Lizzie's Got a Brand New Pot

A coffee pot, that is!  I just picked up a cheap Krups espresso machine at the Red White and Blue Thrift Store. It was clean and had almost all the original parts, just missing the lid to the decanter. At $7.95 it was entirely overpriced, but I guess I am a willing participant in the ripoff that RW&B has become. All that being said, this morning I made a perfect double short latte, and then another for Mr. Ryan, and then one for mom-pool/foodie friend Lisa and one more for the road. In other words, it paid for itself already and the brew is better than Starbucks (not hard to beat, I know) or Crazy Mocha. And--and this is really saying something--it is on par with Buena Vista Coffee, my favorite java stop on the Northside, or for that matter, anywhere in Pittsburgh since the Vault and Kiva Han went byebyes.

Home brew may become a habit.  It takes me a bit longer, but I can do it while the squids are flinging their Koala Krisps at each other over the breakfast table. And I will miss the beautiful-eyed elfin baristas who so gently flex their tattoes while pulling my morning joe and serving the most excellent pastries that should not be offered for breakfast to anyone near my glycemia index. So please go to BVC and support the best little coffee house in Pittsburgh.  Or stop by the Brighton Arms and I'll serve you one of my soon-to-be famous lattes on my porch (sans body art). 

Cookie du Jour: Five -Star Peanut Butter

For 30 years, I kept and practiced my mom's peanut butter cookie recipe. And when my son started helping make cookies, he called it the  Fork Cookie recipe.  He loves the part where you use the fork to smash the dough ball and make lines in it.  I despise the part where you use the fork to cream the sugar with the rock hard butter you forgot to set out in enough time to bring to room temperature. (Okay, it is never going to be "light and fluffy" no matter what I do with this fork!) It is a recipe that calls for a lot of fat and white flour--whole grains don't substitute well. And it calls for a lot of time.  I love these cookies, don't get me wrong.  No other cookies compare to these when it comes to dunking them into a glass of cold milk.  However, they have become a special event cookie in my house.  And a special treat when we go to Grammy's.  In our house, however, we make a different peanut butter cookie.

Grandma Edie's Peanut Butter Cookies.  I found this recipe in an old church-ladies cookbook (created with a typewriter and a mimeograph machine, if you want to know what I mean by "old" in this case.) When I first joined my husband's family, his grandmother was approaching her 90th birthday. She had lost a lot of mobility and conversation skills by then. When we visited on Sundays, she sat in an easy chair by the window watching birds at her feeders. I remember her commenting on cardinals and junkos, her winter favorites. Family members would crowd their children around her, to immerse them in her fading countenance.

At the time, I had no children to present, so to pass the time I would wander through her house looking for clues to her lifestory. I often ended up sitting at her dining room table leafing through her cookbooks. There was one in particular she had used a lot, but I can't remember the title.  I just remember her simple system of rating the recipes she had tried.  A scale of one to five stars (presumably "edible" to "scrumptious.")  These peanut butter cookies had five stars and three ingredients.  How can you go wrong?

Although they are indeed scrumptious, I made them only a time or two and then moved on to other, more challenging endeavors. Until my niece gave us the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie compendium, complete with songs and recipes. This same recipe was included and I recognized it instantly as Grandma Edies's five star cookie. My son, the budding chef, couldn't wait to make them. The result was a perfect cookie for a kid.  Easy, fun to make, and enough protein to counteract the sugar. At least that's what I tell myself.

To make me feel even better about these cookies, I use fresh ground organic peanut butter, organic fair-trade, unprocessed sugar, and a fresh-from-the-farm, organic free range egg. I would not recommend any other substitutions, although I have been tempted to try part honey part sugar.  Technically, you should reduce other liquids when you do that and it really isn't possible in this recipe.

And honestly, the best part is that the kids can experience a great food success with this recipe without too much input from Mom.  Or that you can mix it up and have a tray in and out of the oven in under 20 minutes.

Grandma Edie's Peanut Butter Cookies

1 cup peanut butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg

Combine and mix well. Form 24 balls. Evenly space on large cookie sheet.  Bake at 350 for 12 minutes.  Cool one minute on tray, then flatten slightly with the bottom of a cup or glass. Cool two more minutes then remove to cooling rack. 

Optional:  to make them a little fancier, I sometimes roll the raw dough balls in demerara sugar before baking. It gives them a little crisp and sparkle. However, my mom says it makes them a little too sweet. Try for yourself and decide. Stick with the basic recipe and you can't go wrong.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying (About Frozen Pizza) and Love the (Ellio's) Box

As a hard-core foodie, I usually go to great lengths to avoid anything fast, fried or frozen. However, as a harried, hurried mother of two overactive undereaters, I sometimes go to greater lengths to avoid meltdowns (and dishes, I freely admit.)  It is no exaggeration to say I've tried everything to get nutrition into my tiny tigers. "Everything!" I tell the pediatrician, the endocrinologist, the occupational therapist and the dietitian whose lists of suggestions are longer than my to-do lists. 

Then there's Dad, who is much less paid than the aforementioned corps of kid professionals, and he says, "Frozen pizza. Try frozen pizza.  It's full of calories and fat. And they will eat it."  I say, "Not on my watch.  Do you have any idea how bad that stuff is?" The list of unpronounceable ingredients fills up the whole back side of the box--in a 4 pt font! But, then when Mom's night out comes along, I relinquish my rights and head out the door, fast. What I don't think about can't hurt them, right?

So then after leaving them with a sitter for the weekend (woo hoo!), I came home to find empty Ellio's frozen pizza boxes in the recycling bin. I was thankful for my time off and thankful that the kids (and the sitter) were still here when we returned. And, so I forgivingly and calmly and sat down  to read the ingredients...when what to my wondering eyes should appear? Here is a frozen pizza (i.e. a meal fully prepared and consumed by my children in under 30 minutes) with an ingredient list that nearly complies with my 10-agenda:  Ten or so ingredients that occur naturally and that I don't need a dictionary to define or pronounce. While this pizza does have a few more than ten ingredients, we'll give them a pass since there is  crust dough, sauce and cheese to consider.

Just look at this.  There is almost nothing in this list I wouldn't use in my own homemade pizza:

Enriched Wheat Flour, Water, Soybean Oil, Sugar, Yeast, Whey Protein Concentrate, Salt, Tomato Paste, Spice, Dried Garlic, Low-Moisture Part Skim Mozzarella Cheese.


Of course many would argue that enriched flour has its own ingredient list (and dirty laundry list), and I do not disagree.  I'm just saying, compared to any other frozen pizza I've encountered, Ellio's gets my vote for the least of all evils. (How's that for a ringing endorsement?)

Also, I got a free chuckle out of the warning on the box:

CAUTION: PRODUCT BECOMES HOT WHEN COOKED.


(Full-disclosure: I know nothing about the company that produces Ellio's, except that it has a real physical, google-able address instead of a Distributed by or Manufactured for address.  It may be run by the sanitation department of Lisle, IL, for all I know, but for the purposes of this post we'll suspend our disbelief, ok?)



     

Evdoxia's Spinach Pie

Spanakopita. /span uh KO pe ta/   You've heard of it. It sounds like a high calorie, high fat, special occasion festival food.  Perhaps, if you are not Greek, it is just that. That's how I thought of it, until last Friday when it was the subject of a cooking lesson with my beloved Greek cooking teacher, Evdoxia. With her generous heart and enormous Greek extended family, it seems she can only make recipes that serve 50 or more, and she loves to use oil and butter lavishly. So the recipe is not exactly translatable into health-conscious family-style dining. But the lessons learned were invaluable and totally transferable.

The day's chatter was full of tips and tricks, suggestions for substitutions and modifications. With each step and each layer of filo, she'd say things like, "Thea So-and-So makes it like this," or "Mrs. So-and-So adds this and instead of that." Evdoxia makes it the way she makes it because of her family traditions, the regional customs where she grew up, and the instruction of many older and Greek-er ladies that moved in and out of her 80 plus years. Layer upon layer of filo and culinary influences makes her spanakopita, or spinach pita as she calls it, the best. Reputedly the best that anyone, Greek or not, has ever eaten.

Pita means pie.  Pie can be stuffed with many different things.  In her spinach pie, she uses spinach, of course.  But that is because spinach is available everywhere in all seasons thanks to the frozen foods section. But she also makes with it Swiss chard, which thrives in her garden well into the freezing temperatures of winter. In the summer, she loves to use vleeta. Any leafy green will work, it seems, except the bitter ones like dandelion greens. In my mind, this means spanakopita just took up residence in the use whatever is in the fridge drawer of my mental food card catalog. Frozen spinach, however, she says, is the easiest and most common, though definitely not the tastiest. And, for whatever reason I don't care to explore, she feels that the generic grocery store brand of fresh spinach ends up tasting better than the more expensive brand names or organic.  

Over the past five or so years of cooking with Evdoxia, I've learned that her recipes are difficult to adapt or divide for a number of reasons. The first reason and most insurmountable reason her most of here recipes are hard to scale down to normal proportions is that the ingredient amounts are tailored to fit a certain pan which no store sells. Like her baklava pan.  It was hand made a100 years ago in the village where she was born. It is so integral to her cooking life that when it was time for a new stove, she took the pan to the appliance store to make sure it fit into any prospective new oven. And when her sons buy new ovens, they take the pan to the appliance store, lest their mother not be able to cook in their kitchens.

For her spanakopita recipe she uses a 18-inch round pan. You could make this using with two 9 x 13 cake pans, but it would be harder to cut into the perfectly sized  diamonds that present the serving the way they should look.  Otherwise, cutting it into squares like lasagna, would be like .. well ... cutting it into squares like lasagna and that's just not right.  Presentation is important. So I would opt for making it in the biggest round layer cake pans that you can find. And then follow Evdoxia's suggestion for leftover ingredients.  She always has a suggestion even it if it is just "roll it up and bake it like a strudel."  A Greek strudel, that is. 

So here are two recipes: One from Evdoxia's kitchen and one scaled down for your table. Let me know what you think of my adaptations.