crowded kitchen: super yum paleo brownies

i'm not the best at this ancestral diet thing, but i'm trying. the hard truth of the matter is that in the thick of things, i'm not above shoving a fistful of flour in my mouth when nobody is looking just to cure that carb hangover thing i have going on. but like i said, i'm trying. (pay no mind to the white flour stains all over my clothes...i'm TRYING!)

my husband is really good at sticking to things. that's probably how he never ends up with disgusting chinese food orders...he knows what he likes, decides on something, and sticks to it. straight and narrow type of guy, that one.

we're in this paleo thing together these days. me because i'm sick of eating fake food in hopes of tricking my body into losing baby weight. him because he has huge jiu jitsu goals for 2013 and he needs primo fuel for the things he's going to ask his body and mind to perform. (sure wish i had goals that lofty...i'm pretty much just sick of my jeans unzipping themselves every time me and my stomach sit down. darnit.)

he loves brownies. he also loves snacks at night. and sometimes after a long day of sticking to his diet, the man will down a bowl of chocolate ice cream drizzled in peanut butter and we can all assume that doesn't exactly help the cause. (kind of like me and the flour, right? and by flour, i hope we all know i mean corn chips, crackers, bread or whatever else flour has made in my house.)

so here's a recipe i found on nomnompaleo. it's amazing. and i had almond flour on hand for just such an occasion. it'll probably be my go-to recipe from here to eternity, honestly. it's tasty. it's complex. and it's paleo...though i'm not sure how the sugar plays into the ancestral part. just nod and smile like i did, ok??

i also found a coconut macaroon recipe that i'll try out tomorrow. you're excited, aren't you!?

super yum paleo brownies

ingredients:
3/4 cup almond flour
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

3/4 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup chocolate chips (or use 7 oz of baking chocolate if you wanna!)

directions:
1.heat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Mix the flour, salt, cocoa, and baking powder in a large bowl and set aside while you do work, son!
3. In the microwave, melt 1/2 cup of the chocolate chips and the butter. I set it for a minute and kept my eye on it. Seemed to do the trick and I didn't burn it. Huzzah!
4. Mix sugar, eggs, and vanilla in a bowl.
5. Slowly add chocolate and butter to the egg mixture, making sure to go slowly to not cook the eggs with your hot chocolate sauce.
6. Combine wet and dry ingredients and pour into prepared 8 by 8 dish. Sprinkle remaining chips on the top and press into batter.
7. Bake for approximately 30 minutes.
8. Do your best not to eat the whole pan of brownies before your husband comes home from lunch. Especially important if your 4-year old witnessed you bake the brownies. He'll rat you out.

...happy baking!...

crowded kitchen: red beans and rice in a slow cooker

I'm pretty sure that once, maybe twice (forty times??), I've mentioned how much I love using a slow cooker during the week. It makes my evenings a little less scream-worthy. It makes clean up waaaay easier (I try to get everything, minus the crock itself) washed up and put away before I serve dinner). And it makes me search for new tastes and recipes because I can't really keep serving chicken burritos or the 10,000 variations I've found every single night. Though I've tried. Ha!

This is my latest find. I love red beans and rice and I usually prepare it out of a box. FOR SHAME! (Dirty secret right there...I'm a HUGE Zatarain's fan.)

This one is homemade, but less fussy than the traditional method. That basically  means I don't really know how to buy a hambone, so I use a ham steak, cut it up, and let it flavor the dish. Sue me. (Please don't.)

Super easy. Super delish. Make some. Noooow!

Slow Cooker Read Beans and Rice

• 1 ham steak, cubed
• 1 pound small dried red beans, soaked overnight and drained
• 1 cup chopped onion
• 3 medium cloves garlic, minced
• salt and pepper, to taste
• 1 cup chopped green pepper
• Chicken stock
• Seasonings (I prefer Tony Chacheres, Liquid Smoke, Garlic Salt)
• 1 cup uncooked rice

Combine everything but the rice in slow cooker. Cover with chicken stock and turn on high for 6 to 8 hours, depending on your machine. For the last 90 minutes of cook time, add rice. Easy peasy, right? To be fancy, you can add diced tomatoes, cubed chicken, smoked sausage...the options are endless.

...happy eating!...

crowded kitchen: a week of meals

happy sunday, friends!

here's the bottom line when it comes to me and cooking during the week: i hate it. no, no...i love food. but i hate preparing it when i have the four minions all to myself without my sweetheart in sight 'til well after bedtime.
the last thing i want to do is suffer through those grumpy last hours trying to cook and not lose my cool.

'cause sometimes i lose my cool. shocking, i know.

monday through thursday, i'm a bit of a cheater. i wait until p comes home for lunch and i cook dinner then. well, by cook, i mean shove a bunch of stuff into a slow cooker and let it cook for me. i've done that for two weeks now and it's made all the difference in the world when it comes to dinner time. i can pull makenna and boo apart when they're at each other's throats, i can toss riley roo up in the air four million times like she likes, and i can help boy wonder with his homework (that really means i can be on his hiney like a hawk when his attention drifts every three seconds...'cause that's how it happens 'round here.)

last week we had sloppy joes, picadillo, chicken burritos, and french toast. friday is always pizza night (night off!) this week we're trying a couple new ones, thanks to my absolute FAVORITEST cooking site in the world, Skinnytaste. Have you checked Gina out over there? She gives WW points and everything...I love her so.

I also found the world's coolest menu planner and shopping list template thanks to the Project Girl. She's another neat one to know. I filled in the menus for the week and all the ingredients needed for my shopping trip. Woo hooo. I'm ready.

So here we go...

Sunday (tonight)
Roasted rosemary mediteranean chicken (my recipe)
Twice baked potatoes with broccoli and cheese

Monday
Santa Fe Chicken (slow cooker)

Tuesday
Greek turkey  meatballs with tzaziki (slow cooker)

Wednesday
Chicken Taco Chili (slow cooker)

Thursday
Grilled cheese and soup (easy peasy, lazy me.)

Friday 
Pizza night (thanks, Papa Johns!)

Saturday
Cheese Ravioli and Marinara Sauce (dad's cooking...wooo!)

Bonus:
Wednesday morning is special breakfast day around here and I'm doing Gina's Insanely Good Blueberry Oatmeal Muffins. Hooray!

What's on your menu this week?

...happy eating....

crowded kitchen: meyer lemon pudding cake

my oldest child is a lemon fanatic.

he chews them. he sucks them down to the rind. he covets them. he plots to steal them from neighborhood backyards when we see them growing on trees.

 it's almost kinda strange, but thankfully i love lemons, too. i should rename this "boy wonder cake" for as much as he goes bananas (or lemons, ha!) over it.

meyer lemons are just coming into season here in houston and i picked up a one pound bag for about $2.50. I still have four of these beauties on the counter, just begging for some awesome recipe.

despite the seventy-two bowls it takes, the cake is simple and not ingredient heavy... you just gotta decide you don't mind filling an entire dishwasher with bowls of every imaginable size.

according to my weight watcher points, it totals to about 6 points plus. not exactly cheap, but, hey, it's amazing and it's indulgent and if you plan your day (or week) accordingly, it's so doable.

someday i'll tinker around and see if i can lighten it.

but not today.

 not today...

boy wonder's mega-awesome meyer lemon pudding cake

ingredients:

3 Meyer Lemons (from this, you'll need 2 tsp zest and about 1/3 c of lemon juice, so go ahead and do that work before you start the baking process)

3/4 c. sugar

1/4 c. all-purpose flour

1/4 tsp. salt

3 large eggs, separated

1 c. milk (i used 2 percent, i wouldn't go lower than that) at room temperature

4 Tbs. butter, melted and cooled

directions:

1. preheat oven to 300 degrees. butter and prepare an 8 by 8 baking dish.

2 . get your zest and juice together and set aside in a small bowl.

3. in a medium bowl, whisk dry ingredients and set aside.

4. in another bowl (yes, we're up to three now...four if you've separated your eggs!), mix yolks, milk, butter, zest, and juice. combine with dry ingredients and stir well.

5. bust out your hand held mixer and attack those egg whites until they're at the soft peak stage. fold into your batter gently and in smallish batches (i did it in three).

6. bake 35 to 45 minutes until just set in center. serve warm.

...happy lemons!...

crowded kitchen: one super strawberry smoothie

i hate dieting.

to take it one step further, i have never ever, ever EVEREVEREVER succeeded on a diet.  (that sentence makes me so sad to write, but it's true.)

three times in my adult life, i have been overweight. twice i have shed the weight. neither of those times did it happen thanks to some awesome diet where i got to eat bacon and eggs all day and skipped fruit. it happened when i started a sport (first judo, then jiu jitsu) and trained like a crazy person. the weight fell off without me stressing about it.

fast forward a kid or two. or three. and i just can't make it to the gym to roll anymore. period. it sucks, i cry and lament about it with patrick when i'm really down, but the trade-off is this wonderful family we're blessed with, so i've accepted that it's just not my season to be a jiu jitsu purple belt all star ...yet. (i'm stubborn and haven't given up on my dream. it'll happen.)

but that still leaves me stuck in the middle of a really long journey. i weighed about 200 pounds a couple weeks after riley roo was born this summer. ugh. i hate reading that. the good news? i burned through about 25 pounds in the early fall. SUHWEET! christmas came, and with it came five of those pounds back. damn.

so here i am with no real way to work my pounds off as my life currently stands and yet i want more than anything to be in shape, active, healthy, and full of energy. and lugging these damn 35 pounds around on my carcass isn't making anybody happy, least of all me.

so i made this crazy promise to myself that i'd lose the last 35 pounds by my 35th birthday and write about it here. i ponied up some bucks, marched my defeated self into a 7 a.m. saturday morning meeting at weight watchers and nearly barfed when the scale spoke it's awful, ugly truth. but then it was over. and i went about my life for the past week. and i lost 3.8 pounds when i went to my meeting on saturday. hell yeah!

the whole point of this story is that this is damn hard. i love food. i love to eat. without hours of sweating my a$# off in a gi, well, i don't get to eat like i used to. but i don't want to trade chemicals and food-like products with the real stuff just to get skinny. chemicals suck.

to satiate my god-awful sweet tooth, i started making this smoothie for my mid-morning breakfast. boo loves it so much he calls it his smoothie, but it's cool. i can share. the bonus? for those following points, it's only 4 points plus. woooo!

it's so easy i almost feel guilty posting this as a recipe. i said almost...

megan's fantastic strawberry smoothie

1/2 cup lowfat coconut greek yogurt (it's what i had on hand from yoplait and turned out great)
1/2 cup lowfat milk
3/4 cup frozen strawberries (or whatever 0 point fruit you have on hand)

bleeeeeeeeeeeend away.

easy peasy, right?

note: you might yours a little sweeter. no problem, use a little stevia for zero points or calcuate what a little splash of honey will cost you. i also think it would taste fantastic with almond milk, as i'm pretty partial to the stuff.

...happy eating...

crowded kitchen: slow-cooked chicken tikka masala

Do  you ever come across a recipe at just the right time? One that reaffirms faith in your own cooking?

I had a rough morning in the kitchen and despite a surprising and freeing revelation I finally came to, it was still rough. I haunt Nigella Lawson's web site like some sort of stalker.

 I have this notion that if I lived in London or if she somehow inhabited the apartment above ours, we'd be besties. We'd ride bikes with tassles and playing cards in the spokes. We'd have a secret handshake and she'd totally let me eat all her leftovers.

So I had high hopes when I printed out her "Clementine Cake" recipe and boiled five clementines in their own skins for TWO HOURS. I chopped and swirled them (skins, piths, fruit, and all) around once or twice in the blender and made a cake of them with six eggs and a couple cups of flour. Some sugar, too.

Let me just state for the record that I must have a palate about as sensitive as a concrete slab.

I just don't appreciate certain flavors and the whole having chunks of peel and pith residing in your cake (on purpose, even!) just sorta made me resent this cake that nobody would eat. Not even me. Some people love this cake, as evidenced by the MILLIONS of blog posts raving about the recipe.

I, however, did not.

Add insult to injury? It was such a dense, heavy mess that it ripped my trash bag from the lip of the trash can, forcing me to dig around in the dirty egg shells and coffee grounds to retrieve it. Ugh.

But then redemption came after watching Gordon Ramsey trek across India and eat fire ant chutney and curse at street vendors with flamin' hot curries. I found a recipe for the one of two dishes I've ever tried at an Indian food joint.

 I will eat Chicken Tikka Masala and I will eat Panak Paneer. Period. I've yet to spread my culinary wings. I know, I know.

Thanks to Table for Two, I rediscovered my love for this dish. It's complicated in terms of what I normally cook, but the flavors were incredible in the final product and so worth having to search the spice shelves for the obscure and obselete garam masala. Who knew I'd had it all along? It was fate, ya'll.

My amounts differ from Table for Two, but that's ok. I think that's the fun part about food blogs. The recipe lives on forever in many, many forms!

Slow Cooker Chicken Tikka Masala

Serves 6 to 8

Ingredients:

Package of boneless, skinless chicken tenderloins (my package had 10 and it was perfect)

1/2 of large onion, diced

3 cloves of garlic, minced

1 T fresh ginger, minced (thanks to a juicing experiment gone wrong, I had this on hand!)

1 (29 oz) can tomato puree (in future, I think I might cut back to about 2/3 of the can to balance the "tomatoy" acidity in the dish)

1.5 c plain yogurt

2 T olive oil

2 T Garam Masala

1 T ground cumin

1 t paprika

Salt, to taste

3/4 t cinnamon

3/4 t ground black pepper

1 to 3 t ground cayenne (I omitted this part)

2 bay leaves (I splurged and bought a package...first time EVER using bay leaves)

1 cup heavy cream (next time, I'll up it to 1 and 1/4 cups)

3 T cornstarch

Chopped cilantro or parsley to garnish

Directions

In a big ol' honkin' bowl, combine everything minus the chicken and the bay leaves.  When thoroughly mixed,  put the sauce in a your slow cooker, add the chicken and coat with sauce, top off with bay leaves and let cook. 2 to 4 hours on high, 4 to 8 on low...all depending on your appliance. (Mine is waaay off and it only took about two and a half hours on high.)

It was a hit with then entire crew and all we were missing was naan. Travesty, right? Next time I'll be sure to hit up a local joint for some bread...Lord knows I'm not patient enough to spend six hours making the stuff.

...happy eating...

crowded kitchen: GMOS (Oh, and a few updates, too!)

Some updates first...

Pretty New Colors!

What do you think of the new layout?? Just so we're on the same page, I'm big on changing things around more than I probably should. I've been like that since I was big enough to drag, muscle, and cajole my furniture around my old bedroom back in El Paso. I love remodeling!

So Long to an Old Friend

A couple years ago I started a foodie blog and for the most part, I was decent at keeping it updated. Lately it's been tough to shoot photos, edit, and upload, but little by little I'm getting back to it. But I've been reading A LOT about the business of blogging and what effective bloggers do with their resources...and the number one piece of advice was to NOT separate out each tiny interest you have into new blogs. Ouch. I'm terrible at that...I want an art blog, a food blog, a kids blog, a writer blog...and I'm so stretched out that I can't keep up any of them. So....I'm moving my favorites over here from the blog formerly known as the "Hungry Little Blackbird" and tagging them as "Crowded Kitchen."

It'll keep all my writing under one roof (except my author page, but I'm pretty much ignoring that thing until I ink that ol' bookdeal...so don't hold your breath!)

Little by little, I'll be bringing over the recipes (mine) that I posted and some of the write ups I did after interviewing neat food-based folks. The label up on that nav bar will take you to all the "Crowded Kitchen" posts from here on out...Huzzah, right?

Well, now on to today's post. I want to preface it and say that I'm not some holier-than-thou food elitist. Seriously. I don't even recycle in our current apartment. (The SHAME! I know, I know.../facepalm.)

But I'm edu-ma-cating myself about what I've been eating for a few decades and what I'm putting on my kids' plates. It kinda freaks me out...

So without further ado...some of the things that freaked me out...

Today's Post

It's a strange time to be a foodie, isn't it?

Gluten free, dairy free, vegan, vegetarian, hormone free, cruelty free, foods versus "food like" substances...

The list is long and pretty daunting and sometimes I don't know where to start.

Lately, there's been a lot of talk about genetically modified (GM) food. I don't pay much attention, really. Up to this point, I've never bought anything organic on purpose. Not that I have a problem with organic, I just didn't have the pocketbook power to learn more about it.

But I guess you can only stick your head in the sand for so long before the earth starts rumbling below it and you can't hide anymore.

I've been doing a little cursory research into what exactly GM food is, where it comes from, why there was a big honkin' fight over it in California (and one to follow soon in Washington), and what it could possibly be doing to my family and I.

I'm pretty sure I'll never know everything I need to...that would require a Ph.D. in chemistry that I just don't have. But I know more than I did yesterday. And I'll know more than I do today. I started this journey for knowledge after reading an article in this month's Mother Earth Living. From there I went down the rabbit hole of GMOs and I'll probably never come back.

Another resource was a Netflix gem I stumbled across called "Hungry for Change." It was hard to hear at points because my sons were locked in a death match over a lego, but what I was able to hear was pretty thought provoking. And scary. As hell...

The basics of GMO (as I've found it so far)

Let me state this disclaimer (again): I'm not a scientist. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a farmer. I'm a mama. I'm a food eater. I'm a student of this all. I'm chronicling this as a journey of what I discover, not as a thesis of any sort.

Phew. Glad that's over.

GMO foods contain genetically modified organisms. They've been around for a couple decades and are, from what I've found, everywhere. Evvvverywhere. They can be found under the monikers genetically engineered (GE), transgenic, recombinant, gene-altered, bio-tech...it goes on.

Most cotton, corn, and soybeans grown in the U.S. are modified in someway...most likely to make them pesticide resiliant. Some estimates put the amount of GMO foods consumed by the average American in an average year to be about 190 pounds. (Does that seem like a lot? It did to me.)

Scientists take a gene for a characteristic they like from one plant (able to resist cold?) and place it in another plant's DNA.  According to watchdog groups, its an imprecise science that even the scientists don't really have a handle on yet.

The risks? So far, in independent studies, GMO foods behave differently when consumed by lab rats. Side effects included stomach lesions and ...ahem...rat testicles turning BLUE when they should be more rat-ty colored (pinksh?). SCARY!

There's so much more to it than that and I encourage anyone with the time and interest to find the study in "The European Journal of Histochemistry." If you find it, pass it along, will ya?

Mother Earth Living quotes a Michael Pollan essay:

"These new crops are revolutionary enough to deserve patent protection and government support, yet at the same time the food made from them was no different than it ever was, so did not need to be labeled." 

Mother Earth Living offers a link to this and other reading materials at motherearthliving.com/GMOs.

In the next installation, I'll talk a little more about the major players and what's at stake (money?). And then? I'll talk about my own personal journey and how I'm shifting from one way of eating to a new, more conscious way. It's not immediate and it's not easy, but the more I learn, the more I think it's worth every ounce of effort.

...happy eating!...

crowded kitchen: turkey meatballs with gravy

Not too long ago I made beef meatballs and served them on mashed potatoes. I'm certain it was after reading part of the Pioneer Woman's cookbook (Oh, I love her.) The point of the story is that it didn't go over well with my family. Was it the mashed potatoes? (Too much of a midwest thing?) Or was it the meatballs? (I'm not all that great at them yet.) Either way...fail.

Taking the leap a second time with a failed dinner is not for the faint of heart in my house. But I'm kind of crazy like that and I found another recipe from Better Homes & Garden for meatballs made in the slow cooker with a turkey gravy. Though, instead of mashed potatoes, I cooked wide egg noodles and doubled to gravy to make sure there was plenty of sauce to spare. Success!

My slow cooker is kind of a problem child and "high" really means "burn the crap out of your food," while "low" really means "high with a side of extra high," and "warm" means "your best option."

I hope yours behaves better.

Happy eating!

Slow Cooker Turkey Meatballs with Gravy

meatballs:

1 to 1.5 pounds ground turkey
3/4 cup bread crumbs
1/2 chopped onion (fine)
dash garlic salt or season salt
dash pepper
2 eggs (optional--I didn't have eggs that day and it worked out fine. But eggs are nice if you have them!)

gravy (I doubled this to make sure we had enough):
 packet of turkey gravy
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 cup water

directions:

combine meatball ingredients in large bowl and assemble into 1-inch balls. pan fry them to brown all sides. drain. place meatballs into pre-heated slow cooker.

in medium bowl combine gravy ingredients. pour over meatballs. cook on high for 4-5 hours (slow 6-8 hours) or until done. serve over pasta, mashed potatoes, or in your favorite sandwich vehicle.

crowded kitchen: easy peasy lemonade pie

Now, Boy Wonder and I know for a fact that we didn't invent this recipe. It's everrrrryyywhere (seriously.) 

But, that said...why have we never heard of it until today? I happened to be looking for birthday ideas for the baby girl and this recipe came across our radar. So thankful it did. 

We have an obsession with lemons 'round here. And pie. Lemons and pie. Obviously, we're suckers for dessert.

This little beauty is no bake and uses a store-bought graham cracker crust. So easy...the 8 year old did it all by himself. 

Boy Wonder's Easy Peasy Lemonade Pie

ingredients:

1 (6 oz) can of lemonade concentrate
1 can of condensed sweetened milk
1 tub of frozen whipped topping

Give the ingredients a good half hour to thaw and soften. Mix lemonade and milk. Fold in whipped topping and pour into graham cracker pie shell. Refrigerate at least 2 hours. Try to share with your family. It'll be tough, but try.

Crowded Kitchen: The Acai Mustache Maker (Smoothie)

I was reading an article yesterday and laughed my @## off at a commenter when they said that our sport (jiu jitsu) is known for a few things--acai bowls and cauliflower ear being chief among them.

It's true, and while cold weather and other assorted factors have kept me off the mat lately, the recent drop in temperature and rampant release of flu bugs makes me rethink the benefit of working a little more "jiu jitsu lifestyle" into our winter. Sure, we don't have the beaches the other schools have in So Cal (yes, I'm jealous), but we've got the sunshine. The blinding, eyeball-burning sunshine (which in Alaska in January usually guarantees that it's well below zero and into the negative digits. Blah.)

We love our local Acai Alaska shop, but the problem is that we just might love ourselves into the poorhouse if we frequent it as much as we'd like. They're not cheap! (For good reason, I know. But still...)

Costco had a special on Acai juice today (two smallish jugs for about $7.50). Can I get a "hooray?"

Hooray!

So, in honor of our half-frozen homage to the jiu jitsu lifestyle, here's a quick Acai smoothie that boasts all the superfood benefits of acai, bananas, and blueberries.

Acai Superfood Smoothie

Blend until smooth:

1 banana

1 cup frozen fruit (we used blueberries)

1 cup Acai juice

1/4 cup water (or more, depending on the consistency you like)

It passed the "Boo" test, too...hence the name "mustache maker." The boy sure loves his "smoomies."

Enjoy the day!

Crowded Kitchen: Nanny's Ginger Crinkles

My trip to Texas this month was better than I could have imagined. Good times with my dad and my son. Good food. Hella sunshine. A chance to spend time with my Donna Lynn after a five year absence. Sleeping in my old bed.

And note cards? Recipe cards to be exact.

This year I've slowly become fascinated with cooking. And baking, though the results are mixed and vary, depending on whether I accidentally skip over the "baking soda" line in the ingredients.

In my dad's house, I was pawing through the old bookshelf and stumbled across three recipe boxes FULL of my mom's recipes, handwritten on index cards. Here's the thing about finding these...for years, my mom had the most beautiful handwriting. She had such pride in it, that she did her best to pass it on to me, even if it meant making me re-do my sloppy homework. (Oh, how I cursed her then!)

In recent years, since her diagnosis of the brain disease, her ability to write in the neatly rounded print has dwindled, and often times, when she's quickly jotting notes, I have a hard time reading it. But these recipe cards, well, they tell a story. Not only do the contain all the things I grew up eating, they show the progression of a brain disease of sorts, along with highlighting my mother's fascinations--cranberries, biscottis, cranberry biscotti. You see where I am going.

To make a good find even BETTER, one of the boxes I found had a different penmanship all together. Can you tell where this is going? Oh yes, the motherlode of all recipe boxes...my grandmother, Margaret. Nanny is a woman after my own heart. She devotes precious little space to nonesense like main dishes and vegetables. No, my grandmother gets down with the baking. Muffins. Breads. Biscuits. Cookies. Candy. Pies.

I sat on the phone with my mom on a recent Sunday afternoon reading off the recipes and getting whatever stories went with them. Hermits are Pop's favorite cookies. Penuche is Nanny's favorite candy. Anything with raisins in the recipe was definitely made for Pop. The god-awful sounding things in there like "Cabbage Casserole" and "Minced Clam Lunch" were from an era when Nanny was religiously shedding pounds with Weight Watchers. (Phew!)

Nanny's penmanship is classic cursive they must have taught back in school. It's slanted. It's tightly spaced and feminine. Her s's are perfect. Her f's are elegant. And her recipes? Fantastic.

My mom has made ginger crinkles before. I remember them well, so when I found Nanny's recipe...well, I had to. Consider these my new favorite cookies. And they went well with the boys, too, so I can talk myself into them more often. After all, molasses has a lot of iron, right?

The magic thing about this is that I never grew up close to Nanny. She and Pop always lived on the opposite coast as me, but something happened during that first attempt to cook from her recipe. I learned to trust.

I squinted at the recipe card a few times when I didn't see butter. I saw a whole lot of oil. A lot of the recipes were different than what I'm used to out of today's magazines and recipe Web sites.

"Are you sure?" I asked nobody in particular.

The card was stained and worn. It had obviously been used before, and obviously the results were good if the baker came back to the card time and time again. So I trusted. And I used the nearly one cup of oil. And it was good. Earthy and spicy and crunchy and sweet. So good, I wanted to share Nanny's recipe.

This discovery lit a fire under my butt. I wanted more family recipes. I want them in a book. I want Pam's buckeyes and Dee's peanut butter cookies. I want Cheryl's pie recipes, instructions for my mom's rustic apple tarts, and I want the stories that go with them before nobody wants to tell them anymore. I want my kids and Jeff's kids and Brandy's kids and Justin's kids and Carissa's kids to have this piece of our far-flung, odd, and beautiful family, too.

And I'm working on it, people. :)

Ginger Crinkles

2/3 cup vegetable oil
1 cup sugar
1 egg
4 T molasses
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1/4 cup sugar for coating

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix oil and sugar thoroughly in large bowl. Add egg and beat well. Stir in molasses. Sift dry ingredients to oil mixture. Make walnut-sized balls and cover in sugar. Put on ungreased cookie sheet and bake for 15 minutes. Do not overbake. Cool on rack. Store cookies in tightly covered container. Makes about 3 dozen.

Crowded Kitchen: Gingerbread Pancakes from Omlettery West

I was thinking a lot about my mom today. Partly because of wedding stuff she's totally being awesome about...but mostly because I was being a chicken about calling in on the status of my manuscript and TOTALLY asked her to pretend to be me and bug the editorial assistant for me. She was so game for it, too...

My mom was in the food section of the newspaper once. It was the Austin American Statesman (God Bless America, that is a GREAT newspaper), and she wrote in to the food writer requesting a top secret recipe from our favorite breakfast joint.

If there was ever a poll on which city has the best food, Austin would win my vote hands down, and I didn't even live in that city very long. I actually get homesick for Texas when I think of Austin food, and I grew up (for the most part) in El Paso.

Anyhoo...

The woman responded to my mother in the Sunday edition (it was sometime in the 80s...back when newsrooms were staffed with real people who wrote real columns and loved their jobs) and gave her the coveted Gingerbread Pancake recipe. As recent as a few years back, I remember seeing that yellowed old clipping in the midst of my mom's recipe collection (no, she's not the most organized about that stuff...ahem...Mom...)

(That photo to the left is said Burnett Road Omlettery.)
In my pumpkin pancake post a couple weeks ago, she chimed in about those gingerbread pancakes and how she missed that recipe. But you know what? Google is rad. Way rad. And I found the version of the recipe from Omlettery West (which claims to be different from the one on Burnett Road, where we ate, but big deal. Someday we'll know the difference and we probably won't even care!)

So in honor of her, here is:

Debra's Gingerbread Pancakes (Totally from the Omlettery, though, ok?)

Gingerbread Pancakes
Ingredients:
3 eggs
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup brewed coffee
21/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon ginger
1 tablespoon nutmeg
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, melted

Method:
Cream eggs and sugar together. Stir in buttermilk, water, and coffee and set aside. In a separate bowl sift together remaining dry ingredients.
Stir egg mixture into dry ingredients, then mix in melted butter.
Add more water or buttermilk if necessary, but batter should be thick.
Cook until done on a lightly greased hot griddle or in a heavy skillet (turn once when bubbles appear on upper side and start to break).
Pancakes will be thick and cake-like in texture.

Makes 8 to 10 five-inch pancakes.

Oh, and here's a picture of my mom. She's cute. The handsome chap with her is Boy Wonder. He's rad, too. They're a lot alike.