Dear Thailand: Thanks for Curry

Dear Entire Nation of Thailand,

I am only one person and you are all Thai people considered in context of your history, culture, language, geography, and cuisine. So the weight of my awe and gratitude will be as nothing to you, less than the weight of a fly upon the back of an elephant.

Even so, I would like to express my deep happiness to have been put on the same planet as you, Entire Nation of Thailand. On a winter evening, in the gathering darkness and the unrelenting cold, a person comes to crave something lush and tropical. The muted colors and sounds of the icebound landscape leave little to see and hear, and other senses can make known their demands. Smell, touch, and taste clamor for something sensual and wildly delicious—something that will make the body feel life and warmth again.

And that, Entire Nation of Thailand, is why I am so indebted to you. From your collective imagination springs curry: a dish that bursts with flavor and color. As I eat a bowlful, the fragrant steam curls around my frozen heart. The melting ice loosens, slips, and falls in a shattering splash.

Simmered Curry
This makes a big old pot of curry, 6-8 servings. If I were up to usual caliber for this blog, I would make my own curry paste. But I am too tired, sad, and sick of winter today. Look, just make this and eat it, and I don’t think you can stay mad at me.

2 cans regular or light coconut milk
A 4oz jar of curry paste. I like Thai Kitchen.
½ c or more of chicken stock
2-4 T fish sauce
A kaffir lime leaf (you can find these at an Asian grocery or at Lunds - ask the produce manager to order you some)
1 sweet potato, peeled and cubed
1 white potato, peeled and cubed
3-4 carrots, peeled and cubed
1 zucchini, sliced
1 red bell pepper, cubed
A handful of frozen green peas
A package of seitan
Jasmine rice (or white rice if you can’t find it)

Stir the coconut milk and curry paste together until they bubble, then simmer for a few minutes. Put in the stock, fish sauce, lime leaf, potatoes, and carrots. Simmer for 20 minutes. It’s OK if the potato starts to get crumbly.

Add the zucchini and pepper. Simmer a few minutes until the vegetables are tender. Drop in the peas and seitan; heat through. Serve over cooked rice.

Love, Betrayal, Spaghetti Sauce

Yesterday was my mother’s birthday. She and my stepdad came to eat a Char’s Birthday Dinner. And afterwards, Mom retold some food stories about her immigrant grandparents, who arrived at an Italian-American community in Northern Minnesota around the 1910s–1920s.

Mom told how her nonno, her grandfather, was famous for being the best winemaker in town. How her nonna would grind pork, beef, and spinach together to fill ravioli. How Nonna didn’t teach her own daughter, my grandmother, to put wine in the tomato sauce. How Grandma found out one day because Nonno was watching her make a sauce in her own kitchen and asked, “Where’s the vino?”

To this I say: a) What the hell?! and b) Thank goodness.

Now, it’s family lore that Grandma and her own mother were not close. In fact, they were downright uncomfortable around each other. Grandma’s father had died when she was small, and Nonna had remarried. There was a large blended family of Grandma’s sibling, half-siblings, and stepsiblings to help the two keep their distance from each other. But even so, what the hell was Nonna thinking, keeping the wine a secret? Did she see her firstborn child as a painful reminder? A disappointment? A rival? What could have been more powerful than the responsibility to teach her daughter to cook? What could motivate a culinary betrayal of this caliber?

Whatever it was, thank goodness Nonno wasn’t clued in to the scheme. And thank goodness he was the sort to poke his nose into the cooking pots. Because if he hadn’t, would Grandma ever have learned the trick? Would Mom have found out? Would I?

Today I am cooking up a pot of the family sauce. My home is filled with the smell of wine and tomatoes, a familiar perfume that saturates my memories of growing up in my mother’s house. This sauce is, to me, the most important relic of a world that will disappear forever someday when Mom’s memory of it fades away. But since she never made any secrets about how to cook this recipe, our heritage will maybe linger on the stove for a few more generations.

Nonna’s Sugo
Nonna made this with round steak or chicken, according to Mom, who makes it with ground beef or meatballs. I am making it with mushrooms today.

The carrot fixes it so you don’t have to put sugar in the sauce. My brother and I used to fight over the carrot, so Mom got smart and started putting in two.

2 T butter
3-4 big fat cloves of garlic, minced
1 large onion, chopped
1 lb Something (beef, chicken, sliced mushrooms—whatever you want, I guess)
3 pints tomato purée
2 oz or more of tomato paste
2 c fruity red wine
2-3 t dried oregano
2-3 t dried basil or marjoram
1 big, thick carrot, peeled

Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed pot over high heat. Sauté the garlic and onions until translucent. Add the Something and sauté until browned, if meat, or tender, if mushrooms.

Add the rest of the ingredients and stir well. Let the sauce come up to a bubble, then turn down to a low simmer. Cover loosely or leave uncovered. Cook for hours and hours and hours until the carrot starts to melt into the sauce. For best results, you should drag this out all day long until the carrot completely dissolves. But if you are in a big hurry, I guess you could simmer for just three hours. The sauce should be a deep, rich red and reduced in volume by a third to a half. Add salt to taste.

Use a spoon to find every last piece of carrot. Make sure they are evenly divisible by the number of people who will be mad if they don’t get some. If no one is looking, eat the odd carrot piece quickly before anyone finds out. Careful, it’s hot.

Serve over pasta. Mangiamo!

They Can't All Be Champions

Two things converged today. First, my friend Judy found out last week that if you do a Google image search on "bacon cupcakes," you get 55,000 hits. Second, the temperature failed to reach her minimum threshhold for us to go to the Art Shanty Projects. That's how we ended up in my kitchen trying to make our own bacon cupcakes on a Sunday afternoon.

They say you learn not from your successes, but from your failures. Today has been an education. Did you know that you cannot make a credible peanut butter frosting from the Joy of Cooking recipe using natural peanut butter? Did you know that there is a razor-thin line between crisp-cooked bacon and burned-to-a-crisp bacon? Did you know that a quarter pound of bacon is nowhere near enough to make any kind of flavor impression on the old Walker Museum Gallery 8's Wellesley fudge cake?

That's OK. We learned all kinds of things for next time. For instance, next time we should cook a full pound of bacon to crumble into the batter. Next time we might try a spice cake with brown butter frosting instead of fudge cake with peanut butter frosting. Next time we might even try replacing a tablespoon or two of the butter with bacon grease.

Next time. Except there's probably not going to be a next time. Upon tasting our handiwork, Judy commented, "It's not the best use of bacon, but if you're going to make cupcakes, you might as well put some in."

Meh. We should have gone to the shanties.

Julia Child, and Beef, in Real Life

Skip straight to the photos if you hate essays.

I was at the airport, in desperate need of something to read on the flight home, when I spotted Julia Child’s My Life in France. Now, I get that Julie & Julia has renewed people’s interest in the book, but still. The cover is plastered with images from a movie made from a book about Julie Powell’s one-sided relationship with her concept of a mentor that she knew only from books and television. By my count, that’s at least five layers of embroidery between the reader and Julia Child, and all of them are about some other book. Is anyone else bugged by this?

While reading, I recognized sections of the book that had been source material for the Meryl Streep scenes of the movie. It was tempting to visualize Streep’s Julia Child romping through antebellum Paris, good-naturedly exclaiming over everything, winning the hearts of everyone, and marching clear-eyed toward her preordained success as an author and television personality. But I put this temptation aside. I didn’t want Meryl Streep’s Julia Child, or Nora Ephron’s, or Julie Powell’s. I wanted Julia Child’s Julia Child. And even though it is filtered through the lens of her great-nephew and coauthor, Paul Prud’homme, My Life in France is the closest thing the world will ever get to Child’s authentic self-account of her life.

The film did show some things that jive with My Life in France. Julia Child was a scientist in that all outcomes were equally valuable sources of knowledge. She was an engineer who relentlessly applied knowledge and technique to a problem until she achieved her desired result. There’s no question that she was an artist. She understood the world and herself through experiences with food: cooking it, eating it, talking about it. Child connected to other people through shared culinary truths.

Anyone who has seen a scrap of The French Chef found Meryl Streep’s physical portrayal spot-on. But in the film, Streep/Child is unfailingly forward-thinking, gregarious, attractive, and lovable. Her perfect life is a product of Julie Powell’s (as rendered by Amy Adams and Nora Ephron) imagination: an ideal to strive for and a foil highlighting Powell’s self-perceived shortcomings as a cook and a human being. Child’s own recollections reveal a much different person.

Child was, by her own account, stubborn. She sometimes missed opportunities by failing to heed the nuances of personal politics. She was not a graceful handler of conflict, especially in intimate relationships. On occasion, she did the easy thing and kept silent when she should have spoken up. She sometimes made up her mind without consulting, or notifying, the affected parties. Quite often, she let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In short, despite doing her best, she sometimes screwed up. Like every other human being on our planet, she was flawed… and still lovable, and much beloved.

I am one of the other human beings on our planet, and so is my much beloved Beth, who is having a flawed winter semester. A thousand little things have turned out wrong, and they are all stressing her out. So I asked her to let me cook for her in the coming weeks. When she said yes, I turned to Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Julia Child’s boeuf bourguignon.

Child’s stated goal for her recipes was that they be foolproof: a typical American cook, using American equipment and ingredients, should produce accurate and consistent results by following her clear, well-tested instructions.

Thank you, Mrs. Child. You made all the big mistakes for me so that in recipes, if not in life, we can do everything perfectly.

Bouef Bourguignon
Knopf Doubleday has posted the recipe here.

This is my mother’s old copy of Mastering. It is some goofy pirated version from Taiwan. It looks to me as though someone shot very poor stats of the pages, then reassembled them in a smaller format on fewer pages. The colophon is in Chinese, though. What a lot of nerve!


The pages are onionskin-thin, there is broken type everywhere, and the index was not adjusted for the new pagination. But the recipes, advice, and opinions of the Trois Gourmandes are all here.

My ingredients: onions and carrots, blanched Tollefson’s bacon, and beef chuck. I didn’t even have to dry off the beef chunks. The meat from The Wedge is that good.



You are supposed to have a casserole, e.g. Le Creuset, that can go from the stovetop to the oven. I make do with a cast-iron skillet and my big Emeril covered casserole. Emeril and Mrs. Child cooked together when she was alive, so I figured nobody would mind.

First you brown the bacon...



Then the beef...

Then the vegetables.

Into the charméd pot they go. They get tossed with flour and then toasted for a bit in the oven.


In real life, next you would pour wine into your casserole and start things simmering on the stovetop. Instead I put wine and stock in the skillet. This gets all the browned deliciousness out of the pan so it can go in my stew.


The pot full of meat, vegetables, and sauce gets to hang out in the oven for four hours. Meanwhile, it's time to sauté mushrooms in butter. When you do this, you can expect three stages. First, the mushrooms will soak up all your butter and you will think you didn't use enough. Don't be tricked. Keep stirring, even though the pan looks dry. Second, the mushrooms will lay down the treasures of their bodies, and the pan will fill with mushroom juice. Third, the juices will cook off, leaving tender and flavorful mushrooms.



By this point the kitchen smells like heaven and neighborhood dogs have lined up on my front sidewalk to beg. Now I get to make braised onions. Peel them, brown them, and braise them in stock. All this only takes another hour and a half.

It's possibly time to take that bourguignon out of the oven. I must pour off the sauce, reduce it, put the onions and mushrooms in the pot, and pour the sauce back on. I don't know about you, but I am starting to have some predatory feelings toward this dish. I am starting to leer at it and sing to it. Hey, pretty, don't you wanna take a ride with me?

The dish is getting uncomfortable with my attention.

I served it with wide noodles. Mrs. Child would have said, "Bon appétit!"

Six meals in Boston

Wha... where'd my January go? I meant to take a week or two off for the holidays. Then I got really sick (no disease named after me, though). Then I got mailed to a suburb of Boston on a business trip. Holy crap! I feel like I haven't cooked anything in a million years and probably all my 23 readers have left for sexier food blogs.

Readers! Come back! I miss you, too. Here: as a gesture of my good intentions, I will give you a little food porn tour of Boston. I went with a colleague, Kurt; my lovely consort, Beth, flew in later for funsies. Kurt and I worked all day and then, by night, explored Boston as much as we could. The two characters in the pictures are Ruby Mae Owl and Fred, Beth's and my respective finger puppet alter egos.

Meal #1: Legal Sea Foods


A steamed lobster met its end in my belly at this regional fine dining chain. The whole lobster came with the requisite drawn butter; also with sides of garlic mashies and spicy seaweed salad. Mr. Lobster (pretty sure it was a mister; I found no coral) was preceded in death by a bowl of creamy potato-studded clam chowder. Wicked ahhhsome.

Meal #2: Ye Olde Union Oyster House

Established in 1826, this oldest restaurant in America has the dark, cramped dining space and insanely plumbed, drafty bathrooms to prove it. Not that I'm complaining; I live in a (much younger, yet still) old building myself, and I find the scale perfectly human and dottily charming. Our barman served us Harpoon beer and chatted us up in a fantastic Boston accent. There was a Ben Franklin impersonator drinking at the end of the bar. When we were seated, our waitress mothered us like a hen. The menu was large and impossible to winnow, as there didn't appear to be a bad or boring dish on the list.

I decided on a plate of fried clams that came with buttered boiled potatoes. My two companions had scallops with pasta Alfredo and lobster ravioli in cream sauce.

Odd as it seems to me now, it did not occur to any of us to order oysters.

Meal #3: Amarin of Thailand

The next day, Kurt flew home. Beth and I were staying for another two days. We did not feel like venturing downtown this night, and Beth had found a Thai restaurant on her way to the local Starbucks that morning.

Amarin was a lovely change of pace from the seafood. They had fresh, flavorful, spicy, and inexpensive dishes like this beef with holy basil. The restaurant was filled with Thai paintings, prints, carvings, and sculptures. I felt disloyal to Minneapolis, home of so many exemplary Thai places, for enjoying it so much.

Meal #4: Artú

My professional obligations concluded by Friday early afternoon, leaving some daylight hours for exploring Boston's neighborhoods. In Beacon Hill, we found this small Italian restaurant. I had the "Preferito" panini: huge leaves of prosciutto nestled into provolone-lined Italian rolls and filled with thin-sliced eggplant marinated in olive oil, white wine vinegar, red pepper, basil, parsley, and oregano. Mmmm, mangiamo!

On our way out of Beacon Hill, we stumbled across Cheers across from Boston Commons. It was a great TV show, but we are over it. We satisfied ourselves with a picture.

Meal #5: Cafe Jaffa

Cafe Jaffa is a Middle Eastern restaurant. And yet they had cabbage rolls, a favorite dish of my late Croatian grandfather. I guess Croatia clings to the Near East by its fingernails. Whatever. Jaffa made a fine version of this comfort food from my childhood.

Meal #6: La Summa

And that about sizes it up: La Summa (roughly, "Everything" or "All That" or "It" as in "that's it") was all that, that's it, everything I wanted for lunch. The space was elegant. The food was sublime. The prices were absurdly low, especially considering the neighborhood (North End, historic/expensive).

I had this dish of house-made fresh penne with generous hunks of ham, sun-dried tomato, and spinach in a rich cream sauce with a sprinkling of chopped basil. Che bella.

On our post-prandial stroll, we passed (but did not enter) the Parker House, birthplace of the Parker House roll and Boston cream pie.

And then it was time to fly back to Minneapolis! I'm happy to be home, grateful to be well, and looking forward to cooking my own food this week.

Welcome back to my blog, and thank you for reading!

Ravioli pa' Natale

According to Mom, her nonna—my great-grandmother—spent hours and hours making ravioli for Christmas each year. They truly are a labor of love: between preparing the filling, making the pasta, rolling and assembling the ravioli, and making their sauce, it's like you've made the meal four or five times. When the food passes so many times through the hands of the cook, it cannot help but absorb what's in the heart of the cook.

And in my heart, there's joy to see the ravioli spring into the world out of nothing but flour, egg, pumpkin, and cheese. There's the warm companionship of cooking with my partner, Beth. There's a sense of connection with the women in my family, whose hands have also kneaded dough, rolled it thin, doled out filling, and set trim little pasta shapes on a floured towel to dry. And there's the anticipation of delight when, on Christmas Day, people we love will take pleasure and nourishment from the food we're making.

Ravioli di Zucca pa' Natale
That is to say, pumpkin ravioli for Christmas. This is my recipe, not Nonna's, but I hope she'd be proud. You can make the filling ahead of time and freeze it. You can also freeze the ravioli.

This recipe will make perhaps 80 or so ravioli. For a side dish, plan on 6 per person. For a main dish, plan on 9 to 12 per person.

The filling:
A pumpkin, 3-4 lb.
½ lb. grated Parmesan
Salt and black pepper to taste

The pasta:
5 c semolina flour (any other kind will work)
5 eggs
A tablespoon or two of olive oil

The sauce:
For every 6 ravioli you plan to serve,
1 T butter
2-3 sage leaves, fresh or dried
1-2 baby spinach leaves
1 T shaved Parmesan cheese
Ground black pepper

Cut the top off the pumpkin. Hollow it out, then replace its lid. Place in a pan and bake at 375° for one to one and a half hours or until tender. Let cool.

Peel the pumpkin, cut the flesh into small pieces, and mash it. Mix it with the Parmesan and seasonings to taste.

On a wooden cutting board or directly on your work surface, make a mountain of the flour. Make a volcano crater in it with your fist. Crack the eggs into the crater and add a splash of olive oil.

Use a fork to whisk the eggs in the volcano crater. Whisk all around the edges of the crater. Flour from the volcano mountain is incorporated into the eggs as you go, and soon you are whisking a pale yellow batter. Go slowly so that the eggs whisk evenly and you avoid lumps.

Soon, the batter has become a soft dough. It will grab your fork and you won't be able to whisk anymore.

Abandon the fork, toss a handful of flour on top of your dough, and start kneading in more flour. Gather, squeeze, and turn until the dough is like Play-Doh and does not feel tacky any more. There will still be flour left on your work surface; don't worry about that.

You must be tired by now. Your dough sure is, so wrap it up in foil, plastic wrap, or a barely damp cloth and let it rest 20 minutes. This will allow it to become stretchy.

Now it's time to roll. Get ready a barely damp cloth. Roll your dough out paper thin. You can do this by hand if you are very stubborn. I have an Atlas pasta machine, which is much easier.

Rolled-out pasta is susceptible to drying, so keep it fresh by covering it with the barely-damp cloth while you roll more sheets.

We rolled out to setting 6. We made rectangular sheets by cutting lengths, brushing the edges with water, and rolling the pieces together with the pin.

Work quickly to avoid drying but carefully to avoid tearing.

While I was fussing with the pasta sheets, Beth made tidy little balls of filling. We placed them on a sheet several inches apart, keeping in mind that we would need a seam allowance between each dumpling.

Use a damp pastry brush to moisten (barely!) the space in between each filling ball.

Cover with the other pasta sheet. Allow the pasta to drape over the filling. Seal the fillings in between the pasta sheets by pressing with your fingers. Avoid air pockets; you can get rid of trapped air by making a tiny slit with a paring knife, pressing out the air, then pressing the slit closed.

If you tear the pasta sheet, you can patch it with a dampened scrap of pasta. It doesn't look like America's Top Chef made it, but it tastes the same. And none of those people are invited over, anyway.

Dust a dish towel with flour. Cut between the ravioli with a knife or pizza cutter. Use a bench knife or spatula to pick them up and transfer them to the towel. Let them rest until they are dry enough to handle.

You can pack them up in the freezer at this point. But before you do, make sure to boil some water and test them out. You know, to make sure they're delicious enough to serve.

Set a pot of salted water on the stove to boil. Heat the butter in a skillet or saucepan. Gently sauté the sage leaves until they are crispy; break them up in the butter a little. Sliver the spinach leaves.

Cook the ravioli. If they are fresh, this will take less than five minutes. If they are frozen, just drop them right in the boiling water without thawing.

Drain them well and arrange them on a plate. Drizzle them with the sage butter, sprinkle with shaved parmesan, and toss on a smattering of the spinach slivers. Finish with a grind or three of fresh black pepper.

Buon Natale, mios amicos.

Bûche de Noël Challenge

(artist's concept)

Updated: See actual!

When friend Katrina mentioned that she wanted to attempt a bûche de Noël, I can't remember who first suggested making the traditional French Christmas dessert together. But I do know it was me who proposed "Bûche de Noël Smackdown."

Katrina laughed nervously at that idea. She is the embodiment of kindness and gentility, and I don't think she has a competitive bone in her body. I, on the other hand, freely trade good-natured insults with friends and often cross the line in my efforts to top their putdowns. Katrina is the one person for whom I try my hardest to be kind. If I ever hurt her feelings, even in a friendly cake contest, I could never forgive myself.

"If I set my dial at Lovefest and you set yours at Smackdown, we'll meet in the middle," I said. And so we agreed to a Friday night baking party.

A classic bûche de Noël is made with a chocolate génoise sheet cake and buttercream frosting. After investigating simpler cake and frosting schemes and assessing their levels of difficulty, we opted to take on the challenge of the traditional recipes. We decided, while we were at it, to make two—one for each of us. "How long do you think this will take?" asked Katrina. "Hmmm... three hours," I replied.

Boy, was I wrong. Katrina, her friend and my partner Beth, and I worked together for five hours on the two bûches. Katrina's poor little hand mixer labored away on high speed for at least two solid hours. We were amazed at how many eggs and how much butter disappeared into the cake batter and frosting. And by the end, I was making only indirect requests; and Katrina was threatening, as a joke, to throw me out of her kitchen.

Bûche de Noël: the great leveler, the great reverser of roles.

The cake:
The génoise cake batter requires that eggs be whipped with sugar until they triple in volume. We doubled the recipe, so there were eight total. Here are four eggs at the start.







Beth whipped the eight eggs for nearly an hour to get them ready. We were afraid to imagine how strenuous it would be to whip them by hand. Clearly French cooking is based on a feudal business model, as it depends on a lot of strong young kitchen workers.





Beth adds equal parts cake flour and cocoa. We spread this into two sheet pans and baked them.







Meanwhile, the frosting:
To make buttercream, first cook two cups of sugar and a cup of water to the soft ball stage. Then pour it in a thin stream into beaten, pasteurized eggs. Since the mixer was in use, I opted to beat by hand. This was fun at first. By the time I finished, though, it was a matter of pride.

Then Katrina beat an appalling amount of butter into the frosting. I am ashamed to tell you how much. Oh, OK, six sticks.






This is what a pound of chocolate looks like when melted with a half cup of water.









And here it goes into the buttercream. You must talk like Julia Child when performing this operation.

By the time this buttercream was ready, the cakes were baked, cooled, and brushed with a quarter cup apiece of equal parts brandy and simple syrup.

Assembling the bûche:

Frost the cake generously.









This was the scary part. We were four and a half hours into this job. The last step was to roll up the cake. And if we screwed this up, all our work would come to naught. Those are Katrina's hands rolling the cake. My hands, at the right, are "helping" because I'm terrified.







My fear was groundless. Katrina rolled it up like a pro.

We wrapped up our cakes tightly, packed up buttercream to spread on the outside, and popped them into the freezer. In a couple of weeks, we'll take them out, frost them to resemble logs, and serve them at Christmastime.

By then, each cake will have taken about 8 or 9 person-hours of work. The moral of the story is this: if you see a bûche de Noël in a bakery for any amount of money, pay it. It's worth it.

Bon appétit!

Post-Christmas Update: Here it is in all its splendor.

Peace, Love, and Gingerbread

True confession: I don’t like Christmas much. I don’t like the music. I don’t like the decorations, or Salvation Army bell ringing, or cards. I don’t like shopping. I don’t like how the presumption of Christianity blots out other perspectives at this time of year. I don’t like how it all happens against a deepening backdrop of cold weather and dark skies; or how in January, all the lights will fade and I will feel abandoned to a bleak winter without even the respite of Christmas’s unwelcome distractions.

One thing that keeps me peaceful at Christmastime is gingerbread. I love the alchemic ritual of boiling molasses, sugar, and fat. I love perfuming the flour with splashes of dark, sweet cinnamon and sharp, warm ginger. I love the surface of the rolled-out dough, smooth and cold like black marble. I love my cookie cutters—those old friends I see just once a year. Tin ones from Mom that we used when I was little. Plastic ones that I bought for myself as a young adult, an act of self-assertion for my first holiday on my own.

In those days, I was slowly realizing that I can define this season however I want. I don’t have to be in the office gift exchange. I don’t have to decorate a tree or send cards. I don’t have to let someone else tell me how and when to give. And I can leave all these things behind without losing what’s important: warmth. Light. Faith that, even in the looming darkness of winter, there are human connections to be made. There are cookies to be baked.

I love to decorate each cookie shape in a particular way. The stars and bells get red sugar sprinkles. The trees and holly leaves get green. The dreidls and stars of David get blue sprinkles. The blue cookies are for friends whose philosophies get crowded out this time of year. I want to say to them, “True, this cookie exists because of Christmas. But I know you don’t ride that train, and I see you.” And really, when I bake gingerbread, that’s what I’m saying to, and for, myself.

Gingerbread Molasses Cutouts
Makes 7 or 8 dozen cookies, each 2 or 3 inches across. The great thing about this recipe is how many times you can roll and re-roll it. You can keep cutting out cookies until the dough ball is too small to make a single ‘nother one.

1 c shortening
1 c molasses
1 c sugar
1 c vinegar
2 eggs
6 c flour
½ t baking powder
½ t salt
1 t baking soda
1 T ginger
1 t cinnamon

Combine shortening, molasses, sugar, and vinegar in a large saucepan. Heat, stirring constantly, and bring to a rolling boil. Cook 2 minutes. Remove from heat and cool. Add the two beaten eggs.

Sift, mix, or whisk all the dry ingredients together. Combine the wet and dry ingredients and mix well. Roll the dough into a ball and chill it well. Overnight will do it.

On a floured board, bench, or countertop, roll the dough ⅛ to ¼ inch thick. Cut out shapes. Decorate them with colored sugar, currants, and small candies as desired. Bake on greased or nonstick cookie sheets 6 to 9 minutes at 375°.

Use your cookies to celebrate—or not—however you want. But I do hope they'll make you happy this season.

Post-Thanksgiving soup blues

Yeah, yeah. Here's the bowl of soup I made out of the Thanksgiving turkey. Whatevs. Who cares about stupid turkey soup. I miss my brother.

Don't worry; he's alive and well and has a beautiful family, so I'm thankful for that. I know I shouldn't bitch. Our country is at war. Some people have to miss their brothers every Thanksgiving for the rest of forever. My brother's not in the next world. He's just in the next time zone.

So I didn't get to see Brian this year, but it was still a nice holiday. I like the big dinner with family, and I like working with my mom to clean up the kitchen. It's just that I realized something this year. My very favorite Thanksgiving tradition is eating the leftovers with Brian.

I really missed wandering into Mom's kitchen at 10 or 11 at night, after my parents have gone to bed. There's a loaf of white bread on the counter. There's the big white Tupperware bowl in which we've stored leftover turkey since I was a little girl. There's Brian getting out a plate for his sandwich. He always makes me one too: dark meat, too much mayonnaise, and a lot of dill pickles. We stand in the dark kitchen biting the sandwiches and then the pickles. I guess I could have made my own sandwich, but it doesn't taste the same.

This year Mom sent all the leftover stuffing home with me. I love stuffing. It's my favorite dish on the entire Thanksgiving menu. But I accepted it wistfully, because that stuffing should not have survived the night. I should have spent all of Thanksgiving afternoon and evening keeping track of where Brian was. It takes vigilance to notice when he has materialized at the fridge to abscond with the stuffing. If I don't show up in time to demand my share, he might eat the whole bowl.

So, Thanksgiving is over, the stuffing is mine, and I already had a turkey sandwich. I made soup, but I still feel all lonesome for my brother. Wish I knew the recipe to shake it.