts of whatever sort you desire, or chocolate morsels, or chocolate chunks.......milk, dark or white, or even butterscotch. Make your cookies your own.



We drop our soon to be cookies by rounded spoonfuls onto an ungreased cookie sheet. There is a bit of guess work involved here in gauging just how much dough it takes to make a cookie. I never get as many cookies out of a recipe as it says I should........you just have to make a call and kind of stick to it and learn as you go. I think it is important that the "assistant" get a big hand in this......at some point or another in cooking, you're going to have to get messy, in it up to the elbows sometimes...........it helps to get the idea when it's still fun to get messy.



Bake the cookies for 10 to 12 minutes until golden brown, cool on the sheet for about a minute and transfer to a rack to finish cooling. I'm in my daughter's kitchen here and she didn't have a set of cooling racks....so I borrowed the lower rack from the oven. Since then I've acquired four wire cooling racks from the local Dollar Store for 50 cents apiece........you can pay more for heavier duty racks, but the ones I found are fine for a starter kitchen. They don't take up much in the way of storage space and they come in handy for a variety of applications. I like to use them when roasting meats like chicken breasts or chops to keep the meat up out of its own fat, and they make handy trivets for hot pans on the counter tops.

All that's left is a bit of clean up and to enjoy a cookie snack.........so far the kids that Cheyenne shares these with at school have enjoyed them and she takes a great deal of pride in having made them herself.

Like I say........Home-made cookies....where's the down side?

Enjoy......

Thus endeth the lesson..........