Weekend baking: Leek tart and morning glory muffins

First, Saturday morning breakfast: fairly healthy mini-muffins (or "cupcakes," as K called them, which is fine with me if it gets him excited). This was my first foray into using my food processor attachments, even though I've had the food processor for about eight years now. The verdict: quick, but messy. For the small volume of stuff I had to grate, it probably would have been easier to do it by hand. I've never been a measurer, but when I ended up with a giant pile of carrot and apple lightly coated with flour, I ended up throwing in another half-recipe of the batter at the last minute. I was convinced it would be a disaster, but these turned out very light and were a big hit with the family.

The recipe, adapted from a bunch of similar recipes found on the web and then modified on the fly:
1. Combine dry ingredients:
1.5 cups white whole wheat flour
1.5 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp spices (mainly cinnamon, but I can never resist tossing in some pumpkin pie spice. A friend recently gifted me with some Penzey's baking stuff, including cinnamon. It looked so good that I opened it up despite having an open jar of cinnamon and another sealed one from Trader Joe's. I couldn't believe what a difference it made. I don't think I can go back to supermarket spices.)

2. Add 2.5 cups of grated carrot and Granny Smith apple to flour mixture. Use the food processor if you're brave and don't mind doing dishes, otherwise do it by hand.

3. Combine wet ingredients:
1/3 cup oil (I used grapeseed oil; subbing apple butter or something similar for about half of it might work)
1/2 cup buttermilk
3 eggs
1/2 cup sugar (I bet brown sugar would be better, but I didn't feel like getting it out)

4. Pour wet into dry ingredients and mix.

5. Bake at 350 degrees for about 18 minutes for mini-muffins, about 28 minutes for a mini-loaf (I'm guessing more like 24 minutes for muffins and 40 minutes for a regular-size loaf). If you have a probe thermometer, an internal temperature of about 208 degrees.

I made 24 mini-muffins and a mini-loaf from this recipe (in the disposable mini-loaf pan left over from K's train cake -- they're so useful that I think I'm going to get some real ones. A mini-loaf is the perfect size to give away).

Dinner tonight was a quiche-like leek tart, based on this Epicurious leek and swiss chard tart recipe. Since I'm incapable of following a recipe, I used spinach instead of the swiss chard, pie crust instead of puff pastry, whole milk instead of cream, and added Parmesan cheese into the mixture and pine nuts on top. I tried to par-bake the crust and it immediately shrank -- not only did the sides collapse, but the base even shrank to a smaller size than the tart pan. (Don't even suggest pie weights or rice or beans or something like that. If I'm too lazy to get the brown sugar out of the high cupboard, do you really think I'm going to weight my pie crust?) At that point, saving the crust didn't seem like an alternative, so I baked it until the top was golden, about 8 minutes at 425 degrees, grated some Parmesan on top to seal it, and dumped the mixture on top. It was still delicious, with a creamy but not too rich or eggy custard and lots of veggies, and even looked nice enough to serve for company despite the crust debacle. I could tell it would be great with the more bitter taste of chard, but spinach worked too. Artichokes seem like they be a good addition.

I told JW we should have a dinner party with a spinach pie bake-off -- my other go-to spinach pie, which I haven't made in a while, involves equal amounts of chopped fresh spinach and basil, minced onions, roasted red peppers, parmesan, and ricotta, and also has pine nuts on top. The leek tart is easier and less messy, and just as good, I think. But maybe one day we'll let guests decide.

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Quality time

After the debate over at Cee's about balancing our time between our kids and our careers, and her recent post about quality time, I thought about the time I spend with K during the week. We're together about 3-4 hours a day on a typical weekday. Which, honestly, isn't great. It's about half the time we used to spend together when I was in law school. He's at an age where he would prefer that I never leave his side, and nearly every day when I drop him off at daycare, the last thing I hear when I'm walking out the door is a piteous wail of "MOMMMMMMMMYYYYYY!" (As long as I'm being honest, the bigger fuss he makes, the happier I am to walk out that door to my nice peaceful office.)

I read about a family therapist who said that most of the problems she sees with toddlers are solved by the parents spending half an hour on the day playing on the floor with the kid. Just giving your full attention for that time is all they need, even if you feel like you have urgent things to do or the kid is annoying you. I tried to be conscious of that this morning. We always spend time talking, reading, and playing, but I thought about having that uninterrupted block. And I couldn't do it, not for a whole continuous half hour. I had milk to pour and dishes to wash and breakfast to get ready. I had to get dressed and get him dressed, and grab our bags and change his poopy diaper and change another poopy diaper, and wrestle him into his shoes and coat and into the car. If you add up the time we spent playing, it was more than half an hour, but not in a row.

The four hours I have with K are in the morning, when we're eating breakfast and brushing our teeth and getting dressed and going off to school, and in the evening, when we're eating dinner and taking a bath and doing our bedtime routine. Some days I can manage an entire half hour of pure playtime, but most days, preparation for the day or night interrupt.

The trouble with quality time, when you have a toddler on a typical mid-day nap schedule, is that there are really only two blocks during the day that aren't interrupted by daily routine. And they're right in the middle of business hours, around 9-11 in the morning and 3-5 in the afternoon. We've shifted our work hours around as much as we can to spend more time with K, but we don't have the flexibility to show up or leave in the middle of the day.

I never thought I'd say this, but I do feel guilty when I drop him at daycare and go off to work. It's not that I feel guilty about working. I like feeling like a productive member of society and being able to use my brain and help provide for my family. I just wish I could do my job and have one of those solid blocks of playtime with him each day. He doesn't seem attention-deprived or anything, but it would be nice for both of us.

At least there's the weekend. Every morning, K asks, "Is it the weekend?"

Update, after a 5-day vacation where we were together almost 24-7: I'm not going to feel guilty as long as I feel like we have enough time together,  because this vacation reminded me that the more time we spend together, the more he wants to be constantly physically attached to me.

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Weekend cooking: Scallion pancakes

Courtesy of Ming Tsai, and just as good as the Chinese restaurant version! I used a LOT less oil than he suggested, and also added some chili oil on the dough along with the sesame oil.

These have been on my to-make list forever. They're so simple and use so few ingredients, yet they seem like something you couldn't possibly make at home. Here's how you make them:

1. Sift two cups of flour into a bowl. (Who am I kidding, I never sift flour. But I do sprinkle it out of the measuring cup into the bowl to make up for it.)

2. Have a cup of boiling water ready. Pour it in, mixing, until it comes together into a fairly sticky dough. (I used a little more than 3/4 of a cup. Ming Tsai says you can use the food processor, but this just creates a mess. Use a spatula at first and then your hands.)

3. Let the ball of dough rest in the bowl, covered by a cloth, for half an hour.

4. Roll the dough out into a thin rectangle. Brush with sesame oil (I also used chili oil, and used my hands for this too) and cover with lots of sliced scallions.

5. Roll up, jelly-roll style.

6. Cut the roll into four equal pieces.

7. With each piece, twist several times and then coil.

8. Roll each coil flat. (This twisting, coiling, and rolling process creates the flaky layers.)

9. Fry. I pan-fried, using about 2 tablespoons of oil.

I didn't do the complicated dipping sauce, and instead just splashed some rice vinegar into soy sauce in the same bowl that held the scallions. Not the healthiest starch, but I'll save some money making these at home when the craving hits.

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Current favorite game: Letter Petectives

Today he kept making me spell "gopher."

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Rugelach again

Enough career pondering... now back to baking.


My third batch since Christmas, this time with strawberry jam and walnuts. These are pre-baking -- I had the dough sitting around for a while and didn't want to keep it in the fridge too much longer, so I decided to prepare and quick-freeze them instead of baking them. I am getting better, but I still haven't quite mastered them. A few things I've learned:

• Prepare the dough at least a day in advance -- each step is easy on its own, but put them together and these become a much bigger project.
  
• The dough can stay in the fridge for well over a week with no loss of quality.
  
• But leave it out at room temperature for forty-five minutes or so before rolling out. (This batch turned out much too thick because I didn't have time to leave it out for long enough.)
  
• Jam and nuts make a perfectly fine filling -- no need for anything more elaborate.
  
• If you slice them thin and cook them on their sides (flipping once), they become more like these pinwheels. The look and the texture are slightly different, so it's sort of like getting two cookies for the price of one.
  
• Using floss to cut them doesn't squash them down as much as using a knife.

My repertoire of impressive cookies (defined as cookies that make people say, "Wow, you MADE that?") now includes rugelach, biscotti (only impressive if you've never attempted it before, actually quite easy), black and whites (NY style please, none of these New England "half moon" things), and the piece de resistance, the rainbow cookie. Before Christmas I plan to attempt macarons and florentines. I'm open to suggestions!

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Ambition

Over lunch one day, talk turned to the associates who were laid off last year and what they were doing now. A few are working for smaller firms. One or two have left the profession. Several are working for the government, legal services, or nonprofits. The most common gossip about that last group was, "So-and-so is working for Regulatory Agency... and she's HAPPY!" Everyone looked bitter at this. "And she's actually making a decent salary! Not biglaw money, but decent." Then everyone looked envious.

As soon as you're admitted to Harvard Law, they start hammering into you the message that you are going to Be Somebody. That you are an Important Person, and are going to run the world someday. On the first day of orientation, they say, "Look to your right. Look to your left." But they no longer follow up with "... Only one of you will still be here on graduation day." Instead, it's, "Remember these people. They will be senators, CEOs, federal judges."

I hated the prestige-whoring that goes on at Harvard, but that message couldn't help but sink in. Recently I was remembering why I went to law school. I just wanted a job that I liked, that I thought was interesting and worthwhile. I didn't necessarily want a career that consumed or defined me. It didn't even cross my mind that I could Be Somebody one day, until the Harvard indoctrination started.

Now I wonder. I think I explored my options in law school, but did I think too narrowly about a career? Did I factor in prestige and money more than I admitted to myself? When I think now about what I might do in the future, I feel like my universe of potential options has narrowed more than it should after only a year of practice.

I know my legal career is only beginning. I'm just less sure than I used to be about where I want it to go.

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More baking

I have a loaf of Irish Soda Bread in the oven, in honor of St. Patrick's Day. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention to the recipe (a chronic habit) and swapped the amounts of leavening, then tried to compensate by haphazardly scooping out baking soda. I just peeked in the oven and it looks sort of flat and craggy. We'll see. At least I have three more days until real St. Patrick's Day. I can always try again.

After a zombielike week of fighting off a cold and having zero motivation to do anything useful, I went on an organizing mini-binge this weekend. I'm cleaning out my baking pantry right now. I am appalled at the amount of food that I've wasted by shoving it in there and forgetting about it for years. So far I have thrown out a box of cake mix from 2005 (although I'm actually a little proud that I haven't baked from a mix for at least 5 years -- probably several years longer, since I used to keep cake mix on hand in case of emergency), two packages of marshmallows that expired in 2006, a small bag of hazelnuts that expired in 2008, and some horribly rancid sunflower seeds that my mom bought when she came to stay with us after K was born. I'm organizing the rest into categories (decorating, sweet baking ingredients, bread baking ingredients, flours, sugars, gelatin/custard, etc.) and I have a "use immediately" box which currently contains chickpea flour, cocoa, several chocolate items, some sweetened coconut, another bag of undated hazelnuts, some sliced almonds, and a crystallized quarter-full honey bear. Once I'm done culling, I will make some horrible concoction. I keep hearing about Compost Cookies lately, but they seem like a waste of butter for a bunch of stale ingredients.

Update: Soda bread wasn't quite what I was expecting -- more light and cakelike, not a strong soda taste, and my addition of fennel seeds gave it a pleasant but un-Irish taste -- but good nonetheless. K, ever polite, said, "What a beautiful cake!" In fact, if I swapped out the AP flour for cake flour, and maybe added some lemon zest along with the fennel, I bet it would make a good cake. A hearty, everyday, at-home kind of cake, not an occasion cake. (Other changes: left out 1T of sugar, and used brown sugar instead of white; subbed 1 cup whole wheat flour for AP flour; used 2/3 cup of K's old milk from the morning plus 1/3 cup of water plus 3T buttermilk powder in place of 1 cup buttermilk.)

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Baked oatmeal

Instead of our usual Sunday-morning popovers, this morning I made baked oatmeal. (I also found a pumpkin baked oatmeal recipe, which sounds even better, but I didn't want to open a whole can of pumpkin and only use half of it.) It was delicious, and not that much worse for you than regular oatmeal. The only bad-for-you ingredients are 1.5T butter, which isn't bad -- only about a teaspoon per serving -- and 1/3 cup of brown sugar, which I would reduce by half next time. The Quaker Oats recipe has you sprinkle brown sugar on top and broil for 1-2 minutes for a bruleed top, which I'll do next time. I substituted pumpkin pie spice for the cinnamon, used a mix of raisins and dried cranberries, and added pecans. If K weren't so opposed to any kind of cooked fruit, I'd use apples or pears and walnuts or pecans next time -- since he is, I'd just ditch the raisins and stick to the cranberries and pecans.

The other nice thing about this recipe is that it dirties so few dishes. I melted the butter, warmed the milk, and mixed the rest of the wet ingredients in my big Pyrex measuring cup. I toasted the oats in my 8x8 baking pan while preparing the wet ingredients, and then took the oats out, put the other dry ingredients on top, and poured the wet mixture over. So the only dirty dishes were the baking pan, the Pyrex cup, the whisk, and a few measuring spoons.

It took under ten minutes of prep and 20 minutes in the oven, which is slightly less time than popovers (about the same prep, but 36 minutes in the oven). I think this would make a good side dish when we have guests for brunch. It would be even better with some whipped cream, or maybe some strained yogurt to keep it breakfasty.

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Betsy's Wedding

After LL's post about childhood books where she mentioned the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace, I became obsessed with rereading the Betsy books. I just finished all ten of them, plus "Carney's House Party" and "Emily of Deep Valley," and loved reading them again -- until the end.

Major spoiler alert coming up.





You can see it coming. It's 1914, and for the last two books people have been assuring each other, "There could never be another war." But unlike the rest of the Betsy-Tacy books, which leave you with a smile on your face, "Betsy's Wedding" ends with all the young men (including Mr. Betsy) marching off to fight the Great War. They're all so excited and determined -- "exhilarated," to use Lovelace's word -- and proud of serving their country. Joe heads to officer training, assuring Betsy that they'll start a family the moment his tour of duty is through. They rent their little house and Betsy moves in with her parents. Tib's new husband is going to be a fighter pilot. The book ends on an optimistic note, but you can't help picturing what comes next. I'm sure when I last read this book, probably around age 12, I imagined that Betsy's life went on just as she had planned it. But this time, the ending seemed tragic and uncertain.

The Betsy-Tacy books are reported to be heavily autobiographical. Maud Hart Lovelace's husband did go off to fight in the war, and then came back to her in one piece. I guess I can imagine that the same happened to Betsy, but I wish I had the comfort of one more story telling me that everything turned out fine.

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Dining out

JW gave a big speech at a conference today and didn't get home until late. I left work early to pick up K. Holding hands, we walked to a Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood. He sat across the table from me and ate dumplings and pea shoots with rice and told me about his day. (He also sang a song about dinner.) He was perfect until we went across the street to the wine store to buy a present for Daddy, where he threw a tantrum because I wouldn't let him buy a purple corkscrew. Then he cried all the way back to the car.

It's nice having a big boy. If only I could get him to ditch the diapers.

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Update

After a while of not blogging because I didn't have time or enough that I cared to write about, I entered a period of not blogging because it was too daunting to start again. So here's my quick summary of the past few weeks:

Work stuff: Lots to say, but nothing I can talk about.

Community stuff: Started work on the local committee; seems like a great group of people who are very interested in things that people sometimes laugh at me for caring about. Looks like it will be a lot of work, but worthwhile.

Real estate search: After months of searching for single family homes in our price range, broke down and started looking at condos, which are MUCH nicer, cheaper, and more abundant in my town. But I'm spoiled after living in a single family; all the condos are 2nd and 3nd floor duplexes and I don't like the idea of having to go upstairs to get into my home. Makes it feel like an apartment. This weekend: lots of townhouse open houses, plus probably a peek at one or two single families that we can't afford (or rather, can afford only if we commit to staying at or above our current income level for the next 30 years, and neither of us is comfortable with that commitment).

JW stuff: He bought a very nice suit for his talk at the big conference next week. I asked if I could go, but of course I'd have to pay the $800 conference fee, because it's not like the school play where your family is supposed to come see you.

K stuff: For his 3rd birthday, he got to have 2 lollipops (one first thing in the morning, one that took him all afternoon) and watch all the videos his heart desired (the same episode of Blue's Clues four times in a row). We did get in one fight when I made him wear pants, but smooth sailing otherwise. It was so nice to have an excuse to indulge him all day.

He has an unhealthy attachment to his fleecy pajamas. ("Unhealthy" because he'd rather stay inside all day than change and go out.) He throws major fits when it's time to change, and when changed, once in a while says, "I'm sad because I don't like wearing daytime clothes. I miss my pajamas."

He still hasn't totally recovered from the loss of his pacifiers about a week and a half ago (I will detail the Pacifier Saga another time) -- he keeps getting out of bed at night, waking up at least once during the night, and waking up about an hour and a half earlier than usual. It's gotten better, but we're all tired.

His potty training has regressed. For a while he was going several times a day and telling us in advance when he had to go. Now he keeps refusing and has barely used the potty at all for the past week or so. Which is likely tied to the pacifier change, now that I think about it. At least now he's resisting because he doesn't want to use it, and not because he can't.

He's interested in rhyming lately and has been making up his own words. He was talking about words that rhyme with "house," and when we exhausted the ones we knew, he said, "Bouse!" I asked him what "bouse" meant and he said, "Someone who works too hard." This morning he told me a "montey" is like a monkey, but with longer feet, arms, and head.

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