Karen Sandler

Category: Baking & Cooking

  • New Skills = New Responsibility

    Have you ever tried cooking something new (and a bit challenging) and it turns into a household staple? And when it becomes a must-have, you’re having to make that not-so-new thing again and again because your spouse or your kids (or you!) would be very disappointed without it?

    I suspect were all trying new things with the pandemic shutdown. The staying-home-all-the-time part isn’t new to me because writing has been my day job for quite some time now. I’m used to working in front of a computer in my home office. But until the pandemic shutdown hit, I never had to worry about how I looked from the shoulders up or how the background looked via my webcam.

    My new skill that led to a new responsibility was making homemade English muffins. I came across this recipe in the Washington Post back in March 2020 and thought I’d give it a try. My husband especially likes English muffins for breakfast so I thought it would be a nice treat for him.

    I’ve been baking bread for years, so this wasn’t a huge stretch. But after the first batch, hubby definitely wanted more. He said he could just buy store bought, but I knew he would be much happier eating the homemade ones made him. So that one experiment has become an every other week (or so) ritual when hubby tells me, “I’ve only got two left. Can you make more?”

    It’s become a nice cooperative effort. He’s never made bread, so I make the dough and let it rise in the fridge overnight. The next day, we work together to measure out the 12 blobs of dough that will become muffins. I put a blob on our kitchen scale and he shapes it on the cornmeal covered cookie sheet. Then after another 2-hour rise, he cooks the muffins in our electric skillet.

    Over the 2+ years since we started our muffin making venture, I’ve modified the recipe. We use our electric skillet instead of the cast iron pan the recipe calls for because we ended up with burned muffins. Hubby isn’t super fond of whole wheat or honey, so I switched to rye muffins sweetened with sugar and flavored with caraway seeds. I’ve also gotten lazy and rather than the egg white called for in the recipe, I throw in a whole egg.

    I’ve also started to make other breads more regularly. My favorite is olive bread, my version of a tasty bread we used to buy at the Bel Air market. I use Peter Reinhart’s lean bread recipe from his book Artisan Breads Every Day, and add 3/4 cup of sliced kalamata olives and substitute 1/2 cup of the olive brine for some of the water. It is divine.

    Did you start something new during the shutdown? Let me know in the comments.

  • RTW – Balancing Reality and Fiction

    This week, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks the question, How do you balance hectic times like the holidays with your writing schedule?

    Um, yeah. How do you do that?

    I’m not sure I’ve entirely figured that one out. The good news is, I’ve been under contract with a publishing house nearly every holiday season for the past dozen or so years. The bad news is, that means I’ve got a deadline staring me in the face every year all through the holidays.

    Which means I have to stay focused and on task in November and December. Yes, I’m longing to go Christmas shopping (or Hanukkah shopping–our family goes both ways). I’m dreaming of baking Christmas (or Hanukkah) cookies. I’m jonesing to go up the hill to one of the local tree farms to cut down my tree. But I can’t just take off all the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas (much as I might wish it) because that darn book isn’t going to write itself.

    So what do I do? I do cut myself some slack. I choose a day or afternoon for the tree cutting, for the baking, for the decorating. I work hard on the days when I don’t have holiday festivities planned and get as much written as I can. I tend to do the Christmas shopping in one fell swoop, demanding a list from everyone, and storm the stores on a weekday when they’re less busy. And I keep an eye on my word count and the number of days remaining until the deadline.

    I do find it annoying to have to write during the holidays. Even worse, my birthday is smack dab in the middle of the holiday season, so there’s another distraction. But I also know that I’m very lucky to be working under contract, to have that deadline, so who am I to gripe?

    How about you? How do you keep working during the holidays? Christmas carols on or off? Christmas cookies stacked on your desk? Is your office decorated? I wanna know how the rest of you do it.

  • A Girl in Shop Class

    The other day, I was listening to an interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson on NPR’s Science Friday. (side note: I am madly in love with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. If I wasn’t already married, I would woo Neil).

    Anyway, he got to talking about his childhood, how as a black kid he had to be an athlete in high school to fit in (he wrestled). When he told people he wanted to be an astrophysicist (which he knew from age 11), they told him oh, no, you should be an athlete. Neil said it wasn’t so much racism but the fact that that in those days (late ’60s, early ’70s, based on his age), athletics seemed to be the pathway for someone with his skin color.

    When asked what had kept him going despite society’s skepticism (although his parents did fully support his dreams) he mentioned he had/has a tremendous reserve of strength and self-motivation inside him. When he faced opposition or lack of faith from others, he would draw on his reserve to keep going. Sometimes his reserve got low, but he still kept going until he achieved his goals.

    One funny story he told was of being in shop class in junior high. All the students were to build a desk lamp. It was a simple design, with very clear instructions. But Neil didn’t want to build that desk lamp. He had a particular love of Saturn. He convinced the shop teacher to let him build a Saturn lamp. Neil glued together several blocks of wood, carved out a globe for the planet and a circular piece for the rings. He drilled a hole through the globe to run the cord through and rigged the ring to swivel so that the lamp would turn on when the ring was pressed. He still has that lamp on his desk at the Museum of Natural History. Here’s a video that includes a demonstration of his lamp. It’s at about the 1:10 mark.

    As he was talking about his shop class, he mentioned a reality at that time–that only boys were allowed to take shop. Girls were relegated to cooking and sewing classes. That brought back a memory for me.

    Somehow, when I was in junior high, I was allowed into a shop class. I was the only girl. I loved it. Our project was to design a floor plan for a house. Once we had our design, we were to use balsa wood to build walls. I created a house with a large courtyard in the middle and the rooms ringing the courtyard. I thought it would be cool to have a very private yard like that.

    I was able to draw the floor plan, and got two or three runs of balsa wood glued on. But then came the semester break. I was moved out of shop class (despite my objections) and moved into sewing/cooking class for the second semester. Although it turned out I also enjoyed cooking and sewing, the injustice of being booted out of shop class still stings.

    (Another side note: There was one boy in cooking class. I suspect he was ridiculed by his peers and looked upon with suspicion, just as I had been in shop class).

    I’m assuming that these days if a girl wants to do shop class, she can do it. I know boys take cooking class now in high school. They might still get razzed about it, but they at least have choices.

    So how about it? Anyone have an experience like mine? Or were you allowed to finish that cool project in shop class and you skipped learning how to cook and sew? Let me know in the comments.

  • Something Yummy for Those Holiday Potlucks

    Total cheat on my blog today. My schedule is stacked high with “to-do’s” so I haven’t the time for a thoughtful post. So here are a couple of my favorite recipes you might want to make for that upcoming Christmas or New Year’s Eve/Day potlucks. The first is a cobbler recipe that was given to me by my late neighbor, Connie. She was an accomplished cook.

    Fruit Cobbler

    Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

    filling:
    6 cups berries or pared, cut up fruit such as apples or peaches
    ¾ cup sugar
    1/3 cup flour

    Combine berries or other fruit with sugar and flour. Mix well and pour into 8×8 inch pan. Note: If strawberries are used, add ¼ cup of tapioca. Note: chopped up crystallized ginger goes well with peach cobbler.

    topping:
    1 cup flour
    1 cup sugar
    1 teaspoon baking powder
    ½ teaspoon salt
    1 egg, beaten
    ½ cup butter (1 stick)

    Combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt and mix well. Add beaten egg to dry ingredients and stir until mixture is moistened but still crumbly. Spread topping evenly over berries/fruit in baking pan. Melt butter and drizzle over the topping. Bake 40 minutes or until topping is golden and fruit is bubbling.

    This is a Finnish recipe that I got from a fellow student in a chocolate class I took a few years ago. Very unique and marvelously good. She translated it from a Finnish Chocolate book, hence the metric measurements.

    Chocolate Cake with Graham Crackers

    200 g (7.055 oz.) dark or semisweet chocolate
    250 g (8.82 oz.) coconut butter (or regular butter)
    2 eggs (or pasturized egg equivalent)
    3 dl (about 1.5 c.) powdered sugar
    graham crackers
    milk (you can use Kahlua or Creme de Cacao instead)

    Melt chocolate and coconut butter (or plain butter) in double boiler hot water bath. Let cool down. (I melted the butter in microwave and added chocolate into the warm butter which melted the chocolate. Be sure to mix well to a smooth mixture).

    Beat eggs and powdered sugar until light in another bowl. Beat chocolate/coconut butter mix slowly into egg/sugar mix.

    Line a meat loaf pan with parchment cooking paper. Spread about .5 inch layer of chocolate mixture on the bottom. Set a layer of graham crackers (any other type of sweet cracker that you prefer) on the chocolate mix. Brush with milk (or any liquor). Cover with another layer of chocolate mix. Repeat layering 3 to 4 times ending with chocolate layer.

    Chill 2 or more hours. Remove from pan and remove the parchment paper. Dust with cocoa powder. The cake is ready to eat.

    The cake keeps well in the refrigerator and ages well. Because of the raw eggs it is safer to keep the leftovers refrigerated unless you use the pasteurized eggs.

    Enjoy & Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Felicitous Kwanzaa!