Apple cake for Mabon (Pagan equinox festival)

September 21, 2015 by 4 Comments

We may not be ready to say goodbye to summer, but Wednesday, Sept. 23,  marks the autumn equinox, one of two days a year when the hours of daylight equal the hours of darkness. After that, it’s downhill all the way, at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, until the equinox next spring.

In Pagan tradition, the autumn equinox is known as Mabon, and it’s a celebration of the fall harvest. As we rejoice in the bounty of the fields, orchards and gardens, it’s a good time to invite friends to gather and share.

Mabon is part of the Wheel of the Year, an annual cycle of seasonal festivals that include the solstices (the longest and shortest days) and equinoxes and the midpoints between them.

One of the sabbats

Wiccans refer to the festivals as sabbats – sources of the expression “witches’ Sabbath.”

Mabon is a time of rest after the labor of the fall harvest, a time to complete projects, let go of that which is no longer needed or wanted, and prepare to use the winter as a time for reflection and peace. Followers plant the seeds of new ideas and hopes, which will be nourished spiritually over the next months until the return of spring.

Many Pagans create a Mabon food altar with foods from the harvest. These may include fruits, nuts, grains (or fresh bread made from grain), vegetables, and squashes, especially pumpkins.

The wealth of the harvest

The cornucopia, or horn of plenty, is another symbol for Mabon, representing the wealth of the harvest; it is a balanced figure, including both male (phallic) and female (hollow and receptive) images.

Many Pagan groups use Mabon as a time for food drives, followed by a ritual for the blessing of donations.

Some Pagans have an apple harvest rite at Mabon. I find this interesting because we Jews just finished celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, which includes eating apples with honey to signify wishes for a sweet year to come.

Here is a recipe for one of my favorite apple cakes. It’s very moist and full of nuts. I very rarely add the frosting, because it’s plenty sweet without it.

 

Peanut Butter Bars from the Great Midwest

August 24, 2015 by Leave a Comment

I was reading something somewhere, in print or online, that mentioned a new book, Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal.

I did a very poor job skimming the article, because I assumed the book was a food memoir or travelogue, like Stir, which I wrote about two weeks ago, so I quickly requested a review copy so I could write about it for Feed the Spirit.

I had no clue until the book arrived that it is actually a novel. But I’m still writing about it because it is so good and so much fun.

A satirical look at foodie culture

BookForum  called it “the first novel about the emergence and current state of foodie culture,” and that part of it is very funny in a way somewhat reminiscent of Thomas Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.

But there’s more to the book than a send-up of 21st century eating habits.

Stradal’s debut novel chronicles the education and career of Eva Thorvald, a young woman blessed with a “once-in-a-generation palate” who becomes one of the most sought-after chefs in the country.

The book’s format is unusual (I almost said “unique” but I don’t know for a fact that another writer hasn’t done the same thing).

Eva’s story is told almost entirely through stories about others in chapters where she’s only a minor character. Each chapter is named for a food and tells how that food, and the person associated with it, came into and influenced her life. All the strands some  together at the end.

Pat’s winning recipe

There are a few recipes in the book, including the one below for Pat Prager’s award-winning peanut-butter bars. Middle-aged, small-town, church-lady Pat, after winning the blue ribbon at her Minnesota county fair, takes her recipe to the “Petite Noisette Best of Bake,” in Minnesapolis, a chi-chi competition run by a foodie blog where everything is  organic, locally sourced and GMO-free.

Other contestants have listed the ingredients for their recipes in excruciating detail, like “2 cups gluten-free oats sourced from the organic, pesticide- and GMO-free farm of Seymour and Peonie Schmidt, Faribault, MN, home-processed into oat flour.”

When Pat, who didn’t realize she should have done this, is asked by two young attendees at the bake-off, Dylan and Oona, what is in her bars, she lists the ingredients: graham crackers, butter, peanut butter, powdered sugar, chocolate chips.

“Butter?” Oona said. “What kind? Almond butter?”

“No, regular milk butrter. Like from cows.”

“Hormone-free cows?”

“I don’t know. It’s just Land O’Lakes butter. It was what was on sale.”

“Does their milk have bovine growth hormone?” Oona asked Dylan.

“I don’t know, but I think they’re on the list,” Dylan said.

(Oona, who is pregnant, then wonders if she should vomit up the bars to protect her baby from the bovine growth hormone in Pat’s peanut butter bars.)

“Cow’s milk is really bad, especially for children,” Dylan said.

“It’s full of a bunch of hormones and toxins,” Oona said.

Pat looked at Sam. “Well, I ate these same bars almost every month when I was pregnant with him, and he turned out OK.”

“But that was your choice,” Oona said. “It’s not mine. You have to care about what other people put in their bodies….You can’t just blindly feed these to pregnant people.”

If you don’t share Oona’s concerns, here’s a recipe for Pat’s famous no-bake peanut butter bars.

I suggest you use really good chocolate chips for the topping. If you use cheap, junky chocolate chips, you may need to add some additional butter or a few teaspoons of boiling water as you’re melting them to get them to melt smoothly.

Watch out, this dish is very rich! You’ll probably want to cut it into small bars.

(The photo with the recipe is by Maegan Tintari, via Flickr Creative Commons.)

 

Look to the Black-and-White Cookie

August 17, 2015 by Leave a Comment

I’m half New Yorker (well, Brooklynite) by heritage, and I always enjoyed New York foods (think bagels, hot pastrami, halvah, knishes), but the appeal of the black-and-white cookie has eluded me.

Technically ,says William Grimes writing in the New York Times in 1998, it’s not a cookie at all but a drop cake, made from a slightly-stiffer-than-cupcake batter that’s dropped by the heaping tablespoon onto baking sheets.

Maybe that’s why I never liked them. They had no cookie crunch, and tasted like stale yellow cake.

Dutch settlers probably brought the cookie to the New World – the word comes from Dutch koekje, which is pronounced the same way. Initially cookies may have been miniature cakes, which is the meaning of the word (“little cake”).

Similar to half-moons

Some believe the black-and-white descended from the “half moon,” a cookie popular in upstate New York and New England. Wikipedia dates them to the half moons made by Hemstrought’s bakery in Utica, NY in the early 20th century.

Others trace the black-and-white to the now-closed Glaser’s Bake Shop on New York’s east side, where it was one of the original recipes of the founders, Bavarian immigrants.

What sets the black-and-white apart from other cookies is the use of hard fondant, rather than frosting, to create the half-moons of black and white on top of the cake-like base.

Writing in the blog Serious Eats in 2013, Max Falkowicz says the black-and-white cookie is usually bland and tough, and the fondant top is usually sweet and waxy, little more than “a sugary lid.” He says it’s a creative challenge to do them well.

Falkowicz likes the black-and-whites made by Nussbaum & Wu in the Morningside Heights section of the city, with this caveat: “Be sure to eat it quick: by the next day it dries out into a tough mass, a Cinderella cookie after the stroke of midnight.”

Look to the cookie!

The New York Times’ Grimes says much of the appeal of the black-and-white cookie is like that of the Oreo: one could fiddle with it:

If the cookie was topped with a soft frosting, you could lick it off. A brittler frosting could be lifted from the soft cookie base in small chunks, held in the mouth and savored. You could also separate the cookie into two halves, one black and one white, creating two cookies, or leave the cookie whole and take alternating bites from each side until the whole thing disappeared.

Many Americans first learned of the black-and-white cookie  in 1994, when, in Episode 74 of the classic sitcom Seinfeld, Jerry makes the cookie into an anti-racist icon (sorry you have to watch a short ad first with this link).

Standing in a bakery with Elaine, Jerry nibbles on a black-and-white and muses that its design makes a statement for racial harmony. “Look to the cookie,” he says. Unfortunately it doesn’t end so well for him!

If you live nowhere near New York and would like to try making black-and-whites on your own, here’s a recipe from the New York Times.

Berry Pudding: The greatest thing since sliced bread

August 2, 2015 by Leave a Comment

How often have you heard some wonderful new development heralded as “the greatest thing since sliced bread”?

These days all kinds of supermarket breads are available pre-sliced, and every neighborhood bakery has a bread slicer. But whenever I hear that expression, I always think of the cottony Wonder Bread-type stuff.

For me, today’s recipe may be the greatest thing since the invention of Wonder Bread. But while I was thinking about the recipe, I thought I’d look into the history  of sliced bread. It turned out to be a lot more interesting than I’d imagined.

The inventor

The one-loaf-at-a-time bread slicer was invented by Otto Rohwedder, who grew up in Iowa as the son of German immigrants. At 20, he moved to Chicago where he earned a degree in optometry and did an apprenticeship with a jeweler.

In 1905, Rohwedder moved to St. Joseph, Missouri, acquired three jewelry shops, and used his profits to invent new tools and machines.

As he started thinking about a bread-slicing machine, he wondered how thick he should make the slices, so he put a questionnaire in several large newspapers, garnering responses from 30,000 housewives.

In 1916, he sold his jewelry stores and used the profits to built a prototype bread slicer. Even a fire at his warehouse, which destroyed his machine and all his blueprints, failed to deter him.

One of the problems with pre-sliced bread was the perception (mostly justified) that the bread would get stale faster than a whole loaf. By 1927, Rohwedder had built a machine that solved this problem by tightly wrapping the

sliced loaves in waxed paper. This kept the slices together as a loaf and preserved freshnhess.

A tough sell

Bakers weren’t interested. The machine was bulky, five feet wide by three feet high. Finally Rohwedder asked a baker friend, Frank Bench, to give it a chance. Bench was on the brink of bankruptcy, but he decided to invest in the slicer.

The machine was installed at the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri, and on July 7, 1928, the company sold the first loaf of commercial sliced bread, called Kleen Maid.

(According to Wikipedia, Battle Creek, Michigan has a competing claim as the first city to sell bread sliced by Rohwedder’s machine; however, historians have produced no documentation backing up Battle Creek’s claim.)

Frank Bench’s bread sales increased by 2,000 percent within two weeks.

The New York-based Continental Baking Company started using Rohwedder’s machines in 1930 and created Wonder Bread.

By 1933, 80 percent of the bread produced in America was sold pre-sliced.

A ban on sliced bread

While housewives of the 1930s were thrilled not to have to slice bread every day, U.S. Food Administrator Claude R. Wickard ordered a ban”on sliced bread in 1943, citing wartime conservation efforts.

The government capitulated less than three months later, after a tremendous outcry from customers. Wickard said the War Production Board decided the industry’s use of waxed paper would not affect the country’s defense.

The bread slicer may not be the most important invention in human history, but Otto Rohwedder couldn’t ask for a better tribute than describing something new and exciting as “the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

My husband loves to bake bread, so I hardly ever buy sliced bread, especially the puffy, white supermarket variety. But I made an exception when I found this recipe, which makes a lovely dessert for this time of year when berries are plentiful. It’s from the New York Times, which is a little surprising considering how easy it is to make.

 

Mmmmmm … Michigan cherry pie!

July 6, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Today’s piece is by former newspaper publisher and University of Michigan Regent Phil Power, a longtime observer of Michigan politics and economics. He is also the founder and chairman of the Center for Michigan, a nonprofit, bipartisan centrist think–and–do tank, designed to cure Michigan’s dysfunctional political culture; the Center publishes the online Bridge magazine, where this article originally appeared. The opinions expressed here are Power’s own and do not represent the official views of the Center. He welcomes your comments at [email protected].

July is cherry season, one of the great glories of summer in Michigan.

It’s a subject near and dear to my heart, as my ancestors were among the first people to plant Montmorency cherries (called “sours” to distinguish them from the dark red eating cherries, “sweets”) in northern Michigan.

My great- great grandfather, Eugene Power, started a family farm near Elk Rapids, today still a tiny town northeast of Traverse City, late in the 19th century. He was among the first local farmers to plant cherries, which thrived on the sandy, well-drained soil and for a time became the dominant crop in the area.

The location – between Grand Traverse Bay and Elk Lake – was perfect, as the lakes moderated the cold winter winds and usually delayed flowering in the spring until after the last frost. Even today, much of the land around Traverse City that hasn’t been raped by the developers remains in cherry orchards.

10 cents for 30 pounds

My father, also called Eugene Power, remembered his first job was out on the family farm, picking cherries for 10 cents a 30-pound lug. That was a whole lot of cherries for a dime, but back in those days a dime went a whole lot farther than today. My grandfather, Glenn, who started out as a surveyor, helped lay out the newly planted cherry trees in long, straight lines.

There is a family picture of great-grandfather Eugene standing in his orchard, wearing a white shirt and necktie and a Panama hat, with a farm hand holding a pruning knife standing behind him.

It wasn’t easy being a pioneering family way back then. You couldn’t be sure the trees, once planted, would thrive or bear well. And there was always the risk of a late frost. Prices, too, bumped around a lot; a big crop meant low prices but high volume, while a small crop brought high price but low return. And capital, once lost, was very hard to regain.

A pioneering family

Family legend says the Powers were all a bit eccentric. My ancestors left a secure position in Farmington – an Oakland County town they founded when they first came to Michigan in 1824 – to move up north and start a farm. My grandfather left the farm to become a businessman in Traverse City, while my father struck out on his own as an entrepreneur in Ann Arbor. And I started my own newspaper company, largely from scratch, in 1965.

But that was the way of the pioneers, my ancestors and the ancestors of countless Michiganders who made our state and our nation what it is and whose creativity and, well, eccentricity made all the difference in the new lands of the New World. Reflecting on this history makes me feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of giants looking back in pride on our accomplishments as a nation and hope at our shadowed future. It’s that spirit of hope and confidence that makes our July 4 national holiday so important to so many.

And so, just in time for the sour cherry season, here’s our family recipe for Montmorency cherry pie.

My father preferred his pie with vanilla ice cream. I’m more of a purist, so I skip the ice cream. But I do like the pie cold for breakfast.

Either way, it’s a delicious way to celebrate Michigan cherries and mark our national holiday.

 

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Fair Food Network: Building a healthier food system (and strawberry rhubarb pie, too)

June 8, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Oran Hesterman is my new hero.

Hesterman, president and CEO of Fair Food Network wants to fix our broken food system, and his organization is achieving remarkable success.

A national nonprofit based in Ann Arbor, Mich., the Fair Food Network recently received a grant of more than $5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The money will be matched with private funds to provide $10.4 million to expand the Fair Food Network’s signature program, Double-Up Food Bucks. More about that in a minute.

Hesterman, 63, had an organic sprout farm in his younger days, then got a doctorate in soil agronomy, taught at Michigan State University and worked on food policy issues at the Kellogg Foundation before starting the Fair Food Network in 2009.

A broken system

In his book, Fair Food (Public Affairs, 2011), Hesterman notes that our food system developed to provide the country with abundant food at low cost. That’s undeniably good. But along the way, the system developed some unintended consequences, which are just as undeniably not good. These include:

  • Declining food quality: who can deny that a garden-grown tomato beats one you buy in the supermarket?
  • Compromised food safety: How often do we hear about food recalls on the nightly news?
  • Animal welfare concerns: Factory-farmed chickens spend their whole lives in crates where they don’t have room to take a step or flap their wings.
  • Water pollution: Chemicals from synthetic fertilizers and herbicides are turning up in the water supply.
  • Loss of farmland: Estimates are that the U.S. is losing almost 3,000 acres a day of productive land.
  • Diet-related illness: Heavily processed foods lead to increases in obesity, diabetes, food allergies and other problems.
  • Worker exploitation: Many large farms and processing plants rely on migrant workers, who earn very little, are given substandard housing and often are exposed to toxic pesticides and insecticides.

Most of the readers of Read the Spirit are probably fortunate enough to have the means to overcome many of these problems. We live in houses with spacious yards where we can grow vegetables or participate in a community garden or CSA (community-supported agriculture). We have well-stocked supermarkets in our communities, and we can choose to shop Whole Foods or farmers’ markets and to buy organic produce and cage-free eggs. For us, it may seem that the food system is functioning just fine.

Low-income city residents, however, face enormous challenges in overcoming the broken food system. Even if they could afford to eat healthier, they often don’t have access to healthy foods. There are few, if any supermarkets near them, and many rely on corner convenience stores for most of their food.

Double-Up Food Bucks: a win-win-win

These are the people Hesterman set out to help with Double-Up Food Bucks.

The program enables families on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), generally known as “food stamps,” to double their purchasing power for fresh produce.

The program started at a handful of farmers’ markets in the Detroit area in the fall of 2009 and has spread to 150 markets across the state. Hesterman recently piloted it in four southeast Michigan grocery stores and hopes to get it into more stores soon.

Here’s how it works:

At the market, SNAP card holders can redeem up to $20 from their SNAP cards for gold tokens to spend on produce. When they do, they get an equal amount in silver tokens, which can be exchanged for Michigan-grown fruits and vegetables.

Hesterman says the program is a win-win-win.

“The low-income families bring home healthier food. They put more dollars into the pockets of farmers, especially local farmers. And they keep those dollars in the community,” he said.

In less than six years the program has helped more than 300,000 low-income families and more than 1,000 Michigan farmers.

Fair Food Network has or is developing programs in New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah. Including two employees hired recently, the organization has a staff of 15. “We’re small but mighty,” said Hesterman.

This is important stuff. Read Hesterman’s book, which also offers suggestions about steps you can take personally to help fix the system (buy local!) and ways you can help change our food institutions and shift public policy in the right direction.

If you don’t have the time to get deeply involved, you can send the Fair Food Network a donation – their address is 205 E. Washington St., Suite B, Ann Arbor, MI 48104 – and know that you’ve supported something really worthwhile.

Here’s a recipe for a strawberry rhubarb pie that makes good use of fresh produce. Both fruits are plentiful right now. The recipe comes from Linda Hundt’s wonderful Sweetie-licious Pies.

 

Behind the kitchen door: sweet potato wontons

April 26, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Unless you’ve worked in a restaurant, or are really close to someone who has, you probably have no idea what goes on behind the kitchen door.

Serving, bussing tables, dishwashing—these are all physically demanding jobs but they can be rewarding if the restaurant treats its staff equitably. Unfortunately, too many don’t.

I had my eyes opened recently when I attended a program, sponsored by seven local Jewish organizations, at Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) Michigan.

ROC Michigan, along with 14 similar state organizations, is affiliated with ROC United. The first ROC, in New York, was started after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to provide support for restaurant workers who lost their jobs when the twin towers fell.

Guaranteed wage: $2.13

I knew that servers are paid below minimum wage, with the expectation that they will make it up in tips. But I had no idea the federally guaranteed “tipped wage” is only $2.13 an hour, an amount that hasn’t increased in 22 years! (In some states it is higher. Michigan’s tipped wage will rise to a whopping $3.10 this year.)

It is possible to make a decent living from tips, especially in higher-end restaurants. But I didn’t know that there are no laws guaranteeing tips, and that few restaurants even have policies about tips. Unscrupulous managers can easily skim their staff’s tips with impunity.

I didn’t realize that bussers can be paid the same “tipped wage” as servers but without the opportunity to get a fair share of the tips.

Nor was I aware that restaurant workers don’t have to be paid overtime, or that managers can make the staff stay on the premises but clock out when the restaurant is empty so that they don’t get paid for all the hours they’re on duty.

Like most minimum wage workers, most restaurant staff don’t get paid sick time.

Saru Jayaraman, one of the founders of ROC, has written a book on the difficulties of restaurant workers, Behind the Kitchen Door (Cornell University Press).

Generally, servers and bartenders make more than those who work “behind the kitchen door,” said Alicia Renee Farris, director of ROC Michigan. That’s why she’s developed an innovative training program to prepare adults for careers as bartenders and servers in nice restaurants.

For six of the 10 weeks of the course, the students work at Colors, a full-service restaurant run by ROC Michigan in downtown Detroit.

ROC Michigan says their raisons d’etre are organizing for workplace justice in restaurants, research and public policy advocacy, and “high road practices,” which means fair and sustainable work practices for restaurant staff. At Colors, for example, the wait staff are paid $10.10 an hour and all staff share the tips.

(Last Thursday I heard a piece on NPR’s “On Point” program about how the tipping economy is changing. Bob Donegan, the president of Ivar’s Seafood Restaurants in Seattle said his company increased its menu prices by 21 percent, asks that customers do not tip, and pays all hourly staff at least $15 an hour. It hasn’t hurt them; indeed the number of diners and the chain’s revenue have skyrocketed, but Donegan admitted that could be due to all the good publicity they’ve been getting!)

One of the speakers at our program, a graduate of the Colors training, had a few suggestions for diners. First, ask your server if he or she is happy with the job. If the waiter hesitates at all, you’ll know that working conditions there are not what they should be; you might want to avoid that restaurant in future.

He also suggested handing your server the tip personally, rather than putting it on your credit card, to ensure that the server receives the entire amount. If you want to put the tip on your card, he said, ask the server if he or she will get the full amount if you do so. Again, if you see any hesitation you can suspect some fishy business.

Colors provided program participants with a lovely vegetarian soul food luncheon, which included sweet potato wontons, one of their signature dishes. Chef Alex Amdemichael was kind enough to share the recipe. It’s great as an appetizer, a party food or even as a savory dessert.