Way back when, I posted a recipe for gluten-free homemade Oreos. Now, my public (by which I mean three of the seven people who are my FaceBook friends) have requested them in their old-school, glutenous form. How can I resist?
Homemade Oreos (still by way of Smitten Kitchen)
1 1/4 cups unbleached flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (I use the cheap kind that’s half dutched and half natural, with the skeevy-looking chef on the cylinder)
1/2 t baking soda
1/4 t baking powder
1/4 t salt
1 cup sugar
10 T softened butter (1/2 cup + 2 T butter)
1 large egg
In your Kitchen Aid (or with your hand mixer), stir the dry ingredients until well-mixed. Drop in the butter and the egg, and mix till a rich, chocolate-y dough forms. Drop rounded teaspoons of dough about 2 inches apart onto a Silpat or parchment-lined cookie sheet, and flatten slightly. Bake at 350 F for 8-9 minutes, or until the tops are dry-looking and set. Cool completely on racks.
Step Two: Mixing Up the Creamy Filling
1/4 cup softened butter
1/4 cup vegetable shortening (you can get the high-quality non-hydrogenated kind, or you can choose the nasty generic white blob shortening. If you really cared about your health, would you be making Oreos?)
2 cups powdered sugar
2 t vanilla extract
Beat throughly in a mixer until light and creamy.
Spread a blob of frosting on one wafer and top with another wafer, making a sweet little sandwich. Continue to make sandwiches until all your wafers are paired up. As the cook, you are entitled to any broken ones, plus the orphan wafer without a mate that’s left over. Don’t hesitate to frost them generously–there’s plenty of filling here. (Seriously. I always get stingy with the filling at first, and then there’s a blob left over at the end, and I have to twist apart early sandwiches and plump them up with extra.)
Why didn’t somebody tell me about needle felting?
Well, of course, they did. But that whole “stabbing little bits of wool with surgically-sharp barbed needles” thing tapped into my childhood trauma of stepping on a fish hook, so I didn’t get into it. And that was probably best, because now that I’ve tried it, I can see that it will be a consuming madness for a while. (Especially since the progress on Nora’s Sweater is slow, since it is composed almost entirely of vast swaths of impossibly boring stockinette.)
This penguin is, obviously, derived from the instructions in the December Martha Stewart Living. Tuxedo Boy and I came across it as we browsed for cookie recipes, and he was smitten. What could I do? A quick browse of Etsy reveals adorable possibilities. Felted Moomintrolls, maybe? Watch this space–if not for needle-felted marvels, at least for a closeup of any serious injuries incurred.
Happy Christmas, readers who celebrate. Happy day, readers who don’t. After all the festivities die down (we’re Christmas Eve people here at Ramshackle Hall), what better way to spend a winter holiday than reading a work of popular fiction by Amanda M[innie] Douglas?
I give you: Hope Mills, or Between Friend and Sweetheart (1879). Dedicated to Marcus Ward, the Governor of New Jersey.
From its title, I expected a typical romance–perhaps even a Sunday School novel. Imagine my astonishment when I discovered that Hope Mills is not a blushing maiden, but a textile mill, and the novel a sort of industrial love story about the value of cooperatively-organized factories in economic depression.
What makes Hope Mills worth reading is its frighteningly timely description of the Long Depression of 1873-79.
It begins with a bank failure: ”The second week in October there came an appalling crash. Yerbury Bank closed its doors one morning,—the old bank that had weathered many a gale; that was considered as safe and stanch as the rock of Gibraltar itself; that held in trust the savings of widows and orphans, the balance of smaller business-men who would be ruined: indeed, it would almost ruin Yerbury itself.
“There was the greatest consternation. People flew up the street, bank-book in hand; but the dumb doors seemed only to give back a pitiless glance to entreaties. What was it? What had happened? “Every penny I had in the world was in it,” groaned one; and the saddening refrain was repeated over and over, sometimes with tears, at others with curses.
“The old officers of Yerbury Bank had been men of the highest integrity. Some were dead; some had been pushed aside by the new, fast men who laughed at past methods, as if honor, honesty, and truth were virtues easily outgrown. Among these were the Eastmans. George was considered shrewd and far-sighted, and for two years had been one of the directors, as well as Horace. They paid the highest rate of interest, which attracted small savings from all around. There had been no whisper or fear about it, so solid was its olden reputation. There were people who would as soon have doubted the Bible.
“Two days after this, George Eastman sailed for Europe, on a sudden summons,—his wife’s illness. There had been a meeting called, and a short statement made. Owing to sudden and unexpected depreciation in railway-bonds and improvement-bonds, and what not, it was deemed best to suspend payment for the present. In a few weeks all would be straight again, with perhaps a trifling loss to depositors. Already the directors had been very magnanimous. Mr. Eastman and several others had turned over to the bank a large stock of mortgages: in fact, the virtue of these men was so lauded that the losses seemed to be quite thrown into the background.
“But the examination revealed a sickening mass of selfishness and cupidity; transactions that were culpably careless, others dishonorable to the last degree. If the larger depositors had not been warned, there was certainly a remarkable unanimity of thought, as, for the past fortnight, they had been steadily drawing out their thousands. Wild railroad-speculations, immense mortgages on real estate that now lay flat and dead: scanty available assets that would hardly pay twenty cents on a dollar.”
There’s an excellent portrait of a senior partner in the bank which would do nicely for, say, any Goldman-Sachs executive.
“What impression could he make upon this man? To appeal to conscience, justice, or any latent sense of right, would be a waste of words. With him success was right, and failure the blunder or sin. He was to “do well unto himself,” to gain the world’s verdict of approval. That solid flesh made by good eating and drinking, not debauchery or intemperance,—the man had few of these gross vices,—that complacent strength, that keen, concentrating force than could bend all energies in the one direction, never looking back when he had once set his mind to a thing, experiencing no remorse for those he crushed under his feet so long as he went to success over them, knowing no disinterestedness, trading simply upon the credulity, honor, and honesty of others: he had chosen him for some of these very qualities. Do men gather grapes of thistles?”
Later, the hero of the novel, Jack Darcy, travels the country in preparation for launching his own textile cooperative.
“It was a great and wonderful world. Little Yerbury had hardly any true idea what a mite she was, when one looked at the immense labor-fields of the West and apparently endless resources. Yet there was the same depression out here. Shops and mills closed, for sale, and to let; some running on three-quarter time, with half the number of workmen, others going on at ruinous competition; anxious, moody-eyed men walking the streets, or grouped on corners, their coats and hats shabby, their beards untrimmed, old boots and shoes with the heels tramped over at one side, or a bit of stocking showing through the leather. “No man hath hired us,” said their despondent faces plainer than any words. Young men and boys offering to do any kind of work for any kind of pay, sleeping in station-houses; relief-stores, church charities and soup-houses, homes for the friendless, and all such places, filled to overflowing, and new hordes crowding in every day.
“Yet there seemed to be no lack of money. It lay in banks, it went begging for good security. Where was there any good security? Every inch of ground, every building, stocks and furniture, were covered by mortgages. Stock companies trembled in the balance, and went down like card-houses. Everybody wanted to sell every thing, but there were no buyers. Everybody wanted to work, but there was nothing to do. Everybody was in a chronic state of grumbling; there was no profit to be made in farming, in manufacturing, in any thing. There had been too much over-production, for which every one blamed his neighbor. The great warehouses were full of grain, the mills loaded up with iron, the factories full of cloth and flannels and cottons; and yet people were going hungry and in rags. It was puzzling and painful. We had bought too much abroad, and sent the money out of the country, the balance of trade would make it all right again; there had been over-production, and now there must be a vigorous repression; there had been too much speculation in real estate; there had been too great an accumulation of capital in the business centres; we were fast verging to the state of older countries, where there were the few rich and the many poor: there was a surplus of labor, and was there not also a surplus of people?”
The description of Yerbury after a year of depression is terribly reminiscent of Flint, Michigan–or Potlatch, Idaho.
“Certainly it was quite different from the trim little town of Jack’s boyhood. The blight of poverty and thriftlessness had fallen upon it. There were piles of refuse in the streets, still half frozen; there were muddy stoops and shabby hall-doors, and broken area-palings, and now and then a window patched up with paper or rags. For though there may be much high theorizing and preaching on the two or three exceptional men who have lifted themselves out of dens of poverty, and come through great tribulation, there are thousands who work out nothing but blind destruction and utter shipwreck, and who in frantic efforts for salvation drag down those nearest and dearest, as a drowning man may clutch at his own brother.”
There is a love plot, of course; at first I was quite certain the novel was proto-slash, as well as economic romance: Jack Darcy, the working-class hero, and Fred Minor, his wealthy friend, are inseparable in boyhood (Fred calls Jack his “King Arthur”) and the opening line of the novel is this:
“There is Fred again with his arm around Jack Darcy’s neck. I declare, they are worse than two romantic schoolgirls. I am so thankful Fred goes away to-morrow for a year! and I do hope by that time he will have outgrown that wretched, commonplace youth. Mother, it is very fortunate that Jack is the sole scion of the Darcy line; for, if there were a daughter, you would no doubt be called upon to receive her into the bosom of the family.”
Instead, after many misunderstandings, Jack marries Fred’s sister, and Fred marries Jack’s best girl friend, Sylvie. The romance is insipid, though, compared to the thrills of organizing and running a co-op, triumphing over outside agitators, socialists, wealthy industrialists, and the depression itself.
You think I’m joking, but I’m not. I highly recommend Hope Mills. I think I like it best of all my P: PG novels so far.
(Amanda M. Douglas was not a distinguished novelist of ideas–she’s best known for her juvenile series “A Little Girl of,” early historical novels for girls which detailed colonial life in Old Philadelphia, Old New York, Old Boston, and so on.)
Little Sunshine is all about the cutie-pie food these days. This is her extra-lovely marshmallow, shown with the homemade peppermint marshmallows we’ll be dipping in chocolate tomorrow, and some real live mini marshmallows that I’ve been using for fondant. She is the most talented clever girl in the entire world!
The countdown to winter holidays has commenced–Wednesday is my last day at work till the New Year! I’ve got a sweater cast on and ready to go–Interweave Knits’ Nora’s Sweater–and plenty of audiobooks at my command. The Christmas Eve festivities are planned, and then the long week of lounging. But I haven’t forgotten my commitment to the trashy novels of the past!
Guy Livingstone, by George A. Lawrence (1868), is basically the mid-nineteenth century Less Than Zero. Our hero, Guy Livingstone, is a hard-drinking, hard-riding, hard-fighting fellow who falls in love with a very good girl, is tempted by a very bad girl, and ends up losing everything. His story is narrated by a chronically-ill (possibly tubercular) hero-worshipping schoolfellow–a bit as if Ferris Bueller’s Day Off were told by Cameron. (While composing this, I said to the family, “You know what movie I hate?” And from every room in the house, they chorused, “Ferris Bueller?” I do. I hate that movie. I hate the ethos of it, the sexism, the exalting of assholery. I hate the eponymous self-satisfied little sociopath. And I hate the memory of the hundreds of freshman composition review essays about it on which I was forced to comment in the 1980s. (But not as much as Red Dawn, I must admit.))
There’s an unconscionable amount of Greek in Guy Livingstone–perhaps because it commences as a boarding school novel, not unlike Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Unlike that highly-moral volume, however, in GL we are treated to an intimate view of Victorian dissipation, as practiced in public school, University, and the Guards. Guy boxes, hunts, smokes, drinks, and womanizes unrelentingly. There are some gestures in the direction of a plot, mainly concerning the battle between the wicked woman with whom he amuses himself and the good woman to whom he is engaged. The good girl loses, of course, and dies an agonizing death, taking with her Guy’s guilt and remorse. Later there’s a stalker who murders someone, but by then I’d pretty much lost interest in the whole affair, and was just waiting for Guy to get religion and die. But he didn’t! Well, a horse fell on him, and then he died, but he never did convert.
Like Less Than Zero, this novel was hailed as a work of extraordinary topicality and keenly-observed reportage when it was published, and also like Less Than Zero, it’s pretty much unreadable now. Still, for the lover of Victoriana, it’s probably worth skimming. And it’s certainly worn better than the works of Bret Easton Ellis.
That’s our backyard cedar tree in the snow this morning at about 6:30 a.m., when I went out to shovel our walk. Doesn’t it look nice?
Hanukkah. Hurrah!
Menorah in the front window. Latkes. Sour cream. Green beans (more on them later). And jam roll, to take the place of the sufganiyot. Jam Roll which Little Sunshine turned into a zombie, because she’s like that. Silly girl.
Here’s a more dignified photo of the Hanukkah table:
Among the holidays we celebrate here at home, Hanukkah is a front-runner for favorite. It’s easy to be enthusiastic about.
See, I’m not Jewish, wasn’t raised among Jews, and so am completely ignorant about the lived details of Jewish celebration. When Joan decided to de-assimilate, I was all for it, but without any particular notion of how that might work.
Have I told you this story? It seems that the Polish-Ukrainian side of the family were Jewish, but converted to Catholicism at a particularly harrowing late-19th-century moment, before immigrating to Detroit by way of Montreal. They’ve maintained the fiction of Christianity ever since. But in a weak moment in the church kitchen at a wedding, Grandma told Joan. And that was that. At the time, I was still a Quaker, and had no interest in converting, but was delighted to embark on a retro-actively mixed marriage. (Later, this led to a surreally hilarious situation in which some guy Joan met online wrote her some hate mail announcing that she shouldn’t dare to call herself a Jew, since she’d married a Gentile and had kids with her. When she pointed out that she was already married to me when she converted, he apologized. For reals. Lesbian, shmesbian–just don’t marry a shiksa!)
Anyway, back to my point, which is this: I have no Hanukkah performance anxiety. Because I have no idea what my performance ought to be. It’s very, very liberating, especially when Christmas is in the offing.
Over the years, I’ve gathered considerable Christmas anxiety. I’m haunted by my own Christmas Carol-y apparitions: Martha Stewart, clicking her tongue and shaking her head at the state of my achievements; Elizabeth Fry, sighing that gentle, poisonous Quaker sigh and wondering if it wouldn’t be more Christian to alleviate the terrible sufferings of others rather than celebrate a pagan feast; and the brooding dark-robed specter of that Christmas two years ago when Joan broke down as spectacularly and completely as the Roman Empire and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Add to that the general state of world (and domestic) finance, the complexities of (extended) family life, and a fairly demanding job, and it’s no wonder that drinking a gin and tonic-ah, playing a little dreidl, and eating more fried stuff seems like the best possible idea.
Oh, the green beans! I almost forgot. So, as usual, no-one ate the green beans. And rather than heat them up again, I decided to try something so impudently implausible that it made my hair stand up on the back of my neck (which is called horripilation, in case you didn’t know): Faux Chopped Liver. Yes, I read in one of my many Jewish cookbooks that it is possible to make an excellent vegetarian chopped liver out of greenbeans.
You, like me, may be calling bullshit at this moment. Green beans? Chopped liver? Like hell!
True word: it’s scarily close. I’m not saying undetectable, but still. And while I LOVELOVELOVE chopped liver, I sometimes hear my friend Eric-the-vet-student saying, “The thing is, filtration organs. You know?”
So here’s how to make delicious, safe(r)
Chopped Not-Liver
3+ tablespoons vegetable oil (don’t be stingy about the oil)
1/4 cup finely-chopped onion
1/4 cup walnuts
2 cups green beans (leftovers are excellent for this)
2 boiled eggs, peeled
Saute the onion in the oil till it is brown and delicious. Add the nuts and toast them for a while, till they are fragrant and brown. Add the green beans and saute them, too, till they’re on the olive-khaki side. Scrape the whole mess onto a chopping board and chop vigorously with a large knife till everything is finely minced. Add the boiled eggs and chop some more. When it’s a well-combined goop just shy of a paste, swoop it into a bowl, salt and pepper with abandon, and eat on crackers. It’s delicious, nourishing, and frugal: in a word, heimisch.
“Dread is when foreboding shows itself to be justified. Something like foreboding is built into all fiction, I think. Even Barbara Pym novels have a point where you think, ‘Is that altar cloth going to work or not?’ “
Joan works in the Special Care Unit of a nursing home; her residents live with advanced Alzheimer’s Syndrome and other forms of dementia. The kids and I have been putting together some craft kits for the folks on the unit, who really like to make things, especially projects they can share or display. These paperbag owls, which I shamelessly stole from one of the many incredibly gifted teachers at Tuxedo Boy’s school, were a big hit.
If any of you all know of projects which require only very simple cutting and the use of a glue stick, are easy to supervise, and can be readily turned into individualized kits that fit in a ziplock bag, please share! Links, memories, whatever you’ve got–they will be greeted with great enthusiasm by us, and zestful pleasure by their future makers.
It’s cold and snowy out there. And although we had tons of fun on Halloween, and Thanksgiving is just around the corner, I’m not feeling very festive. In fact, I feel distinctly snuffle-y, and my feet are cold. I hate scraping the ice off my windshield. I walk the razor’s edge between my shivering family and an electric bill which exceeds the GDP of many small nations. Winter has a lot of drawbacks–some of which you may be feeling yourself.
So here’s my idea: something truly delicious for dinner that won’t interfere with a long bath, a couple of good books, a pot of coffee, and some intentional languishing. Fast, easy, and so good it’ll make you want to sing. Plus, it’s as good on tofu as it is on chicken.
Osaka Sauce . . . OF THE GODS!
Okay. It’s not precisely “of the GODS.” It’s actually “of the MUSTARDSEED,” a vaguely pan-Asian noodle joint in Spokane, Washington. But until you’ve tasted it, you can’t scoff. Because this stuff is good.
You’ll need some poached chicken, cut into small chunks, or some cubed tofu (at room temperature), or some boiled shrimp, or some steamed green beans, or broccoli, or all of those things mixed together, and some hot, steamy rice.
In your blender (or in a tall, narrow vessel that your immersion blender fits in, like a Pyrex measuring cup), throw together:
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon dry mustard
2 tablespoons sesame oil
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
3 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons rice wine (or, if you like, 1 tablespoon rice vinegar and 1 tablespoon water)
Blend these unprepossessing ingredients into a smooth, caramel-colored emulsion. Pour it liberally over your rice and whatever stuff you’ve selected–I recommend a big old bowl and a spoon, frankly, and a return to the couch.
It’s tangy and savory, with a lemony-mustardy-sweet edge. It keeps for a week, as long as you stir it up well before you use it. It brightens up the day amazingly.
