Vesna's Fun World

Michael Pollan is coming to town!

2009-09-22T21:39:00.004-05:00

I'm so excited! Wednesday the Lakeview Libary and Community Groundworks at Troy Gardens is having a potluck and discussion in the evening to discuss In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan as a kickoff event to his visit this week.

I'm getting up early tomorrow before work to bake an apple crisp (not low-carb, but reduced sugar, at least) made with apples from a co-worker's home orchard and from Green's Pleasant Acres, where Jennifer and U and I made our annual pilgrimage this past weekend. On Thursday, the man himself is speaking at the Kohl Center on the UW-Madison campus. On Saturday morning, it's REAP Food Group's annual Food for Thought Festival, where Pollan is the keynote speaker.

I've been a Pollan fan ever since I read his eloquent "Naturally" when it appeared as the New York Times Magazine cover story in 2001. I swooned over every beautiful word in The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World.

I don't agree with Pollan on everything, but if more people turned on to what he's saying, wow, this would be a better place. I wish Obama had taken his advice to turn those manicured acres surrounding the White House into sustainable farmland growing veg for presidential family meals and state feasts! What a message that would have been.

My main gripe – my only gripe, really – with Pollan is his anti-meat, anti-saturated fat stance. It irked me whenever it came up In Defense of Food. He consistently treated the unhealthfulness of saturated fat as a given, even though in several passages he spelled out evidence that it is not. He says humans can live healthfully without plants, but not without meat – but surely he must be aware of the Inuit and the Masai, whose traditional diets included little to no plant food.

His main arguments against eating meat turn on arguments against industrially produced meat – but every one of those can also be used as arguments against all industrially produced food, including his beloved plant leaves. Which, by the way Mike, ya can't live on eating mostly them! Environmental, ethical – all of it. The recent book The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability by Lierre Kieth (a fellow ex-vegetarian, and a feminist – I haven't read the book yet, but I like her already!) spells out the horrific cost to animal life – in greater numbers – that factory farming exacts. Woe to the wildlife that crosses the path of a harvesting machine, for instance.

That's why I'm staying up tonight making a shirt that sasses back at his famous dictum, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Gee, I hope someday I come up with a famous dictum that people quote all over the place. In the meantime, here's the design. And, for readers who aren't familiar with it, here's the cover of his book which I'm spoofing, with Pollan's oft-quoted manifesto printed on the yellow band around the romaine. (Bibb?)

To that I say this: "Eat food. Mostly cheese."

That's my Wisconsin manifesto.

Indian Lake Hike with Reeb UU Congregation

2009-09-13T06:32:00.002-05:00

We loaded up a few carpools and headed west to Indian Lake Park. Click on the picture to view a slideshow.

Indian Lake 2

2009-09-12T06:58:00.000-05:00

Sarah Elmore organized the trip. Everyone had a great time.
Lexander found a stand of rare Indian Pipe flower. Angus found more nearby, and a trunk of tree ear mushroom.
Ulysses and me in a log cabin in a clearing.
We picnicked in the shelter after working up an appetite on the three mile hike!

Goodbye, Greyhound

2009-09-11T12:52:00.002-05:00

When we saw off Don's mother last Friday at the bus depot, we noticed a reporter type interviewing folks. We waved him over and wound up as the lede for the article he wrote!

http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/article_cf6caa9c-9d77-11de-8f87-001cc4c03286.html

U's first day of school

2009-09-01T07:36:00.001-05:00

Click on the picture with the arrow to see more pictures and two short videos of U's first day of school.

Ulysses was so excited to go to "big boy school." This summer he attended a six-week K-ready program that the school system provided. This, though, is the real thing! As it happens, his teacher, Ms. Ward (white cardigan) is the same teacher who evaluated him in March and recommend the summer school. They had instant rapport.
Ulysses wore jeans that Amma (Don's mother, Janice) sent earlier and a green checked shirt and white sneakers that we bought with funds she sent for school clothes. The backpack is a one-dollar find from a yard sale Don and Amma went to. For years Amma has been saying she will come and help Ulysses with the start of kindergarten. This year, it all came true. We went shopping for school supplies a week or so ago and had them all assembled to bring in to class. Nowadays they give you a list of what to get, including some classroom supplies.

The tables were set with an apple nametag for each child. Ulysses said, "I love my nametag!"

Everything goes better with...

2009-08-20T06:04:00.003-05:00

Don's mother arrived from Savannah on the Greyhound bus Tuesday evening for a long visit. For years she's been saying she wants to be here when Ulysses starts kindergarten, and now here it is. His first day will be Sept. 1. Tonight we're all going to the elementary school for registration. He's already registered, but we can meet his teacher, see his room and so forth.

The bus rolled in from via Milwaukee around 7:30 and we stopped at the China Wok on our way home to pick up our traditional Chinese feast, as we do every time she comes to visit. This time Ulysses seemed to know what Chinese food was, or at least he crowed about it and was thrilled when Don came out of the strip mall storefront laden with a heavy bag. We had been strolling along the shrubbery-lined walkways with Don's mother, who U calls "Ama," trying to get that rubbery road trip feeling out of her legs. "Chinese food!" he called. "You got the Chinese food!"

Back home we ate what seemed vats of egg foo yung with gravy, won ton soup, pork fried rice, lo mein with all sorts of seafood and meat -- it's the Wok's house special -- beef with broccoli. We each got an egg roll, too. That was Ulysses's pick.

He had his on a plate with a plenty of duck sauce and Annie's natural ketchup. Round and round went the end of the egg roll in the custom sauce between every bite. The orange and red swirl had to be replenished once or twice over the course of the egg roll. At the end of the meal, when we lifted the plate there was a ring of crunchy bits in red sauce that had built up around it over the course of the meal, left neatly behind like a reverse stencil of some kind.

When Ama got in the fold-down futon couch/bed in the living room for the night, Ulysses jumped in with her, smiling happily. "Read me a story!" he said. "Read me the scary book!" (Bears in the Night by the Stan and Jan Berenstain.)

"I'm too tired to read a book to you," said Ama. "I'll tell you a story. A story about when I was a little girl."

Ulysses's eyes shone in anticipation.

"Once upon a time there was a little girl and her two brothers. They went walking in the woods and they found some blackberry bushes. They were the juiciest, sweetest, darkest blackberries ever."

Ulysses was fairly bouncing with joy.

"They picked and picked and picked the blackberries and then they took them home. Their mother brought out some cream...."

Ulysses burst out, "...and then they put it all in a bowl with ketchup!"

.

They hate the taste of mint

2009-08-16T07:41:00.007-05:00

Ulysses ran to the bathroom and shut both doors.

When I had called, "Bedtime!" he had sprung from his computer without a word. Now he waited for me to slip inside and reach up for the toothbrushes and toothpaste. One hand covered his mouth.

One night in June, I had been going through the excruciating nightly routine of coaxing Ulysses into the bathroom for tooth brushing. He was already in the bed, and did not intend to get back out. "Do you want me to brush your teeth for you, or do you want to brush your teeth yourself?"

"No. No tooth brushing tonight."

"That's not one of the choices. I will hold you down and brush your teeth. Is that what you choose?"

"Me, I'll brush."

"All right."

Pause.

"Come on."

Silence. Ulysses dug himself more deeply under the covers.

I was steeling myself to drag him out of the bed and carry him bodily into the bathroom when Donald spoke up.

"At bedtime, monsters come and take your teeth. But they don't take teeth that are clean and brushed. They only take dirty teeth. And they hate the taste of mint."

Ulysses sat up. Without a sound, he bolted into the bathroom and slammed both doors. I came in to find him with his hand covering his mouth. He quickly shut the door behind me.

We brushed our teeth together. He watched carefully, mimicking my every move with his own Spongebob Squarepants toothbrush. It was the lengthiest cleaning his teeth had ever had.

* * *

Since then, the nightly trial of getting to bed and brushing teeth has evaporated into this: "Bedtime!" and a dash for the bathroom, followed by a thorough application of dentifrice. I don't believe I've ever brushed my own teeth this well and this consistently, come to think of it.

He no longer shuts the doors and covers his mouth with his hand, of which I'm glad. I want him in bed and I want his teeth clean, but I don't want him traumatized, after all. After we brush our teeth every morning and night now, he likes to exhale with a proud puff and say, "I smell like mint! Monsters hate the taste of mint!"

* * *

About a month in, though, there was a wisp of rebellion. We were in the bathroom, but he wouldn't take the toothbrush.

"There are no monsters," he said. "They don't really come for your teeth."

"Oh, yes, there are," I replied. "They're so tiny that you can't see them. They're called 'germs.' Have you seen people with teeth missing? The germs ate their teeth. The germs grow in your mouth, but they can only stick to dirty teeth. That's why we scrub our teeth clean and rinse our mouths to wash the germs out and spit them down the sink."

I thought about showing him some of my own fillings, but he took his brush, convinced. Semmelweis should have had it so easy.

Who's wiping whose bottom?

2009-08-15T20:26:00.003-05:00

I was wiping Ulysses's bottom when he said to me, "Mama, I don't want to be a little boy."

"What do you want to be?" I asked.

"A big boy."

I was silent for a moment. Then I said, "You're getting bigger every day."

"Bigger than you!" he said.

"You say you're bigger than me?" I asked.

"Yes, I am!"

I thought about that. "You know, big boys wipe their own bottoms."

.

Girl suit

2009-06-21T06:37:00.006-05:00

Yesterday was a perfect summer solstice day. It was warm and bright, with puffy white clouds. By midday, the sun had burned off the humidity from the heavy rains of the late afternoon and night before, leaving a clean, clear, sky-blue heat that called us out into the yard until evening.

In the morning, when the air was still thick, redolent of chorophyll and moist earth, we all went yard sale-ing. We came home with good loot, including plenty of outdoor toys for U: a toy sting ray that can be filled with water and squeezed to deliver a far-reaching stream; a ball tee that instantly transformed Don's cousin Neil's gift of a ball and bat into one of the most played-with toys in U's pantheon (instead of a source of frustration for U, because it's darn hard to hit a ball that's in the air!); a play fountain with changeable heads that express a variety of showers; a set of plastic horseshoes that we would much rather have 5-year-old U play with than our real, toe-breakable ones.

In no time, Ulysses was stripped down and jumping from wading pool to gooey sandbox to fountain or sprinkler or the newly rediscovered frog-shaped sprinkler from another yard sale outing years ago (he changed them out frequently over the course of the day).

Whenever he carried the frog to the hose end, he turned it over and pointed out the frog's four feet, telling me with excitement, "Frog prints. Look! There are the frog prints! Do you know about frog prints?"

It was hours before I realized he had reinterpreted the phrase Frog Prince.

* * *

"I need my baby suit," said Ulysses, and he ran inside to search for his swim trunks.

"Here's your bathing suit," I said, finding it in the lowest drawer of the high boy dresser Don restored years ago, in hopes of a child to give it to.

"Not bathing suit, Mama," he corrected. "Baby suit."

"Bathing suit," I repeated.

"Baby suit," he insisted. So I dropped it.

Later, when we were splashing together under the hot sun, Ulysses saw my clothes were starting to get wet. "Take off your clothes, Mama!" he shouted, gleefully.

"I can't take off my clothes out here; I'm a grownup."

He looked puzzled at this, then said, "Then go inside and put on your girl suit."

What kind of cake? Birthday.

2009-02-14T06:57:00.008-06:00

Ulysses is into knights and castles these days, so I got the idea to make him a cake shaped like a castle, with crenolated turrets made from flat-bottomed ice cream cones, and spires of inverted pointy cones. I was going to bake in a big, rectangular pan, cut out the center for a courtyard, and build up the corner towers with the material I had cut out from the center. Graham cracker drawbridge and door. Licorice ropes.

"Ulysses, your birthday is coming," I told him a couple of weeks ago. "How would you like a cake shaped like a castle?"

"A castle cake? No," he said.

"For your birthday cake," I said. "With towers and a gate and a courtyard."

"No!" he said.

Obviously he didn't understand what I meant, I thought. I showed him some pictures of castle cakes on the Internet. "No," he said to all of them. "No cake castle."

What's with this kid? I thought. Doesn't he realize how fabulous this cake will be? I started up the conversation a few more times over the following week. It always went the same way.

Then I had a brainstorm. "Ulysses," I said, "Your birthday is coming up. I will make you any kind of cake you want, in any shape. What kind of cake would you like for your birthday?"

He answered without hesitation. "A mountain."

I was embarrassed at how silly I'd been. Whose birthday was it, anyway?

"A mountain!" I said, "Do you want your mountain to be a volcano?"

"No."

It was such a great idea, I assumed he'd misunderstood the question. I asked him a few more times, describing how the cake would look, with lava and all.

"No."

So I supposed I wasn't completely cured of whatever led me to try to feist the castle idea on him. I dropped the volcano idea and thought I'd draw out some more details.

"Do you want the mountain to have a tunnel going through it?"

"Mmmmm.... yes," he said, decisively.

Uh-oh. How on earth was I going to put a tunnel in a cake? Well, I'd walked myself right into that one. I got on the Internet and found a cake that looked promising. It even had a Thomas the Tank Engine track running through it, with trains going round and round! Perfect -- we've got all that. Donald looked at the picture and description and explained to me how it was made (he's genius at that sort of thing, unlike me). Great! I could do that!

I showed Ulysses. "Is this what you want for your birthday cake, something like this?"

He looked pleased. "Yes," he said, like a happy client to an architect who had finally figured out the assignment.

I spent some time figuring out how to put the track together on the board I'd be building the cake on. Took some pictures to guide me in reconstructing it later. Over the week, I gathered materials, and thought about how to build this thing. Emptied and cleaned a big tomato can for the tunnel (it would be slit down one side and then stretched open).

* * *

Yesterday evening, Ulysses and I were at the grocery store. I was shopping for the candies to make into jelly bean boulders, peanut cluster rocks, pretzels for logs and so forth.

I thought I'd better do a reality check. I squatted down to Ulysses, who was in the little car in front of the shopping cart, and said, "Ulysses. You know your birthday is coming." He looked at me. "I will make you any kind of cake you want for your birthday party. What kind of cake do you want?"

"A birthday cake," he said. "Round birthday cake."

"Do you want it to look like a mountain?"

He looked at me as if I had just turned purple. "No."

"Do you want a cake shaped like a mountain with a tunnel in it?'

"No."

"Do you want a mountain cake with a tunnel and a train going through it, like the picture we looked at and you said that was what you wanted for your birthday cake?"

"No! No!" His voice began to rise in panic.

"Okay, okay, you want a round birthday cake," I said, switching tracks. "Do you want it to be chocolate?"

"Yes!"

"Do you want it to be chocolate on the outside and chocolate on the inside, or yellow on the inside?"

"Chocolate outside and yellow inside," he said.

After a bit we went to the baking aisle and I showed him a cake mix with a picture on the box of a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. "Does this look like the kind of cake you want for your birthday cake?"

"Yes!" he said with excitement. I saw a flash of confusion cross his face when I put the box back on the shelf, but it was gone quickly when he heard me say, "OK. That's the kind of cake I'll make for your party."

"Yes! Birthday cake! Round! Chocolate outside, yellow inside!" he said.

So that is the current plan for the Sunday party. Meantime I already have a double batch of frosting (half is chocolate), enough for the enormous mountain, which would have used two cake recipes.

Maybe I'll make a small mountain cake for my own amusement.

A definition of fashion

2009-02-03T12:10:00.001-06:00

After all, what is fashion but some guy doing something that's not in style – first?

Kupus: Serbian cabbage soup

2009-02-01T06:12:00.001-06:00

The most fundamental heirloom recipes are often most at risk for being lost in the sands of times. Why? One reason is that "everyone knows" how to make them, and so nobody writes them down. Another is that they're so close to us, so intertwined with daily life and the act of ordinary eating, that the people who live with these recipes don't even think of them as recipes.

Consider the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. If you were raised in the USA, you might snort and say, "PBJ? You don't need a recipe for that. You just make it." And that is precisely what would make a recipe for, or a really accurate and comprehensive description of, that thing difficult to find a generation after it has gone out of style.

Years ago, I had some friends over for a writing session. I had just made a pot of soup, so I shared it with them. Never would I have dreamed of making it especially for guests; it was just ordinary soup.

They went crazy over it. They demanded the recipe. The richly flavored broth, the big, rustic chunks of well varied vegetables, the savory rings of sliced sausage – they enthused over the most ordinary features in their ordinary bowls. I was taken aback. "There is no recipe," I said, "It's just soup."

"What kind of soup?" they wanted to know.

"Cabbage soup?" I said, feeling like I was giving a flip answer. The soup was built around the cabbage. I didn't know what else to call it.

"Well, can we have the recipe for your cabbage soup?"

"Um, OK," I said, and then never did anything about it. The idea seemed weird, writing a recipe for this. Wasn't it obvious from looking at, how it was done? You go into the kitchen and start putting things into a pot until you have soup. What was there to say?

It took me years to notice that I was responding just as home cooks too often do about the everyday food that is the bedrock of their own culture's cuisine. I've been on the other side of the conversation myself, trying to pry open the oyster that somehow won't believe there's a pearl. There's no recipe. It's just minestrone. There's no recipe. It's just tempeh with onions. Or chile ancho stew, or chicken and dumplings.

And that's how stuff gets lost.

Reflecting on my ordinary soup, which seemed so inchoate, so spontaneous and free of recipe or method, I realized there was plenty I knew about it. First of all, it has a name: Kupus. The "u"s are long, as in cuckoo, and the stress is on the first syllable. It means "cabbage soup," and it's the same as the word for cabbage itself. Sauerkraut, an ingredient I'd forgotten to include for years, is called "Kiseli Kupus" (KEE-seh-lee KOO-poos), or sour cabbage. So the whole thing is sort of cabbage to the third power.

I didn't make this soup up, as I had thought (actually, I wasn't thinking). I learned it from my mother, who made it often. I do a couple of things differently than she did; she used a can of Campbell's vegetable or cream of mushroom soup to fortify the broth, while I use a couple of
cups of my homemade stock -- the type I usually have on hand is chicken. I use a wider range of root veg also. I remember her using potato and carrot; I like to include parsnip and rutabaga as well.

Also, I include the soft, inner green leaves of a celery bunch in my aromatics, sauteeing it along with the onion. This is a trick I learned from my macrobiotic years, along with the roll cut, which I use for the parsley.

This is one of those dishes that everyone makes, and everyone makes a little differently. My mother made it different ways, too: sometimes with a hamhock, sometimes with no meat at all, sometimes with kielbasa as I've described below. We called whatever sausage we used "kobasica" (ko-BAH-seet-sa), the Serbian word for sausage. The vegetable combo varied, too.

Kupus is a wonderful, comforting soup, especially in wintertime. I love to have plenty of broth in my bowl, and I always take an extra moment to select a spoon that will be pleasant to sip from. I like to have a big chunk of cabbage in my bowl, and carve off bits with the spoon as I go.

The simplicity of the seasoning is, I think, elegant: salt, bay leaves, parsely. Whole peppercorns exude a soft, ember-like warmth that grinding shatters and sharpens (I've tried); it's key to the soup's character. Parsnips, rutabagas, even potatoes -- these are optional. Whole peppercorns are essential.

Kupus (Serbian cabbage soup)

Ingredients (listed in the order they're added to the pot)

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 large onion, sliced
• the inside of a bunch of celery, including leaves and tender shoots
• 2 outer stalks of celery, cut in 1/2" crescents
• 4 carrots, cut in 1/2" rings
• 2 parsnips, roll cut
• 1/2 rutabaga, cut in 1/4" x 1/4" x 3/4" slabs
• 2 cups homemade chicken stock or beef stock, brought to the boil
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 10 whole peppercorns
• 2 bay leaves
• 1/2 cup fresh parsley, or 3 tablespoons dried parsley
• 1 small cabbage, or 1/2 cabbage, cut in chunks that include the core
• 2–3 medium potatoes, scrubbed and cut in 8 or • 12 pieces (cut longways, then 3 or 4 horizontal cuts)
• 1–2 packages of Polish kielbasa (or ring baloney, or a big hamhock), cut in 1/2" rings
• 2 cups sauerkraut, with the juice (Gundelsheimer is my favorite!)
• several cups water, brought to the boil

You will need a big pot, at least 6 quarts capacity.

Heat the oil in the pot over medium-low. Add onions and cook until they're a light golden brown, about 10 minutes. Add the inner parts of the celery and cook until softened, about 3 minutes. Add the carrots, parsnips and rutabagas. They don't need to hit the pot at the same time; just keep prepping and adding to the pot as you get them ready.

In a separate pot, heat the stock to a boil and add it to your sauteed veg. Add the salt, peppercorns, bay leaves and parsely. From this point on, it is not necessary to stir after adding anything.

In yet another pot, or a tea kettle, bring several cups of water to boil, but don't add it just yet.

Prep and add the cabbage. When you prep the cabbage, don't cut out the core. That's essential for keeping it in big chunks that stay together during cooking. Just slice off the very bottom, if it looks brownish to you, and discard the outer leaves. Then cut lengthwise through the core to quarter it, and then cut that horizontally into pieces. You'll also have lots of leafy pieces that aren't connected to the core. After you add the cabbage, start a timer for one hour.

Add the potatoes. Add the kielbasa. Add the sauerkraut.

Add hot water until the pot is full to about two inches from the top. Everything should be submerged.

Your soup will be done one hour after you added the cabbage. Taste and adjust the seasoning, adding more salt if needed.

Grind some fresh pepper over the individual servings. It's a different kind of heat than the warmth of the cooked peppercorns. In case you didn't know, don't eat the bay leaves!

Enjoy this soup with some rustic bread for dipping, or all by itself. This is a filling meal in a bowl.

I'm a volunteer!

2009-01-24T06:41:00.005-06:00

I just signed up to be a volunteer recipe tester for Cook's Country magazine, which I love. If I had to pick a favorite magazine, I'd have to say CC edges out even Cook's Illustrated in my affections, because of the 50's-ish retro production style, what with its ever-so pastel-cast color photos and lightly country elements.

Supposedly I'll be getting notifications of recipes to test every couple of weeks. I can try them or skip them as I please. After I prepare the dish, I send in my notes.

I get to give Cook's Country my two cents! And to think, I was just telling someone my dream job would be as a writer and tester in their kitchens.

Close enough for now!

Dan i Noć (Day and Night Serbian bar cookies)

2009-01-09T20:39:00.010-06:00

I've always loved the name of these cookies – "Dan i Noć" (pro nounced "DAHN ee NOCH,") translates as "Day and Night." They show their sense in such a forthright way. Day and night: a light layer and a dark layer. What could be more sensible? The layer of apricot jam between the day and the night makes sense, too: a shimmering sunset – or perhaps a sunrise – of transluscent orange.

These cookies – or little cakes, as you might consider them – are generous and rich. The recipe includes a pound of butter, a dozen eggs, darn close to a half pound of chocolate, a whole jar of apricot preserves. Speaking of which, I recommend spending the extra couple of bucks to get really good apricot preserves. Look for apricots as the first ingredient, and real sugar as opposed to high-fructose corn syrup or other sweeteners. (Fruit-only sweetened is good, too.) If you buy more than one jar and do a side-by-side taste test at home, you will see how big a difference it really makes.

I remember having these at the home of my aunt and uncle when we would visit around Christmastime. it was one of the sitni kolaći (little cookies) specialties of my Grandaunt Naka (b. 1913), whom I shared more about here. Like Naka's Vanil Grancle, these feature apricots, that grow so well around her native town of Kikinda.

My cousin tells me Naka got the the recipe from her best friend, also from Kikinda. The best friend's family helped Naka's family in some way during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia, but I don't know the story beyond that.

Here's Ulysses in January 2008 (nearly four years old in this picture) enjoying a piece of Dan i Noć.

Shortly after this photo was taken, that laptop stopped working. Turned out it was plugged up with cookie crumbs.

I'm posting this today as a hat tip to my niece, Anne (she is the daughter of my cousin, and by the Serbian way of looking at family relations, that makes her more of a niece to me than anything else), 7. She loves Dan i Noć, and was sad to discover there wasn't any at the family get-together in Baltimore this year. My cousin wrote, "She was really, really bummed when she heard that no one made dan i noc. I remembered telling her to choose either gitar [another exceptional sitni kolacic in the family, I'll post that recipe too] or dan i noc as her favorite and she chose gitar so that's what i made but it seems i may have forgotten to tell her why i was asking. she got tears in her eyes, made me so sad!

"so this weekend we're making dan i noc. that works because i wouldn't have had time to make it with her before Bozic [Serbian Christmas] this time and making it together is just as important as having it for Bozic!"

Here's Anne last year (she was Annie then) enjoying the Dan i Noć she made with her mother for Božić 2008.

Recipe: Dan i Noć

Filling
1 jar apricot preserves

Noć (Night)
2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
6 medium eggs (or 5 large)
6 squares (or 6 ounces chips) semisweet baking chocolate (each square is one ounce)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Dan (Day)
Same ingredients as the Noć, but without the chocolate:
2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
6 medium eggs (or 5 large)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

1. Melt chocolate
Melt the chocolate. Use low heat and stir often, so the chocolate won't seize or scorch. Use a heavy-bottomed pan, a flame tamer, or a double boiler if you have one. By the time you add the chocolate to other ingredients, it should be liquidy, but cool enough that it won't cause the eggs to cook on contact.

2. Soft-bake the Noć
Cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs one at a time. Stir in the chocolate and vanilla.

Whisk together flour and baking powder. Mix these dry ingredients into the wet mixture. This will make a soupy batter.

Line a rectangular baking pan with parchment paper or aluminum foil. No greasing is needed. Pour in the batter. Shake sideways, or rap the pan sharply against your counter, to knock out extra air bubbles. You can see in my photos that I missed this step – see what happen?

Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes. It needs to be firm enough that you can spread jam over it, but not baked through, That is, at this point a toothpick inserted in it will not come out anywhere near clean.

3. Prep the Dan
While the Noć is in the oven, prepare the batter for the Dan. Cream butter and sugar, beat in eggs one at a time, beat in vanilla, whisk together flour and baking powder, stir dry mix into wet mix.

4. Apply the jam layer
Remove from oven. Spread the apricot preserves evenly over the dark Noć layer while still warm.

5. Add the Dan layer
Carefully pour the light batter evenly overtop the contents of the pan.

6. Final bake
Put the pan back in the oven for another 30 minutes, or until a knife (or cake pick) inserted in the center comes out clean. The instructions I received say to check the Dan, but I found that the Noć took longer to bake through, so make sure your Dan and your Noć are baked throughout.

The Dan will be beautifully golden brown on top. If the Dan is as browned as it needs to be, but the cake inside still needs more baking, cover the pan tightly with foil (or place a cookie sheet over it) so the top won't overbake.

7. Cool and cut
Let cool. Carefully lift the whole cake from the pan and transfer to a large cutting surface. Slice into rectangular pieces about the width and length of your index finger. Cut carefully and methodically so that your pieces are evenly sized, with straight sides and square corners. I used the patterns on my wooden cutting board as my guides.

The finger-sized pieces are lovely and make hearty portions of this rich dessert. However, after a while I cut some of them into thirds, and found this size makes a wonderful bite-sized treat.

Bozic - Serbian Christmas 2009

2009-01-07T23:50:00.003-06:00

It was great taking a couple of days of work to putter in the kitchen and make these heritage meals. After work our friend Gigi came over, hooray, our Serbian holiday co-celebrant as I've said before. Especially great to have her here because we've missed her on the last couple of occasions.

Corba od Patligan - otherwise known as tomato soup

2009-01-06T20:21:00.005-06:00

I pulled off the Badnje Vece meal more smoothly than ever this year! Not like the years that I would finally get everything (that I hadn't forgotten) on the table by 11 pm. I got eight courses set out before 7 pm, and I only spent the last hour working full throttle. I even made the kidney bean salad from a deeper scratch – dried beans that I soaked overnight, rather than a can. My testimonial: it's different, and it's even better. It has an ineffable homemade quality. The beans are a little grainier in texture, very nice.

Donald gave me props on the tomato soup. Since I threw it together without a recipe, just putting everything into the pot that I thought would be good to find in tomato soup, I figured I'd better write it down fast while I remember what I did.

Remember, it has to be animal-product free. So I had to stop myself from reaching for the butter and the homemade chicken stock!

Corba od patligan
(CHOR-ba od paht-LEE-jahn, with the "j" as in "Jack")

4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 large onion, diced
1 clove garlic, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
2 tablespoons AP flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
several fresh grindings black pepper
2 bay leaves
1-2 shakes red pepper flakes
4 tablespoons (approx) fresh or frozen fresh parsley
1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes, juice and all

In a deep, heavy pot or Dutch oven, heat the oil. Add the onions and cook over medium heat until cleared and beginning to brown. Add the garlic and celery partway through this onion cooking process.

Add the flour and stir well. Let the flour cook in for a few minutes. Add salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, bay leaves, parsley and tomatoes. Fill the tomato can with water twice and add it to the pot.

Simmer, covered, about a half hour. Stir occasionally, making sure it doesn't stick and scorch on the bottom.

If you like, you can blend this smooth when you're done, or strain it. But I don't care so much for perfectly smooth soups, myself. I like it rustic.

Badnje Vece – Serbian Christmas Eve – Menu

2009-01-05T19:03:00.007-06:00

Tomorrow, January 6, will be Serbian Christmas Eve. Technically, it's called Badnji Dan during the day, and in the evening Badnje Vece. If you guess that "Dan" means day and "Vece" evening from this, you'd be correct. But as I remember, we always just called it Badnje Vece, all day long, in my household growing up.

The photo shows my Badnje Vece table from 2005. Here's my blog post from that year.

I wrote a bunch about Serbian Christmas (Bozic) customs in an article several years ago. Here's a link to it on my online article archive:
http://vesnaswriting.blogspot.com/2009/01/serbian-christmas.html

Badnje Vece is a day of fasting from meat, fowl, dairy and egg products. But it's not a vegan day! The main course of the Badnje Vece dinner is fish.

The traditional menu for this meal is extensive. And, meat and dairy or no, it is as filling a repast as any I've experienced. In the early 1990s, my mother, who was born in 1920 in Ruma, a town in Srem, near Belgrade, described the Badne Vece meals she remembered from her youth. I wrote it down in my recipe notebook. Here's what she told me.

Badnje Vece menu

Kolac on the table, but not eaten until Bozic proper
Fruit – cooked prunes
Posna pogaca (flatbread)
Corba od patlidjan (tomato soup)
Pasulj (kidney bean and onion salad)
Rezanci c makom (noodles with ground poppy seed)
Rezanci c badem (noodles with almonds)
Riba (fish)

In addition, a friend told me that apples with nuts and honey are also traditional. Just slice the apples and put out a little bowl of ground walnuts and a little bowl of honey. These are put together on the fly, one at a time, by the eater – like chips and salsa. You pick up an apple slice and dip the end into the honey. Then you dip the honeyed, sticky end into the walnuts. Presto: you've prepared yourself one lovely bite of apple with nuts and honey.

The beans are delicious, and so easy to make. Here's the recipe my mother gave me. I doubt her household had canned beans in the 1920s, but it's possible, as her grandparents owned a general store. If there were commercial canned beans at that time, that's where they would be, after all.

Pasulj
(Kidney bean salad)

one can light red kidney beans, including the liquid
one small onion, diced (about 1/3 cup)
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1/8 teaspoon salt
several grindings of pepper
1/2 tablespoon white vinegar
1/2 tablespoon lemon juice

Mix all in a bowl.

Chill at least a few hours, or overnight.

Happy new year!

2009-01-01T21:09:00.005-06:00

For the first time in years, New Year's Day was a relaxing vacation day at home -- paid time off, to boot. The past two years, I went to my job on Jan. 1. The year before that, I don't remember -- I guess I stayed home along with most other co-workers. Before that, though, when Don and I were driving cab, Jan. 1 was a day to recover from the most grueling, busy night of a cabbie's year.

But this was the first that I recall devoting Jan. 1 to a leisurely day off. It was a great way to start the year.

On and off during the day I puttered in the kitchen, making New Year's Day foods that are traditional either for me and Don personally or for a larger audience. Here's what we had.

Menu
Deviled Eggs

This is a tradition Don and I started the first New Year's we spent together, when 1992 became 1993. The two of us were together in our little basement apartment on Gorham Street, and as the clock wound down, I let out that I regretted we hadn't planned anything, we didn't have anything special lined up to happen at the stroke of midnight. Don sprang into action. He pulled out his old Slovak Cookbook that he'd gotten from his grandmother and found some fast, fun, festive recipes – cheese puffs and deviled eggs -- and made both happen in the 40 minutes remaining. Since then, we've made deviled eggs every year and cheese puffs some years. The eggs, especially, make perfect sense as a new year's tradition. Eggs and birth and newness and all that.

Hopping John

Beaten Biscuits

Egg Nog

Not even in effigy

2008-12-28T09:10:00.006-06:00

The chocolate coins are all eaten but one, a golden dollar that escaped (for now), and shiny disks of chocolate-tinged foil are turning up all around the house.

The contents of the clear plastic candy-cane shaped tubes bearing Hershey's Kisses and gummy Krabby Patties (the burger Spongebob makes at his fry-cook day job) are virtually empty.

Even the hard, essentially flavorless, little Spongebob-shaped Pez-like bits have all disappeared (down the sink, in the case of the ones Ulysses gave to me, one after another, that I surreptitiously and temporarily stashed on a platter of turkey debris).

Yet the merry row of seven chocolate Santas remains intact.

On Christmas Day, when Ulysses unwrapped a long, light, rectangular package to find a box of brightly wrapped Santas, he was delighted.

"Open this box, open, open!"

He inspected the Santas and pried from the blister bedding the rightmost one, a jolly fellow in red against a green background. Carefully, eagerly, he peeled away the foil wrapper to hold the bare chocolate Santa between forefinger and thumb. He lifted it to his mouth. He stopped.

Ulysses held the chocolate figurine a litle farther from his face and regarded it for several seconds.

"I can't do it," he said, finally. "I can't eat Santa."

He looked up at us dolefully.

"Do you want me to put the wrapper back on?" said Donald.

Ulysses nodded.

A few moments of careful re-wrapping later -- the foil hadn't come off in one piece -- and Santa was back with his brethren.

And there he remains to this day.

Christmas Eve evening 2008: Santa burnout

2008-12-24T22:10:00.013-06:00

In the evening, I pulled out some sugar-cookie dough I'd made a month ago and defrosted today. The Cook's Country recipe using yolks only, no whites. They tout that it can be rerolled a zillion times without toughening, thanks to leaving out the tough protein of the egg whites. They're right.

"Ulysses, I'm going to make some cookies for Santa. Do you want to make cookies with me?"

"Yes!" He jumped off the couch, where he was watching The Nightmare Before Christmas, or maybe it was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by that point. He found his miniature rolling pin in his toy kitchen and ran to the kitchen. He ran to the dough on the counter and held up the pin. I invited him to pick out some cookie cutters from the pile on the kitchen table. He went to the table and looked at them.

Then I saw something in his eyes retreat, disengage.

"I gotta watch Cars," he said.

I stopped myself from saying that Cars is not a Christmas movie. I put it in the player, but by the time the menu had come up, he was playing a video game at his computer. "Do you want to make cookies with me?"

"No," he said.

He never did watch Cars that evening, but neither did he respond again, after that, when we reminded him that Santa was coming tonight. All day, he'd bounced and bounded at the mention of it. By now, it seemed, his emotions had been so thoroughly stimulated, they had just gone into overload.

He was withdrawing, for emotional safety, I thought. The obvious corollary of that, I realized later that night, was that his emotions were vulnerable and raw. They could now be readily abraded, inflamed.

* * *

I made sugar cookies in holiday shapes and colors: green wreaths and trees with little balls of many colors and with royal icing bows and garlands; red Santas with icing for the fur at his wrists, cap and ankles; reindeer with red noses; stars with turbinado sugar sparkles. I assembled a plate, including one of the trees, for Santa's visit later that night, and set it on the dining table.

Ulysses plucked a green Christmas tree from the cooling rack. "I'm eating Santa's cookie," he said, happily. How cute, I thought.

Several minutes later, he came over from his video play again and took another tree cookie.

Several minutes after that, I noticed that Ulysses had picked up the fourth and final tree. Earlier, I had asked Don if he had any requests for cookie shapes. He had told me, "I want a Christmas tree."

"Oops! Sorry," I told Ulysses. "You can't have that one. That's Tata's tree." I plucked it from his hand. "Sorry, we need to leave that one for him. Here are the other cookies. Which one would you like?"

"No! No! I want the tree!" he cried, making a grab for the cookie in my hand.

Uh-oh.

"How about this flower?"

"No! Not a blue cookie."

"A heart?"

"Not a red one!"

"All right. How about this wreath? It's green."

"No! It's broken!" It had a scalloped center cut out of it. Much like the blown glass ornaments that had offended his aesthetic sensibilities earlier that day. "I want a tree!"

"I'm sorry, this is the last one. It's for Tata. He'll be said if it's gone." I couldn't back off now. I'd established a cookie ownership and I had to follow through. The ownership of this item had to stand. The person whose cookie it was had to be respected.

"Where are the another tree cookies?"

"You ate yours. You ate mine, too," I added dryly, and only for my own amusement. "But that's OK, I let you have mine," I said, to soften the last remark, before continuing with my lesson: "This last one is for Tata and we need to leave it for him."

Don came out of the back computer room. "What's going on?" I filled him in. He said, "It's OK, Ulysses, you can have my tree cookie. I'm giving you my tree cookie." Don tried to hand it to him.

"No, no!" said Ulysses, in tears. "It's your cookie. I can't eat it, I can't. And I ate Mama's cookie!" He collapsed into sobs, falling onto the floor.

I suddenly realized that he grasped the situation far more deeply than I had imagined.

"Ulysses," I said, "Would you like me to make some more tree cookies?"

He fell silent. He looked up at me.

"Would you like me to make more tree cookies for everyone?"

"Yes!" he said, and sprang up.

"You can help me if you like," I said. "You don't have to, though."

He ran to his computer and plunged back into his game.

Fortunately, I still had some dough. Half an hour later, there were six perfect, bedecked Christmas trees on the cooling rack. "Ulysses!" I called.

Ulysses walked over, quietly, and surveyed the little green trees. He picked up three of them.

He ran to the bedroom, where Don was watching TV.

"Here, Tata, this is for you."

He ran back to me and handed me a tree. "This is for you, Mama."

With the third cookie in his hand, he sat down at his video game.

* * *

It wasn't until much later that I considered the tree cookie that had been on Santa's plate all through the conflict.

I could have let Ulysses have the tree cookie that he picked up from the cooling rack, without ever saying a word about whose cookie was whose. There would have been no issue if the trees were simply gone the next time he came grazing. Meantime, I could have taken the tree cookie off Santa's plate and put it out of sight for Don, for later.

I didn't.

I didn't even dream of disturbing the plate I'd prepared for Santa. Because ... because those were Santa's cookies. It wouldn't be right to take away his tree. I had made four trees. One for each of us.

I'd hypnotized myself into respecting the rights of a fictional character.

Christmas Eve 2008

2008-12-24T19:11:00.008-06:00

I just reread this blog entry from last Christmas Eve – http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/2007/12/adorable-christmas-anecdotes.html – and was struck by the magnitude of difference in Ulysses today: his comprehension, the abstraction of his thoughts, his articulation of them. Last year he was in the moment in such a way – there was no use describing to him a distant future.

This year he's been anticipating Santa's visit for weeks, announcing regularly that tonight was the night. We pointed to the day on the calendar as it approached, showing him, "We're here, this is today. Santa's coming on this day." It was hard to see his scope of comprehension, but probably a safe guess that it wasn't total. I should have told him it was a map of time, because he understands maps. (Thanks, Dora.)

On the morning of Christmas Eve, we told him that this was the big day -- that Santa was in fact coming tonight, that we had a lot to do to get ready. He was elated. We drove out to storage to pick up the tree and decorations, then to the supermarket for figgy pudding ingredients. Would you believe Copps, giant as it is, doesn't carry suet, while our neighborhood market does? It's in the same chaotically, gloriously mixed case of ethnic speciality animal parts as the chitterlings, necks, feet and other tidbits for the adventerous. Or the traditional. Depending on your point of view.

I set White Christmas to play on the DVD. Don got out the battery-powered Christmas train while I prepped the tree area. We stood the 5-foot square cedar play table (built by Don in 2006) on its side against the bookshelf to clear the living room corner. The toy bins that live under the table went into Ulysses' room. I remembered the white vinyl that been discarded at my workplace that I'd brought home for another project, and Don brought it in. We cut parts of it and made a tree skirt about 8-foot square, large enough for the train to run on its extended length track for the first time. We discovered that the other side had been printed on -- it was the color of winter sky, with a field of irregularly placed soft white dots. Snowfall! How fortuitous was that? Or maybe the dots were the printing error that caused the banner to be jettisoned. Either way, it worked for us. We draped the play table with the blue side out, a much better backdrop for the tree than bare wood.

Throughout, Ulysses played on, under and within the enormous length and width of vinyl. As soon as the snow pattern was revealed, he jumped on it with his bare feet. "Cold! It's so cold! Ouch, ouch!" he shouted, gleefully jumping from foot to foot. "Brrr, snow," he said. Next he made an "igloo" of the cavernous mounds, pulling me under with him, insisting that I also complain of the cold. It was hot under that vinyl.

There was a bit of a snag when we eventually cut up his ice fields and igloos for tree skirting and background draping, and then folding up the rest to put away. "My igloo!" he said, horrified. "You broke it!" Then I pulled out the box containing the Christmas tree. I showed him the label, with a photograph of the contents.

"Mama!" he said, excited, "We have to make the Christmas tree beautiful."

Ulysses enthusiastically pitched in to help string the lights, hang the delicate glass ornaments and unpack and set out the trees and buildings and people of the miniature village. Consider this word, "help," with circumspection. For instance, he tended to hang the ornaments not on the branches, but the needles thereon. Matching ornaments, he believed, should properly all hang on the same branch tip.

I moved into high parenting gear to prevent electrocutions, injury and excessive breakage. Don split for the far end of the house and shut the door.

An hour later, the tree was done and only one ornament, a green glass ball, had paid the price. Ulysses had been batting it around on its branch, not heeding my warnings: "Ulysses! Be gentle with that. It's fragile. This breaks very easily. It can cut you."

"No, this is not fragile," he insisted. He gripped at it, and it collapsed into shards between his fingers. A moment of shock, then howling tears. "I cut my hand! The orn'ment broke! My green orn'ment!"

His hand was not cut. Whew.

After a few moments, he was ready to be consoled with a different, identical green ornament that he hung on the same branch. He moved on, but not before he batted at it – gently – to, fro and to again, announcing, "Be careful. This breaks very easily!"

Then there were the fancy glass ornaments,the kind with the deeply indented, faceted centers. Ulysess saw one and declared it broken.

"It's not broken," I said. "It's fine. This is the design. It looks this way on purpose."

"It is broken," he insisted.

"Look, there's nothing wrong with it," I said, angling it so we could see directly into the indented pattern.

It was broken. During storage, the wire for hanging had punched through the thin wall of indented glass from within.

Oops.

After I'd thrown out the broken pieces, I brought out another ornament of the same type.

"No," said Ulysses. "It's broken."

This one was not broken. But he was having no truck with any of the tray of center-dented ornaments that seemed to splinter dramatically in upon themselves. "These are broken," he insisted.

I replaced their lid and put them back in the ornament box for the season.

Ulysses regarded the half-dressed tree. "That's not beautiful," he said, and looked on the verge of tears.

"We're not done yet."

"But it's not beautiful, Mama!" He whimpered.

"Then let's keep trying. Look at this one!"

"It's a egg!" he said.

"Yes! This is a goose egg from our friend Cindy and our friend Troy. They brought it to us from ..." I couldn't remember the country they'd visited. "... Eastern Europe!"

"A egg, a egg! Two eggs!" Happy again, he set to work trying to hang the elaborately painted goose eggs on the same needle of a single branch, and didn't mind when I helped him pick out two different branches instead. Peace had been restored.

Later: "Mama! The Christmas tree is beautiful! We made it beautiful! Together!"

Baka Ljubica's Vanilice crescents

2008-12-22T20:02:00.009-06:00

This recipe of my grandmother's comes to me from my aunt, who fortunately has kept the recipe all these years. These were my Ujka (uncle) Sava's favorite cookies when he was a little boy.

Just to give an idea of the timelines involved here, my grandmother Ljubica (b. Stefanovich) Jankovic was born in 1888, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My mother was born in 1920, and her brother (my uncle), was born in 1923. So, want to talk about an heirloom recipe, this is it.

A few notes: my grandmother, who we called Baka, did not use an egg. However, these cookies are very fragile without one. When my aunt (my Ujna) would make these for my Ujka, she started adding an egg for strength. I made these for the first time this month, specifically to ship to my Ujka and family for Christmas, and I didn't want to take any chances with shipping a box of broken cookies, so I used the egg variant.

These hyper-vanilified cookies use a whopping two tablespoons of vanilla in a batch. Not only that, but they're dusted with vanilla sugar. Baka would place a vanilla bean in powdered sugar for a week or so in advance of making these cookies, and have a wonderfully perfumed sugar to dust with. If you don't want to incur the expense of a vanilla bean, you can pour a teaspoon or so of vanilla into a container and then place two cups of powdered sugar right on top, and wait a few days or weeks for a similar effect.

I didn't plan ahead, and I found myself making the cookies the day before I needed to ship them. Not enough time to make vanilla sugar! So I placed vanilla directly into the resealable container in which I was packing the cookies, and packed the cookies in powdered sugar. The result: I had a great insulator for my cookies that protected them from breakage, and by the time the cookies arrived by UPS ground, and then were opened a couple of days later, the powdered sugar had become vanilla sugar!

Vanilice
(Vah-NEE-leet-seh)
Serbian vanilla crescents

3 cups all-purpose flour
10 tablespoons sugar
3 sticks unsalted butter
2 cups walnuts, finely ground (use food processor or coffee grinder)
2 tablespoons vanilla extract
1 whole egg (optional – will make cookies less fragile)
vanilla powdered sugar to garnish (directions below, you need to make this vanilla sugar in advance)

Mix together all ingredients except egg and powdered sugar.

Add egg, if using, and mix in.

When ingredients are combined, form a small ball, a tablespoon or so and then shape the ball into a crescent. I found that the prettiest crescents are made like this: Shape a tablespoon of dough into a ball. Roll the ball back and forth between your palms until it forms a rope the width of your palms. Roll the rope with a few more back-and-forth motions. The ends of the rope will extend beyond your palms, but will be tapered. Shape this into a crescent, with the points nearly touching.

Place the crescents on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Bake at 350 until just barely browned, about 10 min.

Remove from oven. Place on cooling racks.

Meanwhile, prep a pan, like a lasagna pan, with the powdered vanilla sugar. While still warm but no longer hot, drop several crescents at a time into the sugar and roll them around, shaking the pan, until they're well coated.

Make the vanilla sugar several days ahead of time by pounding a vanilla bean into the powdered sugar with a mortar and pestle. Or, put vanilla extract at the bottom of a container of powdered sugar several days ahead of time. The vanilla flavor and aroma will infuse the powdered sugar.

How to tell a present

2008-12-22T16:19:00.005-06:00

Most every night we put on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and drift off to sleep with it running. A timer turns off the TV after a while. Ulysses has been hearing that theme music, with its signature transition from futuristically, whisperingly quiet to blood-stirringly horn laden (woe betide your sleep if you're only halfway into slumber by the end credits), nearly every night since before he was even born. (Some nights we play Galaxy Quest instead.)

The other night U and I were watching “Parallels,” a final-season episode featuring Lieutenant Commander Worf, the first Kingon to serve in Starfleet. The opening scenes feature a surprise birthday party for him. Mr. Worf is on the cranky side, as a matter of character. He is visibly embarrassed and annoyed as his crew mates lustily sing the rendition of “Happy Birthday” that they've laboriously translated into Klingon in his honor.

“It wasn't easy to translate,” says Counselor Troi to a still-scowling Worf. “There doesn't seem to be a Klingon word for 'jolly,'”

Ulysses was loving it. “Happy birthday, Mr. Worf!” he said. “It's a party!”

Then the birthday cake is brought out. In close-up, a long knife drives into an especially fudgy and moist chocolate-on-chocolate cake. The relative extreme of the visual is needed for later in the story, when the variety of cake is revealed to be a plot point.

Ulysses was delighted by all the chocolateyness. “Cake! He has a birthday cake! Happy birthday, Mr. Worf!” he crowed as the Klingon, still scowling, passes around plates heaped with gooey slabs.

Next come the presents. Data hands Worf a big, flat, beribboned rectangle of shiny wrapping paper. (Everything is metallic in the future.) “A present!” Ulysses said, happily.

Worf tears off the paper to reveal ... “A ... painting,” he says, trying hard to be polite, but unable to conceal his confusion at the inscrutable tangle of bright, abstract shapes. Data explains that it's his expressionist interpretation of a great Klingon battle. “I am honored,” says Worf, but the subtext is unmistakable: “This thing is awful – and I'm stuck with it!”

“That's not a present,” Ulysses said, mirroring Worf's reaction.

“Sure, it's a present from Data,” I said.

“No,” he said, pausing for emphasis. “It's a painting.”

“The present is the painting,” I said. “The painting is a present.”

“That's no present,” he said, shaking his head. He looked closely at me. How could I not see something that was so obvious to both him and Mr. Worf? Didn't I grasp Mr. Worf's reaction on tearing open the wrapping? Couldn't I feel it? Ulysses seemed to be casting about for a way to convey it to me. Finally, he found a way to get it across in terms I should understand.

“That's no present. It's not a toy.”

Grandaunt Naka's Vanil Grancle

2008-12-21T20:05:00.029-06:00

In the past, I've blogged about these exquisite little jam-filled Serbian sandwich cookies that are a family heirloom. See:

http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/2008/02/vanilice-va-nee-leet-seh-serbian.html
and
http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/2005/12/vanilice-serbian-holiday-cookies.html

Those posts told the story of my attempt to recreate, from memory, my Grandaunt Naka's Vanil Grancle (VAH-neel GRAHNT-sleh).

Today I share the exciting news that I managed to get the original recipe! My grandaunt had written down her recipe.

In Western genealogical terms, I guess she's not really a grandaunt to me, as that refers to the aunt of one's parents. But it's the only term that seems to make sense. Yulia (b. Joanovic) Pecic, whom we all called Naka, was my aunt's mother. More specifically, she was the mother of the wife of the brother of my mother. The mother of my mother's sister-in-law. Get it?

Born in 1913, Naka was from Kikinda, a municipality in what's today the Serbian Banat, part of a larger historical and geographical region known as the Banat, which happens to be extraordinarily well suited for the cultivation of apricots.

The Banat overall straddles three nations, as the borders are drawn today: Serbia, Romania and Hungary. The word can be loosely translated as "province," and whereas once there were lots of banats within the Austro-Hungarian empire and within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, this is the area that's meant when you just say "Banat" or "The Banat." It's more or less identical to a region called "The Banat of Temeswar" that was circumscribed by an 18th century treaty between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary, by which the area was within the Kingdom of Hungary but controlled by the Ottomans. Or something like that.

Kikinda is also in the Voivodina, a word that means a sort of duchy (a "voivod" would be a duke), which has historically been an autonomous region relative to the succession of empires, kingdoms and nation-states that have surrounded it. Or something like that. The Voivodina encompasses at least the Serbian part of the Banat, as near as I can figure.

But don't take my word for all this. Poke around on Wikipedia and the many other sources available on the Net and in print, and if you can figure it out better, let me know. I'm no expert. (And by the way, the experts disagree.)

At any rate, when Naka's mother was born, in 1870, Kikinda was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

These cookies represent the intersection of the horticultural tradition of apricot growing in the Banat with the sophistication of Austro-Hungarian cuisine, especially its culinary tradition of baked sweets.

* * *

Earlier this month, I tried out the recipe and sent a batch of grancle east to Baltimore, where my cousins and my uncle and aunt sampled them just this weekend. They report success! The recipe yields a cookie that's true to the original.

The only thing yet to work on, though, is the thickness of the cookie. The pictures you see show a cookie about twice as high as the original. The instructions below will yield cookies that are thinner and have a more favorable jam-to-cookie ratio than the ones in the photo. Also they'll be less of a Dagwood experience to get your teeth around.

Over the decades, I had misremembered the name of Vanil Grancle as Vanilice (vah-NEEL-eet-she). Vanilice, or vanilitse, it turns out, is a different Serbian cookie altogether. In fact, my uncle Sava's favorite cookie from his boyhood was my grandmother's Vanilice. Fortunately, I was able to get the recipe for that from my aunt, via my cousin. I'll give that in a different post

Here's my cousin in early 2008, comparing the photo and description of my 2006 cookies to Naka's grancle.

your vanilice look just like my grandmother naka's granzle (grantsle) except her top round circle cut out was smaller. they were my favorite cookies growing up and haven't had them since she passed away 5 years ago. she used to make them up until the time she died, despite the fact that her hands were almost crippled from arthitis and i used to eat each one slowly and carefully thinking of her crippled fingers making them lovingly for us.

mama never did make these herself, again the apricot jam connection to naka's recipes, wonder if they are austro-hungarian influenced because banat was occupied by austro-hungarian empire.

baka's recipe that mama recalls is the crescent. i just realized that if you remember a friend of our family saying they baked hundreds of these and froze them each year those are definitely my naka's recipe!!!!! she would make hundreds each year, they were among her specialities and i think i mentioned i really think she was a master baker among serbian women who are really mostly master bakers.

i've been to many slavas where people serve "sitni kolaci" that can't compare to these cookies.

Vanil Grancle
Yield: about 60 sandwich cookies

200 grams (1 cup minus one teaspoon) sugar
200 grams (1 stick + 6 tablespoons) butter at room temperature
1 whole egg + 3 separated eggs
1 tablespooon lemon rind, grated and minced
400 grams (2 1/3 cups) flour
1 heaping tablespoon sour cream
* * *
powdered sugar
about 2 cups walnuts, chopped into small bits
about 1/2 cup apricot jam

Forming the cookies

* Mix whole egg and three yolks with sugar.
* Mix in butter, sour cream and lemon rind.
* Add flour and mix to make a soft dough. If exceedingly soft and sticky, add a bit more flour.
* Shape dough into two logs. Wrap in parchment paper or plastic cling wrap and chill. Slice into 1/8" rounds.
* Alternately, shape dough into two or three disks that are 1/8" thick. Chill several hours on a platter, separating the layers with parchment paper or clear clingfoil so they don't get stuck together. Punch out with a cookie cutter into 1.5" rounds.
* Using a thimble, cut a hole into the center of half of the disks. If you don't have a thimble, use any cylinder into which your middle finger will just fit. I used a bit of copper piping.
* Re-roll any dough scraps left over and repeat as necessary until you've made all the dough into bottoms (solid rounds) and tops (rounds with holes).

Baking

* Bake cookie bottoms at 300 F. They should be pale when done, with just the lightest browning on the bottoms.
* Paint tops cookie tops with egg white. I did this by putting the egg white in a tray, and then placing all the tops in the tray.
* Sprinkle cookie tops with powdered sugar.
* Sprinkle cookie tops with walnuts.
* Bake cookie tops at 300 F. Like the bottoms, they'll be pale when they're done, just barely browned underneath.

Unfortunately, I didn't write down the baking times when I did this. Next time, I'll take notes and add it to this post. All I can say for now is, start checking your oven at 10 minutes. Go by sight and by the aroma of baking. When done, they will have puffed up a little. Like most baked cookies, they will feel a little underdone when they are perfectly done -- they continue to bake and dry out after you pull them from the oven -- but they'll have a light brown cast underneath, where they rest against the baking sheet.

I think the bottoms took 20 minutes and the tops 25.

Assembling

Let cool. Place about 1/4 teaspoon apricot jam on each cookie bottom. Top with the cookie top. Press and twist together just enough to distribute the jam evenly to the edge of the cookies. These will be squishy and slidey at first, but the jam will set up after a few hours and the sandwich construction will be sturdy.

Here's a tip I got from Cook's Illustrated: give your jam a quick whiz in the food processor. This will break up the big chunks of apricot and distribute the fruit more evenly throughout the jam, making it much easier to sandwich the cookies.

Now here's the original text of the recipe that my cousin sent me. Note that the non-metric amounts are different from those given above. I re-translated the metric into non-metric, and used what I came up with, rather than the non-metric amounts below. Also, instead of an entire lemon's zest, I used a tablespoon, after checking with my aunt that indeed this made sense. These are not exceedingly lemony cookies.

here is the granzle recipe. the ingredients are straight from naka's recipe as are the instructions on how to assemble the cookies but the directions on mixing ingredients come from my mother and me trying to make sense from how the ingredients would go together.

apparently naka never wrote down how she makes the cookie dough and mama never witnessed it or made the granzle herself. so here goes:

20 dkg (1 cup) sugar
20 dkg (1 cup) sweet butter (unsalted) 1 1/2 sticks
1 whole egg plus 3 eggs separated (small eggs would probably be most accurate)
lemon rind to taste (mama thinks about 1 whole medium lemon)
40 dkg flour (2 cups)
1 heaping tblspoon of sour cream
powdered sugar
chopped walnuts (small pieces)
apricot jam (sorry, no info on quantity for these last 3 items, we'll have to experiment)

combine 1 whole egg and 3 egg yolks and sugar. add softened butter and add sour cream and rind, combine.

add flour and if too soft, add some more. (i'm not kidding, that's what it says)

note --naka used to roll the dough out and cut out the shapes but mama says she does know that naka changed that technique because the dough was always so sticky. i think her solution sounds brilliant.---
form the dough into a long roll like a salami, wrap in plastic wrap and chill until hard. (no info on how long) dough should be like sugar cookie dough you buy at the grocery store---slice and bake---similar shape and thickness.

then, remove wrap and slice the dough into 60 disks. cut 30 of the disks with a hole in the center (these will be the tops) using a thimble. (mama fortunately remembers naka using a thimble, i thought i remembered the hole was pretty small, i love this kind of historic detail and thanks to you, i bothered to get it from mama finally!!!!)

bake the bottom 30 disks at 300 degrees until done (again, no details sorry) and cookies should be pale, not browned.

take the 3 egg whites, whisk with a fork and then paint tops (the disks with thimble hole)with egg whites. dip the tops into powdered sugar and chopped (small pieces) walnuts. then bake at 300 until done, again pale and not browned.

when cookies have cooled, assemble as sandwich cookies using apricot (we always had only apricot but of course any jam will do) jam.

my editorial comment is that i would sprinkle the cookies with powdered sugar and walnut pieces but you might want to dip.

Santa Claus is coming

2008-12-17T05:19:00.003-06:00

I never meant to raise my child to believe in Santa Claus. A fictional supernatural being who gets the credit for staging the gift-giving festivity when everyone knows perfectly well it's the parents who did the work. That it's the parents' love that makes it happen.

But it turns out my usual approach to teaching him about the world -- which might be summed up as a threefold exposing him to situations, things and opportunities, keeping him safe and staying out of the way of his process -- doesn't work the same with Santa Claus as it does with say, gravity or sharing.

The world of physics, his developing body, his energy and his inborn drive for self-preservation provided everything he needed to learn to climb the steps to the slide and come down it. It was easy to learn what leads to stumbling and a skinned knee. The world of interacting humans likewise provides plenty of feedback about what happens when two children covet a single toy. Eventually each toddler learns that snatching and running leads not to an unhampered relationship with the object of desire, but only to weeping, screeching and unhappiness all around.

Not so with Santa Claus. His image is all around all year -- you notice this when you have a young charge -- and especially as the autumn deepens into winter. He's featured on episodes of otherwise non-Christmassy TV shows. Often the plot of these episodes turns on the nullification of one character's disbelief. Or he's simply there, as real as any other fictional being in the show. He's around. He's iconic.

He's the guy who brings presents to children. And children do get presents, after all. For a four-year-old, this is not a controversial syllogism.

Anyway, I thought we shouldn't tell Ulysses that Santa Claus exists. Donald thought we should. As it turned out, it wasn't our decision to make. There was no point at which we would bestow or withhold this piece of information. (Technically, misinformation.) The world has taught Ulysses about the person of Santa Claus. The only real choice is between going with the flow and convincing him that it's all made up. That there's not really any such guy.

In other words, to be really, really mean.

So I'm going with the flow.

Santa Claus is about as real as Spongebob. But how real is Spongebob, for Ulysses? Does Ulysses realize that there is no pineapple under the sea? I want him to know that Steven Hillenberg's imagination is the true wonder of Spongebob. That Tom Kenny, Patrick Warburton, Clancy Brown -- to name just a few of that show's marvelous voice actors -- are among the legions of artists who create this pulsingly alive semblance. There's nothing to gain from trying to explain this to him now. Soon enough he'll know that these guys are made up of lots of little drawings shown in succession, synched with audio recordings made elsewhere. What does he understand now? I'm not sure. But I'm sure it would be futile, not to say hurtful, to dog him with the notion that "Spongebob is not real." Well, there he is. Interacting with a whole world of characters and things. Uttering quotable quotes that we quote in this household. Learning life lessons that we cite.

Every night for the past week or so, Ulysses has told me, in the dark of the evening and often as we're turning out the lights, "Santa Claus is coming tonight."

Each night, I say, "Santa Claus is coming soon. But not tonight."

And Ulysses answers, matching my tone in an exaggerated singsong: "Yes, tonight."