Getting Braver

I’ve been getting more daring in my cooking attempts. While visiting friends in Boulder, Colo. (food pictures and stories forthcoming), I made guacamole and even helped prepare a slow cooker chili recipe. They sound simple enough, but they were a real stretch for me.

Now that I’m home, I’m attempting to get back on the healthy, home-cooked band wagon. This morning I decided I wanted hard-boiled eggs, yet… I had no clue how to make them.

Searching recent newspaper articles, prompted by the recent Easter holiday, I’m sure, I discovered there are a lot of people who stress out about eggs.

Luckily, Moyra Fraser answered my call. This Telegraph reporter explained how to create hard-boiled eggs that will offer sunny yellow centres. I’ll post later with my results.

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YWCA Cookies

Watch your backs, Girl Scouts. This was way ahead of your time, Mrs. Fields.

Apparently, the YWCA ladies can bake a pretty mean cookie.

It all started when I had a hankering for some chocolate chip cookies. I found a 1977 article buried in the back of the Washington Post that began thus:

It is highly unlikely that the Downtown YWCA’s recipe for chocolate-chip cookies will ever be revealed. But that doesn’t stop people from asking. Or from trying to reproduce it.

The popularity of the cookies has fended off competition from Famous Amos and the Famous Amos knock-off called The Famous.

But a cooking teacher in Arlington took up the chocolate-chip cookie challenge two years ago when the Y re-buffed her request for the recipe.

This teacher, a Mrs. Carol Finkelstein, spent two years trying to recreate this famous recipe — at one point, the article says, she even considered taking the YWCA cookie to be analyzed by a lab.

But if this cookie is so legendary, why haven’t I heard of it? Famous Amos, sure. Toll House, of course. The Neiman Marcus urban legend, yes. But I’ve certainly never been to a YWCA or a YMCA and discovered cookies so good they prompted a two-year quest for the recipe.

I was so perplexed I e-mailed the PR coordinator for the YWCA in Washington, D.C. Apparently, my ignorance was so profoundly idiotic that it didn’t warrant a response. So I stepped up my online investigation.

The National Capital Area YWCA recently held a YWCA cookie bake-off, in the spirit of those great original cookies. Again, though, this article assumes I already know the wonder of the cookies! The article goes on to explain that thousands of these cookies were sold from one YWCA in ONE DAY. Barbara Bush and Sandra Day O’Connor are apparently big fans.

But this is the only non-newspaper place where I can find mention of the “famous” treat. Frankly, the Post and the New York Times seem borderline obsessed with them. This Post article provides a pretty good history of the cookie, which was baked by the same four women from 1951 to 1981.

I think a large part of my intense curiosity surrounding these cookies is the fact that I am so perplexed that something treated as common knowledge in several articles was so totally foreign to me. Reporters constantly struggle to walk the line between making sure their readers have all the background information they need without making the article sound like they’re talking down to readers.

For example, I feel as though people in my generation chuckle a bit when local news stations do specials on Internet predators or the newest, hip thing for kids. I wonder if my great-aunt would be laughing similarly at me and my twitterpations over a freaking famous cookie. (P.S. My spellcheck recognized “twitterpations, but not twitterpate)

And what will happen in the future, when people forget that “tots” is a reference from Napoleon Dynamite and Brittany and Paris are no longer household names? When I first thought about this, I figured it wouldn’t be a problem people could go to Wikipedia or the Urban Dictionary to track down dated references. But if the YWCA cookie is so completely erased from most circles of pop culture, isn’t it inevitable that this will happen to some degree even in our time?

And as for the recipe? I spent too much time researching this weekend and not enough time baking. Check back in a day or so!

AJC for Jamie G.

I have a new food reporting obsession. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s recipe finder.

On many sites, I’ve had a difficult time searching through recipe archives. My queries for “chicken” wind up netting either zero hits or 23946732875. Even ProQuest fails me at times.

So it was a welcome change to discover the AJC’s food page. I admit, I was skeptical of the newspaper’s site at first — the home page was so crammed with advertisements that I thought I hit one of those error pages, where you misspell a word in the URL, so scam artists design a site that looks similar but is just all links and ads.

The food site itself is divided into several categories that seemed pretty intuitive to me:
• What are you bringing? (recipes suitable to bring to a potluck or work function, they seem to serve more people than an average recipe without being restaurant-sized batches)
• Sunday Dinner (more involved meals designed “for when you have more time”
• Fit to Eat (healthy, obviously)
• 5:30 Dinner Challenge (30-minute meals)

Bottom line: AJC: UR DOIN IT RIGHT.

The Journal-Constitution is also doing it right because they’ve hired the talented Jamie Gumbrecht from the Lexington Herald-Leader, where she worked as a pop culture reporter. And although it’s silly that she’s moving away from Seattle instead of closer, I can’t help but be happy for her.

Jamie and me in 2003.

Just for Jamie, I stepped out of my comfort zone again this week with another cooking-but-it’s-sort-of-baking recipe. I attempted broccoli corn bread, and then in a flash of inspiration (and because the site was so freaking easy to navigate), I also tried the peanut butter and jelly cupcakes.

A note to food page designers: I loved being able to rate the recipes, as well as see how many people rated them. Toby was highly skeptical of the corn bread, but I pointed out that 16 people gave it 4 stars.

However, it would have been helpful to know when the recipe was posted and how long the recipes stay posted on the site. I assumed that because 16 people had a chance to try the corn bread, it wasn’t just posted super-recently, but as our Detroit News adventure taught me, I don’t expect it to stay online terribly long.

This meal was served with my mom’s fantastic chili recipe, which is not from a newspaper, but is delicious nonetheless. And I should mention that *I* made this entire meal, so you know it’s simple.

Broccoli Corn Bread

2 (8 1/2-ounce) boxes Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, melted
4 eggs, beaten
1 cup cottage cheese
1 cup finely chopped onion (1 medium)
1 (10-ounce) box frozen chopped broccoli, thawed, excess water squeezed out

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a 9-inch-by-13-inch baking pan.

2. In a mixing bowl, combine corn muffin mix, butter, eggs, cottage cheese, onion and broccoli.

3. Spread in baking pan and bake until cake tester comes out clean and edges are lightly browned, about 35 to 40 minutes.

Notes and Modifications
• Don’t be afraid to overcook this one a bit. It’s extremely moist, so it’s nice to have a crunchier crust.
• Toby’s cousin Alex joined us for dinner. Alex likes corn bread!!

And for dessert, Peanut Butter and Jelly Cupcakes

1 cup creamy peanut butter
1 1/2 cups warm milk (or water)
1 box yellow cake mix
3 eggs
2 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/2 cup strawberry jam

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line 24 muffin cups with paper liners.

2. In a large bowl, combine the peanut butter and warm milk or water with an electric mixer until well-blended. Add the cake mix, eggs and vegetable oil. Beat 2 minutes, until smooth.

3. Spoon the batter into the lined cups. Drop a teaspoon of jam on top and in the middle of the batter in each cup. Press down on the jam slightly with the back of the teaspoon.

4. Bake 20-25 minutes, until the centers are firm. (Do not underbake.) Cool in pan for at least 5 minutes before removing

Nutrition information per cupcake: 199 calories (percent of calories from fat, 44), 5 grams protein, 24 grams carbohydrates, 1 gram fiber, 10 grams fat (2 grams saturated), 25 milligrams cholesterol, 209 milligrams sodium.

Notes and modifications
• Let’s be frank. (And slightly not safe for work.) If you put too much batter in the cupcake cup, the batter doesn’t completely surround the jelly and you wind up with cupcakes that look a bit like this. I mention this on a practical note, in case you don’t want lady-bits cupcakes at your next office party. If, on the other hand, that suits your purposes, I highly recommend them.
• The recipe insists you need paper muffin tin liners, but you don’t. I thought the jelly might seep through the bottom if you didn’t use them, but that wasn’t a problem.
• We used Pillsbury yellow cake mix because it was on sale, and it worked just fine.

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Is there interest?

When Toby and I began this project, I wondered if there would be any interest whatsoever in the history of food reporting. I mean, I knew there are a lot of random, niche research topics out there, but I didn’t know what to expect. (That shoutout’s for you, Franny. Sorry I couldn’t find a better comics link.)

With that, I’d like to thank the person yesterday who ran the term “the history of sesame steak” through their search engine and stumbled upon our site. I don’t know if they found what they were looking for, but at least they were interested.

Sesame steak. We didn’t cook this.

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Chicken Sunday

My mom and dad always joke about the years when my dad would visit Grammy’s house on Sunday afternoons and join the Beltowski family for a chicken dinner.

Mom and Dad, 1972

The chicken got a bit tiresome. And so Chicken Sundays became a bit of a joke in our family.

This year, I belatedly discovered the amazing children’s author/illustrator Patricia Polacco (a fellow Michigander). Her version of Chicken Sunday is quite a bit more touching (and tasty) than ours.

Both these anecdotes are relevant because Toby and I have recently been having Chicken Sundays of our own. Our most recent version of this featured a recipe that ran in the Washington Post in 1999. It’s from an article with the headline, “First you take a chicken breast; one way to saute and 13 ways to sauce a weekday dinner favorite.”

Reporter Pam Anderson supports a pared-down approach in the art of saute:

“There’s no need to pinch, prod, poke or push around the chicken. If the oil temperature and pan size are right, the breasts should be done with one turn in about six minutes.”

She gets straight to the good stuff (at least for me, because I need such basic instruction):

Over time, I’ve learned that to saute chicken breasts properly, you must start by heating the pan before you ever touch the chicken. Since neither oil nor butter is ideal, use a combination of the two. Butter for flavor; oil to increase the smoking point. As soon as you turn on the burner to low, add the butter and oil. Slow, steady heat keeps it from wildly sizzling, spitting, smoking and burning.

This was a pretty basic recipe, from what Toby tells me.

The cook at work.

Without further ado, here’s the recipe:

Sauteed Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breasts

(4 servings)

4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves, trimmed of fat
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1/4 cup flour measured into a pie plate or other shallow pan
Lemon wedges or pan sauce (see following recipes)

1. Pull the tenderloin–the flap of meat attached to a boneless, skinless chicken breast–from each breast half and saute them separately. Some brands of chicken breasts come with their tenderloins already removed.

2. Place the breasts between 2 sheets of wax paper and pound or roll until even in thickness.

3. In a 11- or 12-inch skillet over medium heat, melt the butter in the oil.

4. Sprinkle both sides of the chicken breasts and tenderloins with salt and pepper to taste. Dredge the chicken in the flour. Set aside.

5. A couple of minutes before sauteing, increase the heat to medium- high. When the butter stops foaming, turns brown and starts to smell nutty, transfer the chicken breasts and the tenderloins to the skillet. Cook, turning only once, until the chicken breasts are golden brown, about 3 minutes per side (tenderloins will be done a little sooner). Remove the chicken from the skillet.

Orange-Dijon Pan Sauce With Rosemary

(4 servings)

1/2 cup orange juice
1 teaspoon Dijon-style mustard
1/2 teaspoon minced fresh rosemary
1 tablespoon butter

1. To the drippings in the skillet, add the orange juice, mustard and rosemary and boil over medium-high heat until the liquid is reduced to about 1/4 cup.

2. Carefully tilt the skillet so the liquid collects at 1 side of the pan.

3. Whisk in the butter until the sauce is smooth and glossy.

4. Spoon a little sauce over each sauteed breast and serve immediately.

This week’s meal.

Notes and Modifications
• Per serving: 43 calories, trace protein, 4 gm carbohydrates, 3 gm fat, 8 mg cholesterol, 2 gm saturated fat, 8 mg sodium, trace dietary fiber
• Toby said, “I just followed the recipe to a tee.” So apparently that’s all you need to do.
• Recipe taken from: First, You Take a Chicken Breast; One Way to Saute and 13 Ways to Sauce a Weekday Dinner Favorite. Pam Anderson. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.:Sep 22, 1999. p. F01

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Related to kitsch, newspapers and food, but not recipes

The Taj Mahal of Ballard has been saved, local news agencies reported yesterday.

City Council voted 6-3 to declare the 1964 “Googie” style building (you’re reading correctly, it’s not Google, Seattle’s other business juggernaut) a landmark.

We used to eat here after pulling costume shifts until 2 a.m. at Display and Costume during the Halloween season. People are making fun of the fact that such a ridiculous building is being saved, but as a recent transplant, I agree with those who are saying it’s one of the most defining features of Ballard (at least when you approach it from 15th and Market St.).

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Why on Wednesday?

When I mustered up the courage to call and ask for a tour of the Seattle Times’ test kitchen, I knew not to reach anyone on Tuesday. That’s because Wednesday is the day the Food and Wine section is printed, so I figured Tuesday calls would be impacted by deadline stress that I didn’t want to be a part of.

Seattle’s not the only city to print its food section on Wednesdays. In fact, ponding why many papers print their recipes and reviews on this day was one of the impetuses that caused us to create Clipped and Diced in the first place.

There aren’t many cut-and-dried reasons for why the tradition started. Nor are there researched answers — I quizzed several of the journalism history profs at Michigan State University, and none of them knew anything definite. I do know the author of the now-defunct Saute Wednesday blog assigned special food significance to this day of the week, reinforcing the fact that I’m not the only one interested in it.

The best information I can cobble together is this: Grocery stores began their weekly sales on Thursday. The ads for these sales went out on Wednesday. Thus, if newspapers printed their recipes on the same day the ads went out, efficient homemakers could plot their shopping list and weekly menu in one fell swoop.

This explanation makes sense particularly because many small-town papers align their recipes to items that are on sale.

The author of Endless Simmer calls Wednesday the nation’s newspaper food section day, a phrase I find accurate and sucinct.

Unless you lived in the Bay Area in the 1950s. If you did, Wednesday were just another day.

I found further proof of the print-recipes-on-the-day-the-ads-run theory when I was fiching through the San Francisco Chronicle (I just made that verb up, by the way. Sort of. This guy beat me to it).

In 1957, the Chronicle’s food pages ran on Thursdays. So did all of their grocery ads. Not only that, but “Jean Friendly”’s food advice column touting the benefits of the three new flavors of Campbell’s soup ran immediately next to a five-column ad for… you guessed it, Campbell’s soup.

Article or Ad?

I attempted to see if Jean Friendly was a pen name, and I discovered there actually was a Mrs. Friendly related to journalism. I don’t believe she contributed to this article, however.

I haven’t yet decided if the small “Advertisement” print at the bottom applies to Jean Friendly, or if it applies to the article below. Here’s the whole page for you to decide (I’m not sure why the PDF formatting is wonky):

San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, October 3, 1957, p. 14.

I know I skipped out on a few weeks’ worth of entries. I’ll make it up to you, believe me. I just raided the University of Washington library for books on the women’s pages.

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Duh

Somehow I managed to stumble across this article, after searching fruitlessly in December.

Marinated Flank Steak Salad

For the full story, see here.

The End!

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Baked Brie

I have expressed several times before that I am miserable at cooking. My hope in attempting this week’s recipe was the “baked” part of baked brie would save me.

It’s not the first time that the talented Ms. Emily Bingham has said exactly what I’m thinking, and here are her thoughts on baking people vs. cooking people.

Baking is an exact science, it requires knowing all these nuances about your oven and the weather and such… you sort of have to follow directions (unless you’re a super pro). So basically, I think I’m good at baking because I’m really anal. And cooking favors people like my flamboyant mother, who just tosses things in at random only to have things turn out wonderfully (and when she tries the same things with bread or cookies, it’s always a disaster).

Right on, Emily.

Googling for “baking vs. cooking” also led me to a blog with an author who feels the opposite of me.

Which camp do you belong to, cooking or baking? Is there a way to marry these two distinct leanings?

Onto the recipe. I ripped this one from the December 30, 2007 edition of the Detroit Free Press when I was home for Christmas.

Baked Brie with Roasted Garlic and Herbs

Serves: 10
Prep time: 10 minutes
Total time: 1 hour 30 minutes

Ingredients:
1 whole garlic bulb
1 1/2 teaspoons plus 1 tablespoon olive oil, divided use
1 tablespoon minced fresh rosemary or 1 teaspoon dried rosemary
1 tablespoon minced fresh thyme
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 (1 pound) round loaf sourdough bread
1 (8 ounce) round Brie or Camembert cheese, leave rind on
1 (10.5 ounce) baguette, sliced and toasted

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Remove papery outer skin from garlic, but do not peel or separate cloves.

2. Cut top 1/4 inch off bulb. Place cut side up on foil. Brush with 1 1/2 tablespoons of oil and sprinkle with rosemary, thyme, salt and pepper. Bake 30-35 minutes or until softened.

3. Meanwhile, cut top 1/4 off round loaf of bread. Hollow out loaf so cheese will fit inside. Set aside removed bread. Place cheese inside bread.

4. Cool garlic for 10-15 minutes. Reduce oven heat to 375 degrees. Squeeze softened garlic into a bowl; mash with a fork. Spread over cheese. Sprinkle with additional rosemary and thyme if desired.

5. Replace bread top; brush outside of bread with remaining oil. Wrap in foil; bake 45-50 minutes or until cheese is melted.

6. Slice and serve with toasted baguette slices and reserved bread on a platter.

I don’t have any pictures of the final product because I finished making it at a party of people I wasn’t terribly familiar with and thus I felt silly taking pictures of my food. I will say, however, that it was totally gone by the end of the night and that I received plenty of compliments on it.

Here’s what it looked like after we inserted the cheese, but before we put the roasted garlic on top:

Step one: cut a hole in the bread. Step two: put your cheese in that bread.

And here’s the final product as created in the Freep test kitchen. I couldn’t copy the whole article because it’s not available on the Web site, and I discovered that recipes themselves can’t be copyrighted, but the narrative accompanying the recipe can.

A much lovelier image than I could have created, although the MacBook camera picture of it isn’t the greatest.

Notes and Modifications

• We didn’t use kosher salt. We used regular salt. It seemed just fine. Unless you follow kosher.
• The house reeked of garlic once we were done with it. I began to frantically search for remedies, but then Toby pointed out that incense would fix everything. Duh. Clearly he is the yin to my yang.
• We squished the rosemary and thyme before adding them to the recipe. Apparently this is what you do with spices to activate the flavor. If you are a baker, not a cook, like me, perhaps this information was helpful to you.
• See the tiny decorative sprig of thyme in the Freep’s finished product? Toby did that to ours, and it looked quite lovely.
• Throughout the creation of this dish, I kept insisting that we needed parsley and sage to go with the rosemary and thyme. Toby rolled his eyes.
• We didn’t think it would take anywhere near 45-50 minutes to melt the cheese, but it did.
• Speaking of melted cheese, we almost went the cheap way and got two wedges of Trader Joe’s brie instead of getting a whole round. The rind keeps the cheese in the bread, so if we had gone the wedge route, we would have had an enormous mess.

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Pineapple Pound Cake

Phew. This past week has been devoted to tracking down the date that the Detroit News printed a delicious pineapple pound cake recipe.

The recipe.

Allow me to take you through the process that we undertook to attempt to put this tasty recipe in a historical perspective.

First, we visited the Detroit News’ Web site. The home page gave me the option of perusing the last seven days or looking into the Rearview Mirror at the photo store of Michigan’s yesteryears. I could find nothing beyond that, not even a basic archive search.

Then I tackled ProQuest and Lexis Nexus. Lexis Nexus Academic doesn’t have the News, nor does it have the Free Press. The Daily Yomiuri, yes. Detroit News? No.

I finally had to contact my talented copy editor friend, Benita, to help me out. She found the archive search page at detnews.com, which was a battle in and of itself, but even that only went back a year.

The lovely Benita with Freep copy editor Dan Austin, Detroit’s biggest fan.

She hooked me up even further and went through the News’ internal archives, but those only went back three years. “The font recipe exchange is totally ’80s type,” said Benita, which would obviously put us back much further than three years. We seemed to be a dead end.

But why stop there?

I sent off an e-mail to Neal Rubin, metro columnist at the News. I thought he might be able to unearth something Benita didn’t, because he often writes posts about figuring out random stuff. I also knew him from a high school internship, and we stayed in one-e-mail-a-year touch, so it seemed like a better option than contacting someone random in the News’ library.

Neal was back with answers in a day or so:

Recipes aren’t indexed as far back as this one goes. What I do know is that [reporter] Andrea Wojack worked for the News prior to the JOA, which means before 1989.

So we know that it was, indeed, from the late ’70s or the ’80s.

I just found out today what Wojack is doing now, so I’m planning on contacting her soon. Not that she probably remembers this one particular recipe, but it’s worth a try.

Bottom line: At some point in the 1980s, the News printed a fantastic recipe for pineapple pound cake.

I can wager a guess that the Detroit News reduced its free archived content because it wanted a way to make more money from the Web site. But how can it make money if it won’t even tell me what it has hidden in its archives?

Anyway, onto the cake.

I just skirted disaster when I attempted this recipe, as I was under the mistaken impression that a “tube pan” was just a longer, thinner version of a loaf pan. I needed a ten-inch tube pan and my loaf pan was 9 3/4″, so I assumed I’d be close enough. I called Mom to confirm, and was surprised to discover that a tube pan actually means a Bundt cake pan. Whoops!

Clearly, my background weighs more heavily on the reporting side than the baking side of this endeavor.

That crisis averted, I cautiously brought my laptop into the kitchen so I could bake.

My MacBook meets my kitchen.

The recipe was crazy easy, and although I was skeptical about the pineapple glaze (because it looked pretty gross), the finished product was remarkable. And now, you can make it too!

Crushed Pineapple Pound Cake

1/2 cup shortening
1 cup butter or margarine
2 3/4 cups sugar
6 large eggs
3 cups sifted flour
3/4 cup milk
1 teaspoon sale
1/4 cup crushed pineapple with juice

Glaze:
1/4 cup butter or margarine
1 1/2 cup confectioners sugar
1 cup crushed pineapple, drained

1. Don’t preheat the oven!

2. Cream together shortening, butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition.

3. Sift flour with baking powder and add to creamed mixture in small quantities, alternating with milk.

4. Add vanilla and stir in crushed pineapple. Blend well.

5. Pour batter into well-greased 10-inch tube pan.

6. Place in cold oven. Set the temperature to 325 degrees and bake 1 1/2 hours or until cake springs back in pan when lightly touched.

7. Let cake stand a few minutes in pan, then loosen and invert on rack.

8. For glaze, combine butter, sugar and pineapple. Pour over warm cake. Cool before serving.

Delightful.

Notes and Modifications
• We had regular canned pineapple on hand, but it’s worth it to go out and get diced/crushed pineapple instead so you don’t have to mess with a food processor or anything.
• Obviously, this cake needed to be placed on a larger plate. Don’t make the same mistake we did, as we came dangerously close to a glaze disaster.
• A big THANK YOU to Benita and Neal for all their help!

And just think, without my mother obsessively saving recipes, this one would have been lost for all eternity.

Coming up: the history of the Bundt pan revolution, and a test kitchen adventure.

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