Feeding Frenzy, 18 April 2013

Today was yet another example that I am my mother's daughter.  The drive to cook humongous amounts of food is apparently in my blood.

The difference between Mom's situation and mine, however, is that she had a very large family to feed all the food to.  I don't.  I now have several examples of wanting to feed my family of four and accidentally succeeding in preparing for a family of eight.  Or 12.

One example happened on New Year's Day this year.  My mom always prepared a particular ethnic dish traditional to our family on January 1st, and this year I thought I'd pick up the baton and continue the tradition with my boys.  The dish is a doughnut-like batter with raisins in it that gets fried into fluffy, golden-brown dumplings and then coated in sugar.  (Yum.)  Looking through my mom's recipes, I soon discovered she had about four different sizes of the recipe written down, and I wasn't sure which one to choose (she neglected to write down "Serves X number").  So I picked a size in the middle and went for it.

The fact that the size I was using called for 12 eggs should have tipped me off.

An hour later, I was still frying, and I had to make an emergency call to the neighbors across the street to help us eat them.

A more recent example is my purchase of 60 pounds of strawberries, because surely a mere 20 pounds couldn't make enough jam to feed my family.  I had to be rescued by a friend to help me get through the large task of processing them.  It was a sticky six hours, but I think we have enough jam now.

Now, as we speak, I am lying down recovering from tonight's bout of Monster Meal Madness.

It all started two days ago when I went into a grocery store I don't usually shop at, and saw that artichokes were on a good sale.  Oh, what a treat! I thought.  I'll get four.  So far, so good.  Four family members, four artichokes.  (Never mind that two of them are children who may or may not eat any artichoke, let alone a whole one apiece.  Just a minor consideration.)

Then I wandered over to the meat section and discovered a sale on pork chops.  Hey, that would be fun!  We could have a nice meal of pork chops and steamed artichokes.  I wonder how to cook pork chops.  I've never made them before.  I'll find a recipe online!  Naturally, the sale was on the "Max Packs" of meat, so I had to get a fairly large tray of the things.  But the three "men" of my family are big eaters, so I wasn't worried.

But this morning I had a brief moment of clarity that I probably actually had more food than we needed for one meal.  Remembering that my father-in-law was gone for the day on business, I invited his lovely new wife for dinner.  She gladly accepted!

Of course, now we had five people and four artichokes.  That wasn't quite right.  So what did I do?  I went to the store to buy another artichoke.  My FIL's wife called to say that he would be arriving from the airport around dinnertime, so he might be able to join us as well.  Super!  I put a second artichoke in the bag.

Then I stopped to think.  Wait, how many pork chops do I have?  I think there were five in the tray I bought.  I'm not so sure that's enough for six people.  So I went back to the meat aisle and sure enough, the Max Packs were still on sale.  I got another one.

Now I had 10 pork chops and six artichokes.  The meal needed something else to round it out, so I got two pounds of sweet potatoes to make oven fries along with it.  Eh, maybe we'd have a few leftovers, but that's better than not having enough food, right?

Reality didn't hit until about 4:00 this afternoon, an hour before dinner was supposed to be served, when I realized I'd need two pots to cook the artichokes in.  Okay, two pots, double the broth, no biggie.  (I still hadn't accounted for multiplying the time it took to trim the things.)  At 4:30, I had the globes steaming and got cracking on the sweet potato fries.  That was easy, since I have a machine that slices them.  They got popped into the oven at around 4:45.

About that time, Mrs. FIL arrived and asked if there was anything she could do to help.  Since I still had the meat to get to, I gladly accepted and turned over the artichoke cooking to her (turns out, she grew the things at one time and knows all about doneness and other important things). I pulled the two Max Packs out of the frig.

The recipe I was using called for four chops, and since I had 10, I multiplied the seasoning amounts times 2.5.  Even when I had to measure in 1/4 cup each of onion and garlic powders (one ounce), the magnitude of the matter didn't register.  But once I had the oil heated in my--large--electric skillet, another reality presented itself.

"Huh," I said out loud.  "I guess I'll have to use two skillets.  These pork chops are really big."  Mrs. FIL agreed.  Even so, I could only get eight chops cooking.  Two went back into the frig.

Now I had two pots boiling, two skillets frying, two pans of sweet potato fries baking, and two children whining that they were hungry and couldn't they eat yet??  Thank goodness for Mrs. FIL and her savvy with spatula and spoon.  I'll spare you the rest of the blow-by-blow, but by the time we sat down to eat, it was almost 6:00 and there were food and dishes everywhere.

When both children opted against artichokes, and one of them also declared he didn't feel well and only ate two bites of pork, and slender Mrs. FIL cut a pork chop in half to serve to herself--and I remembered in a rush that she and FIL regularly split entrees at restaurants--I admit I began to panic a little.  "Eat lots of artichoke!" I encouraged the adults with a forced smile.

What have I learned from this?

For one thing, don't plan on one artichoke or one pork chop per child.  For another, check the weight of the meat you're buying instead of counting the number of cut pieces.  My friends, when I stopped for a minute tonight and added up the weight of the meat I had purchased,  those two Max Packs included 10 pounds of pork chops.  Ten pounds.  For six people.  Mind you, not six Marines.  Two small children, two women (who both happen to be trying to keep their weight down), one man who traveled all day and wasn't hungry, and Jay.

By the way, thank goodness for Jay.  He made a valiant effort to eat as much as he could hold, bless him.

In the end, Jay and I will each have an artichoke tomorrow, and I'll be looking up whether or not it's feasible to freeze pre-breaded/fried pork chops.  Not that I feel like eating more pork any time soon.

I think I'd rather have some strawberry jam.

The Eighth, Year Three, 08 April 2013

Today marks year three of Mom's Heavenly homegoing.  I miss her.  Like crazy.  Within just the past few months, I've started dreaming about her on occasion, and we sit together and she hugs me.  It feels so good.

The past two years, as many of us as were available got together to spend the day with each other.  This year, The Eighth came on a Monday, which makes it awkward for out-of-towners to travel around.  So I marked the day in a number of ways.

Yesterday afternoon, G, Z, and I drove to pick up my one-year-old nephew, Baby K, from Claire and Bernie (my sister and bro-in-law), who were badly in need of some adult time.  It was our first time having a slumber party with Baby K, and we had a blast!  It was fun to watch him play with the many Duplos we have, all of which were gifts from my parents.  I enjoyed thinking about how even though my mom isn't here to watch Baby K play, he is still getting to participate in gifts she gave her grandsons.

Early this morning--5:30--I woke up with The Eighth heavy on my heart.  Instead of fitfully trying to sleep longer, I got up and looked at photos of my mom.

This is one of my very favorite pictures of Mom and me.  (You can tell I'm a girl by the ruffles on my shirt.  Hair doesn't run in our family.)  She taught us that the best part of baking was licking the beaters.  Salmonella shmalmonella!

Z got up a little later and cuddled with me under the quilt Mom made for me after Jay and I were married.  She made the same pattern for every single one of us, but we each got to shop with her and pick our own fabrics.  I love the memory of being with Mom at my local fabric store.

Kind of ironic in retrospect that Mom's not in the picture!  From left to right: Claire and Bernie, me and Jay, Carl, Dad, Kay, Essie, and Em.  (Dad's quilt was made from scraps of ours.)

After I fed little boys breakfast and sent G off to school, Claire arrived at our house and she and I jetted out for a pedicure while Z and B.K. played with Grammy G (it's an alphabet soup of names, really).  When we got back, the four of us had lunch together and spent some time outside; Claire and Z played baseball and I sat with B.K. on the grass while he spun wheels on some trucks.

After rests all-round, Claire and B.K. went home and I made dinner.  Mundane, perhaps, but even the simple act of feeding my family is a connection I have with Mom.  She was my first cooking teacher.  (And aside from experience, my only teacher, actually!)

Jay took the kids to play at a park after we ate, and I "puttered," as Mom would say, around the house, doing little chores.  Then, I sat down at the piano.  Mom's piano.  And I played for an hour.  Brahms, Schubert, Bach, Clementi, Chopin--all music Mom taught me to love.  Growing up, I listened to her play the piano; I listened to the records and CDs she put on; my fingers learned to feel keys and follow music under her instruction.  Mom was not my only piano teacher (in truth, I whined too much under her tutelage), but she was my first.  My first piano duets were with her.  The first songs I sang were accompanied by her.

I had hoped to sing/play with her for years to come, but I am so grateful for the memories I have and the lessons she taught me--

Love God, love your husband, love your children, love your family, love your neighbor, love music.

Thank you, Mom, and I love you.  Save me a spot by the piano bench in your Heavenly mansion!

37 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, 05 April 2013

The title is slightly misleading.  It's actually 37 jars, not bottles; and it's jam, not beer; and it's on the counter, not the wall.  But the old song's countdown seemed appropriate.  Today was my first foray into the world of jam making, and I say Go Big or Go Home!

Forty pounds of strawberries later, I have my feet propped up and my eyes are slightly glazed as they gaze at the computer screen.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The story begins on Wednesday afternoon, when Jay called me from the grocery store, announcing that strawberries had gone on sale for $1/lb--a pretty darn crazy good price.  I suggested he get a bunch.  He announced he already had 16 pounds in the cart.  The word "jam" jumped into my head and I suggested he buy 20.

When he got home, he managed to fit all 20 pounds into the refrigerator, buying me an extra day with which to research recipes and gather supplies (in between watching four little boys for eight hours, but that's another story).  Daunted by the inordinate amount of refined sugar involved in "normal" jam making--the kind my mother did (we're talking more sugar than fruit)--I scoured the internet for reliable-looking reduced-sugar recipes.  I also ate a number of the strawberries fresh, and found the taste a bit weak, which is only to be expected from a grocery store.

So I settled on a strawberry-orange recipe that used honey instead of sugar, and a small amount at that.  (You can see my inspiration here.)  We happened to have some large oranges on hand, so I zested and juiced them for a trial batch of jam last night.

Seriously, these oranges were the size of grapefruits.

I followed the recipe's instructions to a T, only eliminating the water, since I wanted a stronger taste.  Two pounds of strawberries and a few minutes later, yummy smells began arising from my cooking pot.

Can't you almost smell that syrupy steam? Yummers.

Not bothering to seal the jar since it was a trial batch, in almost no time at all I had one pint of near-perfect strawberry orange jam.

So much for yesterday.

This morning, I woke up at 6 a.m. and thought, Wait a minute.  Two pounds of berries only got me one pint.  We eat a lot of jam [in plain yogurt, in cottage cheese, on toast...].  I don't want to go to the bother of making a big mess for only a few pints.  I should go buy some more strawberries.

**Queue ominous orchestral swell**

I dragged the kids to the grocery store with me and came home with another 40 pounds of strawberries.

Well, I had done the math and--at the time--it seemed like a reasonable amount!  Of course, somehow I managed to forget that we still had 10 pounds of berries in the refrigerator.  (Seriously, who forgets they have 10 pounds of *anything* in the frig?)

It turned out not to be a simple case of duplicating last night's success in larger quantities, either.  You know how on the back of pectin boxes it warns not to double the batch?  Try tripling it.  Then try stirring it forever to get it to reduce.  Then seal it up in jars and hope it sets when it cools.  Then try to decide whether cooking too much at a time made it so runny; or if the problem was using an off-brand of pectin; or if the strawberries weren't chopped small enough; or if somehow leaving out the orange zest changed the consistency; or if your math was totally bonkers and you mis-measured something.  Then try to stave off whines of "I'm bored!" and "G pushed me!" from little boys.  Then look at the 44 pounds of strawberries left in your kitchen and fight a growing sense of panic.

Only the first six pounds a-washing.

The air in the kitchen was tense.

But with the incredible moral and cooking support of our dear friend Grammy G--who ended up spending 8 hours with me today--and the knowledge that my mom would have figured it out, I made some adjustments and slogged on.

Wondering how those strawberries are in such uniform shape? I ran them through my French fry blade on my slicer-shredder. It was a cool idea but didn't end up saving much time in the long run.

By the third or fourth batch, Grammy G and I figured out our system and had things running fairly smoothly.  We didn't eat.  We barely sat.  We conversed only sporadically.  But we made progress.

Grammy G takes a turn stirring two pots at once.

Incidentally, I thought I'd make a note of the tools involved in the process.

• Knives, assorted
• Spoons, stirring
• Spoons, tasting
• Spoons, measuring
• Cups, measuring
• Tongs (for picking lids out of boiling water)
• Jar holder thingies (for moving jars into/from boiling water)
• Two cutting boards
• Large bowls
• Large pots
• Pressure cooker/canner
• Small pot
• Jar funnel
• Pot holders
• Towels and washcloths
• Kitchen scale (for re-weighing strawberries when I lost track)
• Pliers (for removing the drain plug from the sink after I wedged it in upsidedown)

A small sampling of the tools involved. Notice the many tiny honey bears. Jay said they were the best deal, oddly.

Six and a half hours after washing the first batch of strawberries, I removed the last jars from the bubbling canner.  They were the last jars because...they were the last jars.  I ran out of jars before I ran out of strawberries.  Remember those 10 pounds I already had in the frig?  Well, there are still 10 pounds of strawberries in the frig.

But the other 40 pounds are...Voila!

Thirty-seven pints of strawberry jam, which include 40 pounds of berries, nine cups of honey, three quarts of orange juice, and 12 boxes of pectin.  Plus a little desperation endurance.  And a whole lotta love!

The story ends happily with every jar cheerfully pinging its signal that it sealed, and displaying a progressively thickening consistency as the jars cool.  The taste tests I took while cooking are magnificent.  The fond memories I have of jam-making with my mom filled some little heart-holes.  Spending a day with Grammy G made some lovely new memories.

But I'm not going to buy strawberries again for a long time.  A long time.

P.S.  For those of you who are interested in such things, you might like to know the following.  After doing more math, I determined that each pint cost roughly $2.50US to make.  Each pint has a total of 60 grams of sugar (from the strawberries, orange juice, and honey).  The "low sugar" jam we've been buying at the store has 160 grams of sugar per pint.  I think this homemade stuff is worth it.  I think.