food and family

90 Things My Mother Taught Me: Part II

/ cziemke / Leave a comment

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Today is Mum’s Birthday in our homeland, where it is yesterday, while I am already in tomorrow, where it isn’t Mum’s Birthday anymore. [Disclaimer: actually, it isn’t Mom’s birthday anywhere anymore. Thinking up 90 things took longer than I expected.]

As promised (rashly), here are the second 44 things my mother taught me, in more-or-less no particular order:

44:     If the Dawgs are behind in a football game, go into the kitchen and they will turn it around. This only worked for Mum, which earned her the nickname “the Kitchen Witch.”Dean Rusk During one of her dinner parties the Dawgs were behind in a big game (which the guests were listening to on radio, because . . . well . . . it was them Dawgs!), Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk (who was a Georgia boy and taught at UGA in his later years) politely picked up Mum’s plate, and his, and ate with her at the kitchen table. Georgia, of course, won.

This was the year UGA won the National Championship. Mum spent the entire 1980-81 football season in the kitchen, but never got the recognition she deserved. Hershal Shmershal.

43:      It is a bad idea to decorate your white dog with red and blue crepe paper for the 4th of July parade. It will rain and your dog will turn purple tie-dye.

42:      If you don’t eat it for supper tonight, you’ll get it for lunch tomorrow.

snoopy1241:      It is important to learn how to type, but only well enough to get a job. Don’t type so well that people might actually want you to do it. This was when they still had typewriters — manual ones.

40:      If a peacock falls in love with you, don’t look him in the eye, or he will follow you around all day waggling his tail feathers in your general direction.

39:      How to knit “continental style”: I didn’t know it was called continental style, Mum probably didn’t either. I just know she could knit really fast, and I can too. Mind you, I rip out a lot more than she did.

38:      Never tell people you love frogs. If you do, you will never, for the rest of your life, receive a gift that doesn’t have frogs on. Also, never tell your Aunt who lives in Milwaukee that you collect beer steins unless you really mean it. If you do, you will reach middle life with enough beer steins to open your own Ratskeller.

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Thanks, Auntie June, for all the lovely steins!

37:      Flying coach to Los Angeles, then folding yourself into an overloaded, un-airconditioned Datsun 210 to keep your kid company on a three and a half day drive from Los Angeles to Athens is a supreme act of love. Knitting the same kid a gorgeous sweater in the process is even more awesome.

Our intrepid adventurers in LA on the morning of departure
Would you drive across the country in this car?

 

36:      The stripes on Raggedy Ann’s legs go round-and-round, not up-and-down.

35:      Colored towels don’t work. Actually, this one came from Dad, but it is too good to leave out, as is . . .

 

34:      There are no roads in Canada, and . . .

33:      You can drive to Manassas, but you can’t drive back.

32:      If you are born on the 4th of July, you will always get American flags on your birthday cakes. And people will ask you if you are a Yankee Doodle Dandy. To get a birthday cakes with no red, white, and blue, you will have to leave the country. But you might still get fireworks.

31:      If you see a flash of white fur followed by a barefoot woman shaking a raw piece of bacon shouting about Russian Dumplings, it’s just Mum trying to catch the dog.

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The noble, and fleet of foot,  Piroshki with Miss Peanut

30:      Don’t leave any complicated cooking until the last minute, because parties always end up with everyone in the kitchen. Besides, the whole point of inviting folks round for dinner is to enjoy their company.

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29:      Make friends with old people, they have interesting stories to tell you. I’ve had several adopted Grandmas over the years and my life was richer for it. I am now an old person. I am available for adoption.

28:      Edna Shakleford will never, ever give you the recipe for her Coconut Cake to die for. Make a pitcher of martinis and get over it.

27:      Bake Christmas Stöllen because: 1) it is a family tradition; 2) they are sort of like fruitcake, but people actually like them, and 3) people will be so grateful they will give you Christmas cookies that you can, later, pretend you baked. This saves you the onerous job of baking Christmas cookies.

26:      It also helps to have two sisters who bake wonderful Christmas cookies.

25:      Janice’s nutmeg logs are the best cookie ever, closely followed by Anita’s cranberry bark, which, technically, isn’t a cookie.

24:      When the rabbit starts running around in his hutch, you have about five seconds to get the freezer door open.

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Oops!

23:      Your kid will get potty trained eventually. Make a pitcher of martinis and don’t stress out.Then you can smile knowingly when a visiting neighbor’s little boy walks up to you and says, proudly: “Look! I made a poo-poo” and presents his mother with a perfect turd.

 

 

22:      When your daughter declares she might want to join a convent, make a pitcher of martinis and roll with it. The phase will pass.

21:      When your daughter takes an overdose of sleeping pills and lands in a psychiatric hospital on suicide watch, hug her a lot and tell her you love her. The phase will pass.

20:      When the troop leader tells your daughter that she has to sell two cases of Girl Scout Cookies, just buy them all and put them in the freezer. Added bonus: you will have something to fall back on if the stöllen-for-Christmas cookie scam doesn’t work.

 

19:      When the Band Director tells your kid that she has to sell four cases of Drix, just buy them all and put them in the freezer.

18:      When your kid melts her band hat by using it as a lampshade, don’t make her feel any stupider than she already does. Try to fix it by stuffing it with newspaper, then own up to the Band Director.65272_10151352831074442_1906667689_n

17:   Don’t use your husband’s royalty check as a bookmark unless you are sure you will remember which book you marked with it.

16:      1044516_10151782269223410_365771569_nGathering about 10,000 yards of raspberry pink sating for a bridesmaid’s dress is a way to spend a weekend, but not much of one. But you do these things for your best friends, and your kid’s best friends.

15:      When stealing peas from your mother’s garden, if you tell your brother that the shells are the best part, then you get to eat all the peas.

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Mom and her brother Billy, who ate all the pea pods

14:     When your husband convinces his star graduate student to partake of a martini and radish and onion sandwich binge, legendary hangovers will ensue. Be on standby with Alka-Seltzer.

13:      Major Professors can convince their students to do just about any damn stupid thing.

12: During USMC Japanese Language School reunions, legendary hangovers will ensue. You will see a side of your husband/Dad that you never even suspected. And you will have a great deal of fun.

 

11:      Bunion surgery really sucks. Wear sensible shoes.sensible shoes

10:      If God intended for you to walk with bunions, he wouldn’t have made teenage daughters with driver’s licenses.

9:         You can wear white shoes any damn time you want to. Particularly if they are sneakers. Especially Chucks, which are even cool in Venice.

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8:         Homemade gifts are the best. No one will remember that Pet Rock they got for Christmas in 1972, but they will still have, and love, the Raggedy Ann you made them with the stripes going the wrong way, the Amish dolls you made one year, the Mother Geese (Gooses?) you made another year. You daughter will keep, and cherish the Pooh, Tigger, and Paddington Bear you made her. When she lives in New Zealand, she will think of you, and miss you, every time she sees them – worn and well loved as they are.IMG_0109

7:         Kneading bread dough is better than therapy, and cheaper.

6:         Always write Thank You notes. Right through the 1980s and 1990s, everyone who donated money to the Athens Area Emergency Food Bank got a handwritten Thank You note written by Mum. And most of them donated more money, and received more Thank You notes. Mum was gracious and generous.missions_foodbank

5:         Good people fall on hard times. No one should go hungry because they can’t afford to buy groceries. And no one should judge. It could be you next time.

4:         You can change the world with a telephone, index cards, and a roll of stamps. I’ve seen it happen. Mum did it, right from this chair:

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The Command Centre

 

3:        Mom to Simon: “Are you sure you want to marry her? She’s trouble with a big T!”

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2:         Crossword puzzles are good for your brain. CCI06072016_6

 

 

 

 

 

 

1:         You were a beautiful soul, loved by many, and you are deeply missed. Happy Birthday, Mum!

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Smells Like Victory

/ cziemke / 5 Comments

IMG_0111Every morning, between our first cup of coffee and “breakfast”, which is usually more like elevenses, Simon, the boys, and I go out for a morning romp. Simon feeds the pigs and alpacas, I give the chooks their morning eggshells, Shakey has a morning constitutional, CJ chases his tennis ball, and Cully does whatever Cully does.

This morning, though, CJ couldn’t find a tennis ball and then, suddenly, he disappeared into the bush. When we all came in, I detected a whiff of deja vu. Something like . . . what? Ah! I remember! The summer a possum crawled under our air conditioner condenser and died.

Odorifically.

Filling chez Ziemke with the bouquet of road kill.

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RIP Possum

We spent the night in a motel.

CJ has had a bath.

Some childhood memories, I can do without.

Music can tap into memory in a powerful way and has, for me, become a transformative outlet for my tangled emotions. Taste can trigger memories. For me, tomato sandwiches (on squishy white bread with Blue Plate Mayonnaise) will always taste like summer in Georgia. But smell alone can, almost literally, transport me back in time. It is far and away my most evocative sense, for better and worse.

The smell of bread baking always — every single time — carries me back to my Mum’s kitchen.

The smell of chlorine or coconut oil takes me back to long, lazy summers hanging around at the Green Acres Pool — and probably earning myself skin cancer.

The smell of wet wool conjures blizzards, snow forts, and wet beanies and mittens.1012852_10151784211238410_1993603695_n

And I can smell when it is going to snow.

Then there is dead possum.

And the smell of liver and onions frying. We had liver once a week until (God bless ’em) the nutritional powers-that-be declared it unfit for human consumption because of its high cholesterol. Liver and onions smell deceptively delicious when they are cooking, especially when they are cooked — as Mom always did — with bacon. I, however, was not fooled.

And fish baking.

Mom was a marvellous cook. Almost everything she touched turned to deliciousness.

With two exceptions: liver and onions, and her baked fish casserole, which replaced liver and onions night post-cholesteral consciousness raising. She layered thawed flounder fillets (which came in unappetising-looking fish bricks) with canned tomatoes, sliced onions and green peppers, and topped the whole thing with sliced lemons and breadcrumbs.It smelled like some ill-considered tex-mex cat food and tasted worse. 29-fish-fingers-rexDad claimed to like it. I think he was trying not to ruin his weekends. It was disgusting. I prayed for fish fingers. They never came. I’ve never quite recovered and still have an extremely cautious relationship with fish.

All these years later, when I get a whiff of the fish monger at the Farmers’ Market, I get a pit in my tummy that says “Oh, no. Fish casserole.”

Forgive me Mom.

Now I am starting a new life, in a new home, in a new country.

My life in New Zealand is full of new smells that are building new emotional memories that will stay with me wherever I go.IMG_0236

Wee piglets. I will never forget the smell of our Wee Charlie when we first brought him home. You know how babies smell like milk? Well, Wee Charlie did, too. I know. I bottle fed him for four weeks.

Turns out bottle feeding a Kune Kune piglet is a full contact sport.

The hangi, a Maori banquet cooked in the ground — sometimes with wood, sometimes in geothermal steam vents. I’m not Maori, but the smell reminds me of family.

Rotorua, which smells like boiling mud because it is full of , well, boiling mud. And spas. What’s not to love?IMG_0825

Penguins, which, come to think of it, smell pretty much like Mom’s fish casserole.

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Muddy chickens. We don’t have any sand, but there is a sunny, peaty spot where the Saltenberger girls like to take their dirt baths. It makes them smell like the earth.IMG_0429

Alpaca spit. Ok, not all smells are good. But if you smell alpaca spit once, you’ll never forget it. Shearing day is also our annual alpaca spitting contest. Domino is the undisputed champion.

Domino, getting ready to let one go
Alpaca Shearing
Nonu, not spitting

Manuka smoke, which makes the bacon buttie stall at the Market almost irresistible. But, I think of the smell of wee piglet and resist. Fortunately, they also sell liquid manuka smoke, which is magical.IMG_0473

And the waiting room of the Hutt Valley DHB Mental Health Services, where I went every week for six months and where my lovely therapist introduced me to me. When I started, that room smelled like any medical waiting room, a combination of fear and anxiety. As Jane helped me, gradually, to let go of what I didn’t need — guilt, grief, insecurity, and failure — and embrace what I had left behind — my happy childhood, my inner musician and artist, the future, and kale — that scent of fear transformed into one of healing and growth.

That smells like life.

That smells like victory.

 

Victory Vegetables

A Gentleman in Full

/ cziemke / 2 Comments

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This is Chris.

As you can tell from his impish smile, he was full of beans. And as you can tell from his bacon-wrapped Christmas turkey, he was no vegetarian. Still, Simon loved him, and so did I. IMG_0145

Even though he once told me my vegetarian pizzas looked like dog vomit.

Chris said exactly what he thought, exactly when he thought it.

And he seemed to own (at least) one of everything. When we were preparing the paddock for our Kune Kune pigs, he had a fence-wire-stretching-thingy. And a trailer to pick up the pig shelter kit from the shipping depot.IMG_0307

You see, Chris didn’t believe in delivery charges. So, every so often, Simon and Chris would head out of a Saturday to pick up some impossibly heavy and unwieldy thing or another and man-handle it up, or down, the stairs.

Chris believed in living life to the fullest. He rode a motorcycle to work in all kinds of Wellington weather. He drove his Porsche through New Zealand’s narrow, twisty turning roads, in clear defiance of the nation-wide 100 kph speed limit. When he found a Scotch Whiskey he liked, he bought a case. An excellent bubbly at an excellent price? Two cases! He owned more bottles of Limoncello than any other person I’ve ever known.

Were it not for Chris, I wouldn’t be here — as in, I wouldn’t be here in New Zealand. You see, it was Chris who made it possible for Simon to emigrate to New Zealand from the United Kingdom in 1998 to escape the ravages of a broken heart. They worked together, ate cheese toasties, did crossword puzzles, and played darts. And Simon’s heart healed.

Were it not for Chris, Simon wouldn’t have been on the Indian Pacific Railway from Sydney on July 5th, 2008.

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July 2008

Were Simon not on that train, we wouldn’t have met. Had we not met, I would have continued to go on ever more bizarre internet dates until I went totally mad and started collecting cats. Which would have made my dogs most unhappy.

I first met Chris a few days before Simon and I got married in Hawaii in 2009. He was Simon’s best man. They turned up together after a nine hour Air New Zealand flight during which, I’ve no doubt, they were the life of the party. By the time Simon made his way through immigration as a new migrant on a fiancé visa, Chris had charmed everyone in Customs.

Over the coming three days, we three went to Wal-Mart, where Simon bought his wedding clothes (which I am certain made my Dad smile, wherever he was) and Chris bought discount electronics. We went to the outlet mall, where Chris bought running shoes for his step son, Logan. CCI18042016The cardboard cutout of Logan’s left foot was a prominent feature throughout the festivities. And we went to the Saturday flea market at the University of Hawaii football stadium parking lot, where Simon sunburnt his feet to a crisp.

Oh, and we got a marriage license, which, for the record, looks just like President Obama’s birth certificate.

Chris hit it off immediately with my Goddaughter and bridesmaid, Alex, who sneezed all over him (and pretty much everyone else) during the ceremony. CCI18042016_3He was a dapper Best Man in his linen suit, Panama Hat, Hawaiian shirt, and dress shoes. The celebrant wore a turtle print sarong and a t-shirt with krishna on it. The groom wore shorts and bare feet — it was a beach wedding, after all.

When I came to New Zealand as a potential job candidate, in 2012, he picked me up at the airport and drove me to the top of Mt. Victoria, and showed me the beach where Ma’a Nonu sometimes worked out, which pretty much sealed the deal. And he woke up at 4 am to get me to the airport for my 6 am flight back to Sydney, and home. Service above and beyond the call.

It was Chris who introduced me to the Lower Hutt Saturday morning Riverbank Market, in all its vegetable glory. Chris was at the airport when Simon and I arrived in Wellington from the United States, stinky and travel weary, with our duffle bags full of what we thought we would need to survive until the shipping container with our worldly goods arrived. The next morning, he shepherded us, jet-lagged and bleary eyed, to the market. I thought I was hallucinating. It was the first week of August, the deepest Southern Hemisphere winter, yet the market was replete with freshness — leeks, silver beet, lots of lovely brassicas, and those New Zealand standbys, kumara and pumpkin. And these weren’t just leeks — they were leeks the size of baseball bats. And daikons the size of cricket bats. And handmade noodles, and food trucks. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I was right about the heaven part.

Were it not for Chris, there would be no Kale Whisperer.

Over the coming months, Chris would pick me up every Saturday morning and we would go to the Market together, leaving himself to sleep in and get the kettle ready for our return. Chris introduced me to the Tofu and Chinese Noodle Man, and the Thai Herb Lady, and the best free range eggs in the market, and the French Bread and Stinky Cheese Man. Some weeks, we would visit the Mad Butcher or Pack ‘n Save — places I rarely have occasion to enter. Then back to chez nous for a cuppa.

Then, one Saturday, Chris seemed not his chipper, sassy self. He didn’t rise to the bait when I ribbed him about the half-dressed Barbie doll in his Land Rover. He’d been sleeping badly. He thought he had gastroenteritis. Then he thought he had become diabetic.

Then he had a scan.

There was a mass.

Then surgery and chemotherapy.

That was two years ago.

He faced the end of his life with his usual charm, humour, dignity, and generosity of spirit.   Even when we knew he was in pain, he could laugh. And make others laugh. He faced cancer head-on and fought it with everything he had. In short, he succeeded in doing what we all hope to do:  he remained Chris, in full, right to the end.

He adored his girls.

He wore a beaded bracelet that read: Fuck Cancer.

I agree.

Tomorrow, we will farewell Chris.

Today, I am unspeakably grateful to have known him.

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Carries’ French Apple Pie: A Forty Day Invention Test, Episode Five

/ cziemke / 1 Comment

More years ago than I care to mention, I was named for my two grandmothers: Frieda Matthaie Ziemke and Caroline Ketz Saltenberger. Frieda died too young and many many years before I was born. I never knew her. I have a few photos of her. She was very beautiful, and very young. Sadly, I will never be able to share any of her recipes. We have none. No written memories of her at all. At least none that I have seen. All I have of her are a few photos and her name, which I cherish. She always looks a little sad.

Frieda with Dad as a baby, 1923
Frieda and Otto Ziemke, newlyweds, 1920
Frieda Matthaie, 1920

Caroline lived into her 80s, but she was damaged by a series of strokes, also too young, a few years before I was born. I knew her, but the Carrie Saltenberger I knew was frail, largely confined to her armchair (and later a wheelchair). She was felled by the hypertension that runs in my family and that was, sadly, untreated in her case. She was feisty, though, and had a wicked sense of humour. Woe be on any little kid that thought they could pull something over on Grandma because she couldn’t move very fast. She was a demon with her fly swatter.

For the first fifty years of her life, Grandma Saltenberger was a hard working farm girl.

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Carrie Saltenberger with her three eldest children, Idamae, Billy, and baby Anita, c. 1936

Along with my Grandfather and his maiden sister, Ida — known to us as Tanta — Grandma worked their little farm in far Northern Wisconsin, raising dairy cows, chickens, occasional turkeys (which she hated), growing vegetables, and sustaining the family through the Depression and the War years on very little in the way of cash.

As the years went by, Grandma became less and less rooted in the present, but her command of the past was astonishing. I remember her teaching me to make biscuits by reciting the recipe, step by step, as I measured, sifted, blended, cut and baked. Much of what I know about the Saltenberger family’s (occasionally colourful) history came from Grandma. Usually on the sly, while my Grandpa was napping. Like many other families, the Saltenbergers have two histories, the official one and the “interesting” one. Grandpa was the keeper of the official history. You went to Grandma for the interesting bits.

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Portrait of Carrie Saltenberger in 1975

She was always called Carrie. In our family, I have always been called Carrie. In my mind, I have always been Carrie. I am proud to be Carrie, because I am proud of my Grandma and what she achieved and endured. So, no, “Carries’ French Apple Pie” is not a typo. Instead, it is my take on her long cherished recipe. Two Carries. One pie.

Strictly speaking, this is not a pie at all, but a cobbler or, perhaps, a crumble. I found the recipe tucked among the correspondence between my Mum and her aunt, our Tanta. Tanta would have written the recipe after Grandma’s illness made it difficult for her to write. But Tanta made the provenance of the recipe clear, this was Carrie Saltenberger’s recipe, her favourite recipe. “Many years old.” Part of my family’s past.CCI21032016

As is often the case with Tanta’s recipes, the directions are a bit notional. I’m not sure what makes it French. Perhaps they called it “French” to distinguish it from Dutch Apple Pie, with custard, and German Apfel torte. “Put in a baking pan.” What kind? Glass? Metal? What size? Does the baking pan go in the oven while I’m making the crust? How long? These were all questions I set about to answer, through trial and error.

I did make a few changes to “modernise” the recipe a little, but nothing that changed the fundamental simplicity and homeyness of Carrie’s original. I’m not a huge fan of nutmeg, at least not in large quantities. So, I stepped up the cinnamon, cut the nutmeg, and added another dimension with allspice and black pepper. I love black pepper with fruit. It makes it taste fruitier, somehow. It is a must on flabby tasting supermarket strawberries. The Italians use black pepper on fruit a lot, so perhaps I transformed Grandma’s French Pie to an Italian one.

Grandma would have used apples from their apple tree (which was still going when I visited as a child). The apples would have been harder and more tart and probably would not have produced as much liquid as my New Zealand-grown Farmers’ Market apples would. So, I also added cornflour to the fruit as a thickener (which is entirely optional), and dotted the fruit with 2 TBS / 1 oz / 25g of well chilled unsalted butter, cut in smallish chunks, also to thicken it a bit. I also cut back on the sugar and added a bit of salt to the crust.

As it turns out, the experiment was a thundering success. The result was everything I’d hoped: homey, delicious, and as Tanta wrote, “very good easy to make, too.” Not too sweet, either. The crust tastes pleasantly eggy, something between a cake and a meringue. When warm, the spicy apples cry out for a scoop of vanilla ice cream, but all I had was cream, which was also pretty darn yum.  No wonder Tanta encouraged Mum to try it, adding it was “my favourite recipe and also your Ma’s.” Ladies, you had good taste!

Carries’ French Apple Pie

Ingredients:

For the Fruit:

2 1/2 lbs / 1 kilo mixed apples (I used Braeburn and Galas),

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/2 tsp ground allspice

1/4 tsp finely ground black pepper

1/2 cup / 100g sugar (I think raw sugar would be nice here, but I used granulated)

1 TBSP cornflour (cornstarch)

1/2 cup water (120ml)

Juice of 1 lemon

For the Crust:

3/4 cup / 105 g all-purpose flour

1/2 cup / 100g sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1 egg, lightly beaten

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 375F / 190C

Butter a glass 9×12 or similar sized baking pan. I used an oblong gratin dish.

Peel, core, and slice the apples.

Stir together the sugar, cinnamon, allspice, black pepper, and cornstarch in a small bowl, then combine it with the sliced apples.

Arrange the apple slices in the baking dish, sprinkle the water and lemon juice over them, and put them in the preheated oven for 20 minutes.

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See, Auntie J: I tried to arrange the slices in sort of rows! But my soul resists order.

While the apples are baking, sift together the flour, sugar, baking power, and salt. Lightly beat the egg in a separate bowl.

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Combine the beaten eggs with the dry ingredients and crumble together like pie crust, just like Tanta says. It will feel softer and crumblier than a short crust dough, but not as dry as a crumble topping.

Take the apples out of the oven, dot with the butter, and spread the dough over the apples.

 

Return to apples to the oven and bake for another 45 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown.

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Serve warm or room temperature with cream, custard, ice cream — whatever you fancy!

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Not-Quite-Tanta’s Peach Kuchen: A Forty Day Invention Test, Episode Two

/ cziemke / 2 Comments


“A Georgia peach, a real Georgia peach, a backyard great-grandmother’s orchard peach, is as thickly furred as a sweater, and so fluent and sweet that once you bite through the flannel, it brings tears to your eyes.”

Melissa Fay Greene, ‘Praying for Sheetrock’

I grew up in the Peach State.  I’ve lived many places, but in my heart, I will always be a “funny talkin’ honky-tonkin’ Georgia Peach.” Georgia is no longer the United States’ top peach producer, but it still has the best peaches. My High School sweetheart was somehow related to the owners of the local orchard, Thomas’ in the thriving metropolis of Bishop, Georgia. He could get us in early, before they opened to the general public and — more importantly in Georgia in July — before the temperature and humidity rose into the mid-80s.  Still, peach picking was hot, humid work. After an hour or two Thomas’, I’d be sweaty, thirsty, sticky and covered with peach fuzz and the occasional bee sting. But nothing can match the joy of standing on a step ladder in the middle of a peach orchard and biting into a warm, perfectly tree-ripened peach.

Peaches are my absolute, all-time favourite fruit. I came by my love of peaches early. Long before we moved to Georgia. You see, my Great Aunt, Tanta Ida, made the absolutely most delicious peach coffee cake ever.

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Tanta Ida (2nd from the left) with Dad, Mum, Grandma, Janice, Grandpa, and the budgie (circa 1955)

My Aunties tell me she would make huge pans of küchen for all the various boyfriends who visited the foxy Saltenberger girls over the years. She made some for my Dad when we visited Eagle River every summer, and I happily embraced the peachy deliciousness windfall. [The family lore says Dad hated Eagle River — he didn’t — because he was bored without any libraries to hand. I think it was more a matter of vanity: people were constantly feeding him and, as you can see in this vintage photo, he got a bit chubby. And then there were Grandpa’s Scotch and Root Beers.]

All my life, I’ve tried to find that special peach deliciousness. A few weeks ago, while I was going through some of Mum’s old recipes, I found a very old, stained recipe for Tanta’s Peach Küchen. Joy! My next invention test was born.

New Zealand produces peaches. They are tasty, but they are delicate wee things. In the effort to minimise the fuzz, the varieties of peaches they grow here have very thin skins. It’s almost impossible to get them home from the market unscathed. Fortunately, the nectarines are fairly robust. Peaches have fuzz to protect the fruit from water and keep it from rotting. It’s like a little peach raincoat. Nectarines are just peaches without their raincoats. As far as this recipe is concerned, they are interchangeable.

I was, however, determined to work with the real thing. Tanta didn’t use nectarines, so I wouldn’t either. As it turns out, getting the peaches home safely was only the first of my challenges. When I started this Lenten journey of recipe invention, I said I would share the successes as well as the less-then-successes. In this case, there were a couple of false starts before I finally settled on formula that works.

The challenge, in this case, was translating a shorthand recipe from another era on another continent into something that I could recreate in my kitchen in New Zealand. The directions were fairly general, but, obviously, 3 cakes of yeast and 7 1/2 cups (1,065g) of flour was going to make one honking big cake.  But how big? “Spread in pan (greased well)” wasn’t much help. And what is the modern, dry yeast equivalent of 3 cakes of yeast?DSC_0787

For some help, I turned to my trusty copy of The Food Substitutions Bible (see “The Third Cookbook of Christmas”). It suggested that one cake of fresh yeast is equivalent to one package, or 2 1/4 tsp (8g) of active dry yeast. Great. That means I would need over 2 Tablespoons (24g) of yeast for 7 1/2 cups of flour! Argh! An oven explosion was sure to ensue.

I decided I would cut the recipe by a third(ish), since there was only me and Simon to eat it, so I trusted my baking experience and estimated how much yeast I would need. So, for 4 cups (568g) of flour, I would use the equivalent of one package of dry yeast, 2 1/4 tsp (8g). And 3 tsp of salt seemed like an awful lot, so I cut that back to 1 tsp.

The next hurdle was the liquid. Tanta, at least before my Grandfather burned the farm down (long story for another post), would have used whole, raw milk and eggs straight from the chicken. My concern was that our supermarket milk, even whole milk, might lack the right balance of fat and natural sugar. We don’t buy whole milk, but I keep a bag of New Zealand’s #1 export commodity, whole milk powder, on hand for baking. That’s what I ended up using.

I reckon the butter we get here in New Zealand is probably closer to what Tanta would have had than the processed butter we used to get in the States. The fresh (unsalted) butter here is incredibly dense, with very little added water. So no worries there.

Her farm eggs were probably as unpredictable as our farm eggs, so I held back one of the yolks, just in case everything ended up too gooey. It didn’t and I ended up using the whole egg.

The biggest question mark turned out to be the fruit-to-cake ratio. The recipe just says “arrange the peach slices on the dough.” How many peach slices? How many peaches?

In the end, I decided, the first time around, to base the number of peaches on the size of the cake. I guessed that Tanta would have made her küchen in a lasagne-sized pan (9×13 inches). I had inherited a marvellous lasagne-sized pan from the farm that Mum told me was Grandma’s coffee cake pan. Coffee Cake? Küchen? Same pan? I decided to use my 8×8 inch glass cake pan. Based on the reduced amount of dough I had, it seemed a reasonable assumption.

Tanta’s recipe called for 3 cups of sugar and 4 1/2 tsp of cinnamon for the topping. Yikes! Another hint that she was making big, sheet cakes. I cut that back to 1/2 cup (100g) sugar and 1 tsp of cinnamon — you can always add more if you like your streusel really cinnamony.

So, my first effort was OK, but not right. Why? It came down to two miscalculations: too much yeast, not enough pan. So my first küchen rose too much and threw most of the fruit and topping out of the pan and on to the pizza stone that lives at the bottom of my oven. Smelly burning sugar mess.

The good news is that two weeks later I tried again, adjusting the yeast, using a larger pan, and, just to put my own spin on things, adding oatmeal and brown sugar to Tanta’s sugar-butter-flour-cinnamon topping. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the final result.

Not-Quite-Tanta’s Peach Küchen

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This is not an extravagantly sweet coffee cake. It is an old-fashioned, gather around the kitchen table for elevenses coffee cake. You can eat this for breakfast and not feel guilty. After all, it’s basically peaches and oatmeal. Right? My theory is that my Tanta and Grandmother developed their recipes during the Great Depression, when money was scarce, especially on farms, and the sweetness in food came, as much as possible, from the natural sugars in the milk and fruit.

Ingredients:

1 cup (250ml) whole milk (reconstituted dry works well)

1/3 cup (65g) granulated sugar

6 TBSP (85g) unsalted butter

1 1/2 tsp (7ml) active dry yeast (NOT quick rise or bread machine yeast)

2 large eggs

4 cups (568g) all-purpose / standard grade flour

1 tsp (5ml) kosher or sea salt

Topping:

7 peaches (or more, if you like)

Juice of 1 lemon

3 TBSP brown sugar

1/2 cup (100g)2 granulated sugar

1/3 cup (70g) standard grade flour

1/3 cup rolled oats

2 TBSP butter, melted

1 tsp cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 375F/190C. Butter a 9 x 13 pan. To make removing the cake from the pan easier, you can line the bottom and two sides with parchment to form a sort of sling. Don’t forget to butter the parchment.

  1. Scald the milk. This makes the milk taste sweeter and, well, milkier. You can do this on the stove by putting the milk in a small saucepan and heating it until it has a skin on top, but short of a simmer. It will just be beginning to form tiny bubbles around the edges. The easier way is to put the milk, butter, and sugar in a glass container and microwave the whole works for about 3-4 minutes at high. Just to be on the safe side, I zap it for two minutes, check the temperature, and zap it for another minute or two.
  2. Let the milk/butter/sugar cool to lukewarm (skin temperature), then add the yeast and let it proof for five minutes or so. If your liquid is too hot, you’ll kill the yeast. If your yeast is good, it will go to town and end up looking like this
  3. Gently beat the eggs and add them to the wet ingredients.
  4. Sift the flour and salt together in your mixing bowl. If you are using a standing mixer, using the flat paddle, add the wet ingredients to the flour. If you are mixing by hand, make a well in the flour and add the wet ingredients.
  5. Mix everything just until it comes together into a ball. This doesn’t want a lot of kneading.DSC_0756
  6. Cover the dough and let it rise for at least an hour.
  7. While the dough is rising, peel, pit,  and slice your peaches. To peel the peaches, drop them, one or two at a time, into a pot of boiling water for 20-30 seconds then into a bowl of ice water to stop them cooking. Then you can just rub the peel off with a paper towel. Be careful. They are very slippery.
  8. Toss the peaches with the juice of 1 lemon (to stop them turning brown). You can add a little sugar here, but I don’tDSC_0751
  9. Roll out the risen dough into a rough rectangle slightly bigger than your pan, then press the dough into the pan with the dough going up the sides. Like this:DSC_0770
  10. Arrange the peach slices over the dough in one or two layers. I thought seven peaches were enough, but Simon wanted more. Use your judgement here. Or, you can throw in a handful of blueberries. The photo on the right is my first attempt — the one that exploded all over the oven — you can sort of see the signs already. But the combination of yellow and white peaches and blueberries was pretty, and tasty.
  11. To make the topping, sift together the dry ingredients, then stir in the melted butter with a fork. Mix it all up until the butter is well distributed. DSC_0769
  12. Spread the topping evenly over the peaches, then cover with a towel and let rise for another 30 minutes. This is a good time to preheat the oven, if you haven’t already.DSC_0773
  13. Bake the küchen in the 375/190 oven for about 40 minutes. The toothpick test is tricky, with all the gooey fruit. It should be done when the crust around the edges is nice and golden brown. If you did the sling thing, you can try pulling it up. If the whole thing sort of slumps in the middle, you might need a little more baking time.
  14. This is delicious hot, so you only need to cool it on a wire rack for a few minutes before you grab your fork, brew and cuppa, and eat Not-Quite-Tanta’s Peach Küchen.DSC_0774

 

Living from the Downside Up

/ cziemke / 3 Comments

One year ago today I broke.

For months, on the nights that I slept at all, I had been waking in the wee hours in full blown panic attacks. Simon and I had moved to New Zealand almost a year and half earlier, and we had been in our house for a year, but I still felt untethered and completely, catastrophically alone. I spent whole days curled up like a fist. Even on good days, I was trapped in the wrong end of the telescope. There were days I couldn’t feel my arms. Days when everything tasted like sand and I couldn’t swallow. Days when my pulse roared in my ears like the surf. I wanted to cease to exist. I wanted to have never existed.

One Sunday night, I started to cry and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t think. My mind had shattered.

Simon intervened. I can’t imagine how frightened he must have been. He insisted I request a compassionate leave from my job and seek professional help.

I had committed to participate in a bilateral engagement with a delegation from Vietnam the next day. I rallied my reptile brain and managed to get through the meeting without humiliating myself or my hosts. Then I walked away from my career to mend and, I hoped, find a way to want to stay alive.

The past year has been an extraordinary journey to the centre of myself. With Simon’s support and the help of my excellent doctors, I have healed. I have moved beyond fear and loss to reclaim my life. I have stopped striving to become the person I thought I should want to be and am, finally, discovering and nurturing the person I am.

I got my first tattoo.IMG_1079

IMG_0251I am learning to play the accordion.

I have chickens.

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And, one Saturday morning at the Riverbank Farmers’ Market in Lower Hutt, I became the Kale Whisperer.IMG_1217

This wasn’t my first crackup. I’ve lived with the black dog on my shoulder most of my life. The first time I clearly remember being depressed was when I was 10, during our first year in Georgia. The first time I remember coming completely apart was in my second year at University. I was a crazy intense student. I was working two jobs, maintaining a 4.0, not sleeping, and living on Dr. Pepper and Milky Way bars. I passed out in Botany class. I got myself to the end of the Semester and spent spring break in bed. In a tight little ball.

A dozen or so years later, it happened again. I had finished my Ph.D. and was a few years into my career as a defence analyst. I’d been battling a prolonged period of depression, self-harming, and a relapse into the bulimia I developed while ending my first marriage. Since University, I had been wrestling with what I thought might be a call to become an Episcopal priest. As a defence analyst, I felt like a fraud. Everyone knew more than I did. More to the point, they all seemed way more interested in the ins-and-outs of the Pentagon than I would ever be. So, I had taken the step of starting the gruelling process of discernment of a call to ordination.

My discernment hit a brick wall that threatened not just my faith but my survival. My escape route into seminary was gone. I was like the mythic hero who rode his horse into a valley that grew ever narrower until, at the end, he couldn’t go forward, he couldn’t go backward, and he couldn’t get off his horse. I was broken and I hadn’t the slightest idea how to begin to get mended. So I took pills. Lots of them. My best friend, Susan, found me just in time. To my everlasting amazement and gratitude, she remains my best friend to this day. I’m Godmother to her beautiful daughter.

For the next two years, I was in and out of hospitals until I finally connected with a sensible therapist who helped me get all the odds and ends back into the closet and set me on a more-or-less steady course. I found a comfortable and challenging professional niche. I bought a house. I was determined to learn to like myself. I started to learn French.  I was, at last, on an even keel.

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Mom and Dad shortly after their marriage in 1949

Then my world shattered again. My father, the one steady anchor in my life, my hero, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. My mother was agoraphobic and wouldn’t leave the house. Neither of them would even talk about moving. In a desperate attempt to keep them in their home, every other week for the next two years, I drove to Georgia and spent three days cleaning my parents’ house and filling their freezer with delicious and nutritious food. It was the one way I could still show them how very much I loved them.  It worked for a while. And then it didn’t. My Dad died in October 2007 after a short but nightmarish illness, for which I blamed myself.

I got through all the turmoil of those four or so years because I had to. I accepted the support and generosity of friends who helped look after Mom and Dad when I couldn’t. Paul came over from the UK to help me sort through the house and move Dad to Virginia. Kline and Carolyn opened their home to me. Carolyn fed me to near bursting and took me to Target at dawn on the day of Dad’s Memorial Service to buy funeral clothes because USAir lost my suitcase and all I had to wear was bluejeans. Elsie shuttled Dad to his neurology

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The noble Maxwell in his retirement

appointments and took him to the lunch buffet at the Peking Restaurant. Nash drove Dad and his beloved cockapoo, Maxwell, to the dog park. Nash and France adopted Max after Dad died and gave him the pampered retirement he deserved. I took anti-depressants to calm my anxiety. Mom’s best friend, Margaret, and the ladies of St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church arranged two memorial services and two receptions to farewell my parents. What they say about Southern Hospitality? It’s all true.

When I finally brought Mum to Virginia, she had lost the will to live. I could tell she was staying alive for me. Because she knew if she died, I’d be alone.

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Honor Guard for Cpl. Earl F. Ziemke, USMC, at his interment at Arlington National Cemetery, 31 October 2007

On a professional trip to Australia in 2008, I met a handsome chap from New Zealand on a cross-country train journey. The rest, as they say, is history. Mum met Simon when he came to Virginia over Christmas. She relaxed. I would be safe, and happy. When she was diagnosed with lymphoma, she was ready to let go and passed much more peacefully than my Dad, in May 2009. Two weeks later, Simon got his fiancé visa. We got married in Hawaii in July. Three years later, we decided to move to New Zealand.

When I broke a year ago, I survived by leaning on Simon, seeing doctors, stripping wallpaper, and cooking. IMG_0015

As I began to feel better, I contemplated both my past and my future. For years, as my defence career got ever more frustrating, I toyed with the idea of a new career. Gourmet dog cookies, perhaps? A personal chef? A food and travel writer? New Zealand’s next Master Chef? A pizza blogger?

A pizza blogger! In an effort to do something to get the rest of my life started, I started thinking about creating a vegetarian pizza blog.

My young cousin, William, came to spend a few months with us in his break between graduating High School and going off to University. So, for the first time since we had moved here in 2012, I also started exploring New Zealand. William and I traveled all over this beautiful country — Dunedin, Stewart Island, Fiordland, Napier, Rotorua, Christchurch, Hokitika. We ate seafood chowder in the far South and went to a Maori hangi in the geoDSC_0246thermal North. As I fell in love with my new home, I also started to learn, slowly, how to live with myself.

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William eating the most delicious vegan dumplings ever at the Christchurch container mall

And I continued to cook, trying new things I’d never had time to explore when I was working and traveling all the time. My vegetarian food universe expanded well beyond pizza. I tried to invent vegetarian versions favourite comfort foods. For me, cooking became an exercise in mindfulness. A way to calm my anxious monkey mind. A way to connect my American roots to my new life in New Zealand.

Today, one year later, I am — dare I say it? — happy. Most of the time. I expect I will always feel the presence of the black dog. I will probably always get sad at Christmas. I expect to take anti-depressants for the rest of my days. But, through it all, I will cook.

The biggest challenge for me has been to learn to live in the moment. I cannot change the past, and the best way to ensure a good future is to have a good present. My new routine of going to the Saturday Farmers’ Market to buy whatever produce is in-season and beautiful, creating seasonal pizzas, nurturing a weekly batch of sourdough bread, and cooking food that is absolutely the best I can make it today has healed me. It has grounded me to my New Zealand home. It has also brought me back in touch with my long-ago roots in different family rituals in different and far away places.

IMG_0086Now my scars are honestly come by, from a blazing hot pizza oven or careless use of the mandolin slicer. They tell stories of pizza and coleslaw; of bread loaves and pickles; of kiwi pies and vegetable calzones; of turning hot corn tortillas with fingers instead of tongs.

And in sharing those stories, I will explore life from my new perspective and continue to heal.

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Snow Soup for You!

/ cziemke / Leave a comment

I hate snow. I hate shovelling snow. I hate it when I have to get up at 0-dark-thirty to shovel out a spot of grass so the dogs can answer the call of nature. I hate scraping ice off my car. And I really hate it when the snow on the roof turns into ice dams and water leaks into the rafters to come out. . . oh, anywhere. 009When the hundred-year blizzard hit DC in 1996, I was attending a conference at Wilton Park in the UK. I came home to find all my upstairs window wells an inch deep in water. I hated that. I hate that people put salt on the sidewalk that irritates my dogs’ feet so I have to wash their paws whenever we come in from a walk. I hate people who think that just because there is snow on the ground, they don’t have to pick up after their dogs, as though the poop will disappear with the spring thaw. I hate leaky snow boots. Snow ice cream? Yuck. Snowmen? Depressing when they melt. And they always melt. I, ladies and gentlemen, am a snow Scrooge.

So why, whenever there is a big snowstorm on the east coast of the United States like the one this past weekend, do I get homesick? After all, one of the things I like best about living in Wellington, New Zealand, is that it never snows. So why, when CNN started warning, mid-last week, that a huge, hundred-year blizzard was headed toward Washington, DC, did I feel the urge to run to Countdown and stock up on toilet paper, white bread, and milk?

Why do I feel this longing to get my hands on a snow shovel? Why do I keep checking on washingtonpost.com to see if the Federal Government is closed? Why do I want to Scotty to beam me back to DC?

The truth is, while I hate the snow, I love the magic of a snowstorm. It isn’t just the old cliche of waking up to a wonderland dusted with icing sugar. It isn’t just that the sky is never bluer than on the morning after a massive snow dump. 008I love what a snowstorm brings out in people. Some of my best memories of my old neighbourhood in Annandale, Virginia, involved snowstorms, when everyone came together to dig out the parking lot and make sure our neighbours who were unable to shovel themselves would have clean and safe stoops and sidewalks. We built an iceberg in the cul-de-sac from the snow we cleared from our parking spots. It was a kid magnet. We were all in the same boat, and it was, for the time being, a boat that wasn’t going anywhere. You might just as well sit back and enjoy the ride. So we went to each others’ houses for supper; we shared snow shovels; we traded videos. We were neighbours, at least for a few days.

And the dogs. Every dog I’ve ever lived with got in touch with their inner wolf when it snowed. This wasn’t a surprise in the case of our two Samoyeds — Nikita and Piroshki. They were never far from their inner wolf. But Miss Peanut, Crackerjack, Shakespeare, and Cully all got a far away look in their eyes when it snowed, as if they were ready to hitch up  the sled and go mushing.

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Even crabby old Cindy Dog got her inner puppy on when it snowed. Granted, in his last couple of winters, Crackerjack, at 16, had decided that he was over snow. But, for the most part, my canine family always went just the teensiest bit feral when the snow began to fly.

I was born in a mini ice-age, between two historic nor’easters that hit the DC area in February and March 1958. I remember there being one or two big dumps of snow each winter in the 1960s. The biggest was in January 1966. CCI26012016_3I got a sled for Christmas the year before — a blue plastic toboggan that looked like a space ship. It was one of those Christmases — much like Christmas of 2015 — when the temperature hit 70F on Christmas Day. My ever amazing Dad pulled me around the yard on the toboggan, on the grass. So, when the snow hit, the sled had grass stains. Jeannie et. al.2Our house was on a steep hill — excellent for sledding and snow fort building. Not so excellent for shovelling out the driveway. And since we lived on a dead end street with only three houses, Dad had to shovel all the way up to Sharon Chapel Road. Dad — a son of Milwaukee and lake effect snow — didn’t love snow.

Perhaps that’s why he decided, a year later, to move us to Georgia, where he could be assured that there would be no blizzards. Now, it’s true there aren’t blizzards in Georgia, but there are ice-storms, which can be much worse, really. All the the cold and wet without the fun and, often, without electricity and cable. Once in a blue moon it would “snow” — which wasn’t really snow but accumulated sleet. And we did have snow days. My freshman year in High School we got an extra week of Christmas vacation because it “snowed.” CCI26012016_2My friend Andrea broke her leg sledding and spent the next several months in a full-leg cast. Usually, though, snow in Georgia meant some version of ice. Any Yankees who are tempted to make fun of how we Southerners panic at the first sight of snow, I defy you, or anyone, to drive on the sheets of ice that form on untreated roads in a Georgia ice storm. One year, during a particularly bad ice storm, one of the pine trees in our yard came down under the weight and took down our electrical lines. It was so cold in the house that our budgerigar and my Siamese fighting fish died. Dad, not one to take chances, and in revenge for the lost, cut down all the rest of the trees in the yard. Overkill? Maybe.

When the first wave of Snowmageddon hit DC in January 2010, I was in the UK, at a conference at Wilton Park. Sound familiar? Spooky, huh? Anyway, I managed to get on the first flight back from London — when we landed at Dulles, we sat on the plane for about an hour because no one who knew how to drive the gate had managed to get to work. Then we waited for another hour in customs. None of the baggage handlers had made it to work, either. That was nothing compared to Simon’s ordeal. My adorable new husband, bless his cotton socks, made what had to be a harrowing drive to the airport to meet me, and we slipped, spun, and slid home in his trusty RAV4. The experience was so shattering, Simon was never able to drive on the Beltway again.

As a newcomer to DC, Simon wasn’t up on the culture of panic  pre-snow shopping, so for the next week or so, while the Federal Government — and hence my place of employment — remained stubbornly closed and our neighbourhood roads remained stubbornly unplowed, I became a pantry cook.

I always keep a sizeable stash of dried beans, flour, and canned things, so there was plenty to work with. I channelled my homesteading ancestors. OK, I didn’t have any homesteading ancestors, but my grandparents lives in Eagle River, Wisconsin during the Great Depression were challenging enough. I baked bread. I made long, slow cooking soups. I baked dog cookies. We shovelled snow. We watched a lot of videos because the snow had blocked the satellite dish — leading Simon to insist we get cable. They were golden days.

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One of my blizzard rituals is to make a big pot of stock. This goes back to my carnivorous past, when chicken stock was a pantry staple. The store bought stuff is never as good as homemade, but making large amounts of stock presents a challenge when it comes time to cool it. It isn’t really safe to leave a pot of meat stock at room temperature for the hours it would take to cool down. But put in in your fridge and you run the risk of warming up the cold food faster than you cool down the hot stock. During a blizzard, you can bury your hot stock in a snow bank. It’s the next best thing to a blast chiller.

I don’t make chicken stock anymore, but snow — even snow ten thousand miles away — still triggers in me the urge to get out the stock pot. Instead of chicken bits, I gather up excess veggie bits — the tops of the enormous leeks, green onions and celery I buy at the market, onions, slightly dry mushrooms, carrots, a couple of waxy potatoes, the odd apple or pear, a parsnip, maybe a bulb or two of fennel, and garlic, always lots and lots of garlic. If I’m feeling industrious, I chop everything. If not, I just leave it in chunks. Add enough water to cover the lot, throw in a couple of bay leaves, a few black peppercorns, a handful of whatever herbs you have around, and some kosher or sea salt and bring it all to a simmer. If you want a dark stock that looks and tastes more like beef stock, you can caramelise some of the vegetables (carrots, onions, celery, potatoes) in a very hot oven until they are good and brown. Don’t let them burn, though. Brown is good, but burnt just tastes like burnt.

Caught in a blizzard without a fridge full of vegetable bits? Peel a couple of heads of garlic (yes, the whole thing), add a bay leaf, a spring of fresh thyme (or a teaspoon or so of dried), some black peppercorns, a bay leaf, a teaspoon of salt, a glug of olive oil, and two quarts of water. Simmer that. It smells heavenly and tastes just like chicken stock. I kid you not.

So, next time it snows, forget the white bread and Doritos. Gather up your veggies, add water, and just let the whole delicious mess simmer, and simmer, and simmer. Long and slow. Go outside and shovel snow. Build a snowman. Make a snow angel. Come inside. There’s soup for you!

The Fifth Cookbook of Christmas: Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads

/ cziemke / Leave a comment

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Today would have been my Dad’s 93rd birthday. He wasn’t a vegetarian. His favourite foods were: fried eggs (sunny side up), Campbell’s Pork and Beans (Mom spiffed them up with green peppers, mustard, and various other secret bits of magic), and pretty much anything made with ground beef. According to family legend, Mom and Dad went in with friends once to buy a steer. When the butcher called to find out how they wanted their half cut up, Dad told him to just grind the whole beast into hamburger. Fortunately, Mom was able to intervene. Dad was an avid gardener and produced bushels of tomatoes, green peppers (capsicum), tender little yellow crookneck squash, okra, eggplant, raspberries and figs. But, at heart, he was a meat-and-potatoes sort of guy.

Like most meat-and-potatoes guys, Dad also loved bread. Good, hearty, stick to your ribs, Olde Worlde bread: rye, pumpernickel, crusty Kaiser rolls, and the absolutely delicious, chewy hard rolls from the Black Forest Bakery in Athens, Georgia. When our family moved from Virginia to Georgia in 1967, we entered the black hole of bread. European style bread simply didn’t exist. Not even mass-produced rye bread. Certainly not the kind of peasant breads that work your jaws and have the fortitude to mop up the remains of a hearty soup. Roman Meal Bread was the closest to whole wheat available. Our choices were pretty much Sunbeam (“It’s batter whipped”) and Wonder Bread. It was at this point that Mom went back to baking bread in a serious fashion.

It wasn’t easy. These were the days before supermarkets sold Bread Flour, and most flour sold in the South was made from soft, summer wheat. Flours like White Lilly are indispensable for making biscuits, cornbread, and cakes, but lack the complex gluten structures that are needed for hearty, crusty European loaves. Eventually, Mom found a commercial source of hard wheat flour, which she bought in twenty pound bags and she was off. Every three weeks or so, I’d come home to a kitchen full of dough and the smell of fresh baked bread. It was heaven. Some would go in the freezer, but Dad and I usually devoured at least one loaf on the spot.

Mom was famous for her breads. At the Annual Christmas Auction at St. Gregory the Great Episcopal Church, her “coffee cake of the month” and “bread of the month” offerings raised a pretty penny. When she teamed up with our friends Kline and Carolyn to offer a catered German dinner party, folks pulled out their check books and dug deep.

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One of the legendary St. Gregory’s Auction German dinners, cooked and hosted by Carolyn, Kline, Dad, and Mom, circa late 1980s

At this time of year, she’d be in full Christmas Stollen baking mode. She was famous for her stollen — the traditional german fruited bread that is baked and sugared to look like the Christ child’s swaddling clothes. This is NOT fruitcake, it is Christmas manna. Mom’s recipe came out of her head — handed down from her mother and aunt. In mid-December, our kitchen became an assembly line, with sweet, fruity loaves at various stages of development. While I’m no longer big into Christmas, I still honour this one family tradition and bake a batch or two around Christmas time from Bernard Clayton’s recipe. stollenIt tastes like my childhood and makes me happy, a little bit sad, and very grateful. And when it is a little stale, its makes the best toast ever.

I reckon today is an appropriate day to add Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads to the Kale Whisperer’s Twelve Cookbooks of Christmas. My well-worn copy is the 1987 edition. There have been subsequent revisions, the most recent in 2006, that incorporate newer technology, like bread machines. But the basic spirit that makes this cookbook an all time great remains.

Bernard Clayton gave up a high-powered journalistic career in New York and Chicago after a mystical bread experience during a bike trip around Europe in the mid-1960s. He moved to Bloomington, Indiana, worked for Indiana University, and pursued his fascination with bread. His wonder at the art and science of bread making shines through this book. He prefaces many of the recipes with an introduction, perhaps describing the bread’s history, how it fits in to the wider world of breads, and how he discovered it. Clayton was not professionally trained — he taught himself to bake — and the un-jaded joy of the gifted amateur is contagious. I defy you to pick up this book and not immediate begin tagging recipes. This is one of those cookbooks you’ll want to sit down and read, cover-to-cover.

In addition to the Christmas Stollen (my copy automatically opens to that page), I love the Dilly Casserole Bread (a 1960s staple), the Sour Dill Rye Bread (which uses pickle brine as the liquid), the Portuguese Sweet Bread, and the German White Bread with Caraway. My New Zealand sourdough starter, which has been going for two years, now, began with his Honey Starter.  Our sourdough starter is like a member of the family. It’s less demanding than the dogs. It only needs is to be fed and cuddled once a week. And it doesn’t have accidents in the house. I had to leave my previous starter in the US when we moved to New Zealand.

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My New Zealand Honey Sourdough Starter, freshly fed and happy

The Ministry of Primary Industries here was unlikely to look kindly upon a glob of dough teeming with microbes, no matter how yummy. It found a happy home with my friends Mary and Wade. They let me visit when I go back to Virginia. Mary gave up baking bread for Lent one year, so I know she is a good mother (and her dogs are way better behaved than mine).

 

This is the most comprehensive handbook for the home bread baker I’ve ever found. It was written based on thousands of hours of Clayton’s own trial and error in his own home kitchen. I’m reasonably confident that there is nothing that a home baker needs to know about bread making that isn’t in this book. If you try to bake bread, and something goes wrong, Clayton will tell you why. Most of the recipes include separate instructions for mixing the doughs by hand, in a stand mixer, or in a food processor.

My copy does not include bread machine instructions or recipes, which is fine by me. If you want to make bread, make bread. Don’t be afraid of it. Hold the dough, knead it, throw it, slam it — as Clayton advises, “don’t gentle the dough” — watch it rise, punch it down, knead it some more, and feel it come to life under your warm touch. Bread making, unlike some other kinds of baking, is very forgiving. And much cheaper than therapy.

And nothing beats a slice of hot, fresh bread with butter. It tastes like love.

 

 

Home

/ cziemke / 1 Comment

New Zealand is my new home. I felt at home here almost from the start. Kiwis get my sense of humor in ways that my fellow Americans never did. Simon and I can live 20 minutes from the center of the nation’s capital and keep pigs, alpacas, and (coming soon), chickens. Work-life balance is a real thing here, not just an aspiration. It is possible to drive from our home in the hills to the beach in 20 minutes or less. Almost nobody here goes back to work on January 2nd. New Zealand is closed in January. The January “blahs” that used to knock me sideways every year just aren’t a thing.

There has been much to learn: driving on the “wrong” side; the metric system; Kiwi English; spelling; that horizontal rain makes umbrellas pretty much pointless; that July isn’t summer, and January isn’t winter; that there are 18 hours of daylight on Christmas and 8 hours of daylight on the 4th of July; the rules of cricket; that the number 10 is pronounced “tin” while 7 is pronounced “seevin.” Footy games are “matches”, the field is the “pitch”, and it takes rugby players roughly 80 minutes to play an 80-minute match. And there are no TV time-outs, special teams, shoulder pads or helmets. So you’d better have your beer and chips ready before play starts.

New Zealand is my home. For me, though, the notion of home is bit slippery. You see, I have many “homes” in places where I’ve never actually lived. In addition to my actual homes (Virginia, Georgia and Wisconsin, New Zealand), I get homesick for, inter alia: New Orleans, Edinburgh, Paris, the Masai Mara, and Antarctica. In pondering how this is possible, I’ve come to understand for me, “home” is about memorable experiences and the people with whom I shared them.

And I remember those experiences in terms of food.

I discovered my love for jazz and zydeco over coffee and biegnets with my parents at the Café du Monde. My friend Anita and I kicked off a long-weekend sharing our love of art with glasses of red wine and the best omelets ever for breakfast (well, an early lunch) at a sidewalk café on the Rive Gauche after an all-night flight to Paris. My two chosen sisters – Susan and Elizabeth – and I ate great piles of mussels and chips (but not haggis) after exploring ruined castles in Scotland, and drank gallons of vino verde in the hot, dusty Alentejo in Portugal. I ate delicious grilled langoustines in Bali while my venerable Elder Sister, Katy, fed her grilled fish to the street cats. Simon and I drank gorgeous Argentine and Chilean wines while watching the penguins and icebergs in Antarctica. And I reveled in quaffing Tusker beers with my fellow campers after a hard day tracking wildlife with my intrepid Masai guide, Josh, at Freeman Safaris in Kenya.

In fact, sharing memorable meals is, for me, the way I end up expanding my chosen family. Conversations and experiences can create acquaintances, but for me, breaking bread creates family. And family is home.

Taste is my most evocative sense. Music is a distant second. Christmas isn’t Christmas until I’ve had one of Auntie Janice’s nutmeg logs and a slice of my mother’s stöllen. Passion fruit (a key ingredient in New Orleans’ famous hurricane cocktail and also popular in New Zealand) makes me hear Dixieland jazz and zydeco. My cheese and nut loaf evokes Thanksgiving dinner with Pete, Anita, Mike and Mary Beth, even in New Zealand in July. Peaches take me take me back to the battered old formica kitchen table at my grandparents’ farm where Tanta comforted me with peach küchen after a run-in with the wasps in the outdoor privvy. Every time I eat oatmeal, I hear Grandpa Saltenberger saying: “If you don’t eat your oatmeal, you won’t grow hair on your chest.” Somehow, that arugment worked for him: I ate the oatmeal. It never occurred to me, at 7, that I might not want hair on my chest.

Not all the memories are happy. I was eating baklava the moment my appendix ruptured, and I still can’t face the stuff. When I was about 6, I ate whipped cream until I was sick (they warned me), and it still gives me pause. At about the same age, I went to the fridge and took a big slug out of what I thought was ice water. It was martinis. Please, never order me a martini! And tuna casserole will forever take me back to the hours and days I spent by my father’s bedside when he was dying in hospice.

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Dad’s winter greenhouse, circa 1969.

With absolutely no disrespect to my loving and all-around-wonderful mother, my Dad was (and remains, eight years after his death) the center of my universe. He was a World War II veteran, a brilliant scholar, and a venerated teacher. But in his heart of hearts, he was a farmer. Not a gardener – he had no truck with roses or posies. That was my mother’s realm. He grew food. Every summer we drowned in bell peppers (capiscums), green beans, snap peas, shelly beans, okra, eggplants, radishes, spinach, and lettuces. He even grew summer squash (courgettes) – crooknecks and zucchini – even though he hated it, because he knew I loved it. Half of the back yard was covered in raspberries – because Mom loved them. His fig tree was legendary – it was the fig tree equivalent of the loaves and fishes. It fed the ten thousand hungry southerners with figs. And with my mom’s famous fig pizzas. Yum.

But what I most associate with my father and, hence, with love and family, is tomatoes: his huge, ugly, sweet, juicy heirloom tomatoes. When I moved away from home, he would pick them green, wrap them in newspaper, and ship them to me. One bite of a vine-ripened tomato, warm from the sun, transports me right back to summertime Saturday afternoons, when we three sat down with a couple of big, fat tomatoes, a jar of mayo, salt, pepper, and a loaf of squishy white bread – no lettuce, no bacon – and ate tomato sandwich after tomato sandwich, washed down with unsweetened grape Kool-Aid. I’m sure, when I die, my last thought of my father will be those tomato sandwiches.167185_10150125454908410_190088_n

I only know how to tell my story, and my family’s story, through food. Family, love, life, and home are all embodied, for me, in food: in the making of it and the sharing of it. In this blog, I will share what I have learned about living and cooking as a vegetarian, and living and cooking as a vegetarian in New Zealand. I will also share my stories: the ones I remember from my past homes and the ones I am making here in my new home. Some are funny, others are sad. All are, for me, full of the kind of meaning that makes ordinary food a meal, makes meals into memories, and makes memories into home.