Picnic Soup #2: Tomato and Buttermilk Soup

I didn't eat/enjoy/recognize avocados as food until after college (Face masks? Sure. Food, no.). If one of your fellow picnickers shares my old hesitation, you're going to have a hard sell with Cold Avocado Soup. Try this alternative, from Outdoor Dining:

Tomato and Buttermilk Soup

2 cups (16 fl oz/500 ml) tomato juice
1 cup (8 fl oz/250 ml) buttermilk

This simple soup is cool and refreshing; if desired you can add some chopped tomato, cucumber, and fresh herbs. You can also vary the proportion of tomato juice to buttermilk.

Combine the tomato juice and buttermilk.

Serve Tomato and Buttermilk Soup chilled with open sandwiches, which become extra special when you make them with savory butters.

Variation: Combine buttermilk and apricot nectar for a refreshing drink.

Serves 2

Two ingredients! Just two! No cutting, no dicing, no blanching, no skinning, no skimming, no heating... it's simple, alright! Other than a glorious opportunity to stain things tomato red, this is something you could easily make with any kid old enough to stir the sugar and Kool-Aid packet in to the 2 quart pitcher.

Or was that just my childhood?

This soup shares a page with lots of savory butter suggestions. Pink peppercorn butter, which is "particularly good" with roast beef. Anchovy butter, for eggs, watercress, or cucumber. Herb butters. Walnut butter. If you can whir it up in a food processor, Outdoor Dining suggests you make it into a compound butter. I actually agree, and was just exhorting my brother in law in Pittsburgh to use some of his bumper crop of tarragon to make a compound butter. Compound butters (savory or sweet) freeze beautifully, and it's great to be able to cut off a hunk of a seasoned butter to melt on your grilled whatever.

Cooking the Books: Tangy Cucumbers

Some things in life seem so basic, so natural that to discover them writen down can come as a shock. "Wait, there's a recipe for that?" I cried, when I came across the basic natural it's-always-that-way cucumber dish in the Spratt/Bachman & Mellberg/McKenzie Family Cookbook 2008:

Tangy Cucumbers
Betty Mellberg McKenzie

1/2 cup white vinegar
1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
Water

Slice cucumbers into a bowl. Add above and then put enough water to just cover the cucumbers. Keep in fridge. They get better the longer they sit.

"Seriously, a recipe?"

But then, if this isn't the only way you were ever served cucumbers as a child, this is just the sort of thing you need. (No hyperbole there; it seems we always had a jar of these in the fridge, which is a neat trick, because I could eat all the cukes in one sitting without trying.) It is, indeed, tangy, as the title (and the vinegar) suggest. You could fancy it up by adding dried hot pepper flakes, or thinly sliced onions. I do not. You could use a food processor or mandoline to ensure uniform, nearly-transparent thin slices. I do not. And yesterday, Washington's Green Grocer brought me two cucumbers...

I scrubbed them, and realized they were still very waxy. Out came my trusty Oxo vegetable peeler, and in a trice, off came the waxy peel. A bit of casual knife work, and I had a bowl full of uneven but beautiful slices. I ground a good healthy amount of black pepper on top, and sprinkled a hefty pinch of salt over. Then, I poured 3/4 a cup of vinegar over, slowly, to wash the spices into solution. Yes, 3/4 cup. I love vinegar. And, yes, white vinegar. Other than Easter egg dying, this is the only food application for white vinegar in my life; otherwise, I use it mostly for cleaning. I topped off the cukes with one scant cup of cold water...



...and then I ate the top layer, with my fingers. Yes, it tastes better after it sits. But, yes, I could eat it right away. It took all my willpower to not tuck in with a fork, but... there's always tomorrow.

Bug Juice? No, Green Punch!

I had half a mind to be high-minded about the The Fruit of the Spirit: 100th Anniversary of Bittinger Lutheran Parish recipe selections. I really thought I wanted to prove that community cookbooks were treasure troves of fabulous recipes you might otherwise never find.

And then I found Green Punch.

Green Punch
Lottie Brenneman

2 pkgs. lemon-lime Kool-Aid
1 (46-oz.) can pineapple juice
2 quts. water
1 qt. 7-Up or ginger ale
Mix together and add ginger ale or 7-Up last. Sherbert may be added.

Oh, hell, yes. It's nearly Memorial Day weekend, it's going to be in the mid-80s here in DC, and Green Punch? Green Punch sounds like icy cold perfection.

I'm assuming that the packages of Kool-Aid are the "add 1 cup of sugar" kinds...one envelope each, which would normally make 2 quarts of Kool-Aid. I also assume that, with the soda and the juice, there's no need at all to actually add sugar, so the omission in the ingredient list is not so much an omission as a nod to not developing diabetes. Personally, I find diet 7-Up and diet ginger ale to be perfectly acceptable substitutes for the full-sugar variety, so you could shave a couple hundred calories off every serving if you want to make a substitution.

Then again, on the same page, there's "Easy Punch," which has Kool-Aid, pineapple juice, water, 7-Up, ice cream and 3 cups of sugar. If you want to get your sugar high on, you certainly have options in The Fruit of the Spirit.

Green drinks make me think of camp (but in a good way), picnics, birthday parties, field days... It's the sort of thing that feels fancy when you're five. As summer comes on, I think that fancy-for-a-five-year-old is well worth embracing in our culinary endeavors. Cheers.

Cooking the Books: Popovers for Piglet

This is what happens when popovers don't pop over. Epic failure.

I'm at a loss. This recipe has never failed me. Ever. My chefly husband tried to console me with a well-meant, "Popovers are notoriously difficult!" Yes, well, this recipe has never, ever failed.

Lessons learned: I may well have figured out how to bake in my tiny tiny half-sized oven, but the tricks needed can't be used on popovers. Anything that requires me to not open the door for 25 minutes is just going to bomb.

:sigh:

I was really looking forward to the popovers. Not only for beautiful blog fodder and a great wrap up to The Pooh Cook Book, but because I was craving them. For breakfast.

:sigh:

Trust me: it does work, this recipe. But you need enough room in the oven for good air circulation. And it wouldn't hurt to have a window on your oven door.

Chefly Husband says that, since the only leavening agent is the eggs, the oven must have been too cold. Since the bottoms are burned, I'm thinking that, in theory, the oven temp was just fine...until the pans went in and blocked all circulation. So, hot on the bottom, cold on the top, not good for popovers.

When I try it again -- and I will -- I'll either cook 'em one pan at a time, or try stacking them... it is entirely possible, however, that my oven is not meant for popovers.

Bonus Post: A Recipe For Getting Thin

The "cute factor" of The Pooh Cook Book runs high. If you are of the sort that finds things Pooh charming as opposed to treacly, I must recommend you go out and buy yourself a copy -- you can find it through Amazon resellers or on eBay.

But, as charming as I find the recipes themselves, sometimes, you need to see a page to truly get it. So, here:

A Recipe For Getting Thin



"how long does getting thin take?" asked Pooh anxiously.
-- Winnie-the-Pooh

Aw. It's a recipe for getting thin. With no ingredients. And a picture of Christopher Robin reading to Pooh, who is stuck in Rabbit's hole.

Aw! I love this book. I didn't think it possible, but I love it even more after this week of sharing recipes. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Tomorrow morning, I'll cook up one of the recipes, and then we'll move on to whichever cookbook wins the poll in the right-hand column of this blog.

Honey Toffee Pennies

Nowadays, you'd be hard-pressed to find a kids' cookbook that even considered encouraging the kids to boil sugar. Boiling sugar = danger, danger, danger. Plus, candy making is usually viewed as a highly-precise, needs-special-equipment sort of affair, ill-suited to the novice.

The Pooh Cook Book is either more ambitious or more foolhardy than you might expect.

Honey Toffee Pennies

1/4 cup (2 ounces) butter, sliced
3/4 cup honey
1 1/4 cups brown sugar, firmly packed
1 Tablespoon cider vinegar
1 heavy-bottomed saucepan
1 after-dinner coffee spoon
   or
1 quarter-teaspoon measuring spoon

Choose one of these flavorings for each batch of toffee:
6-7 drops extract of mint
   or
1/4 teasppon of one of these:
powdered cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger
   or
Juice of 1/2 lemon

Put the butter, honey, sugar, and vinegar in the heavy-bottomed saucepan. The saucepan must have a heavy bottom or the toffee will burn.

Keep over low heat until mixture has melted.

Stir and increase the heat.

Boil without stirring at high heat for
   10 minutes for chewy toffee;
   15 minutes for hard toffee;
   20 minutes for brittle toffee;

Add the flavoring when you remove the saucepan from the head, while candy is still boiling.

Honey toffee tastes good at every stage, so it doesn't matter whether you boil it for ten minutes or more. What matters is not to stir it.

Drip the honey toffee from a small spoon into penny shapes onto a dish or a piece of plastic or Pliofilm or wax paper. If you are very clever, you will be able to drip it from the spoon in all kinds of shapes -- clouds and snails and beetles and birds as well as Pooh shapes.

Or you can drip it from the spoon in small blobs and wait until it cools, so that you can shape it with your hands into balls or little squares or rectangles.

A good trick to keep the toffee liquid is to put the saucepan with the toffee in a larger pan of hot water. You won't have to work quite so fast if you keep the toffee hot and liquid.

The 15- and 20- minute toffee gets harder the longer it sits. When hard enough, wrap in plastic or wax paper and store in an airtight container.

And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it."
-- Winnie-the-Pooh

Pliofilm, it seems, was a brand name for a competitor of Cellophane. It played a role in the Allied invasion of Normandy. And you could use it for candy making! Except for the pesky "it contributed to leukemia" part... Let's stick with wax paper, shall we?

I've only tried to make hard candy once; I was sure that homemade lollipops would be delightful. They weren't... they tasted of the butter that I put on the molds, and not at all like sweet little nuggets of fruity delight.

Toffee, though, is supposed to be buttery. So this might well be worth a shot, especially because it seems to be completely unfussy. No thermometer. No firm amount of time.

Cottleston Pie

If I thought that The Pooh Cook Book was all about honey, I was wrong. It's also all about eggs. So, if you bought a dozen to make Popovers for Piglet, here's a way to work through some of the remainder.

Cottleston Pie

(Preheat oven to 375° F)
(Yield: 6 servings)

1 9-inch pie shell baked until firm but not browned
3/4 cup bite-size pieces of cooked ham
3 eggs
2 cups whipping cream
1/4 teaspoon salt
Grind pepper
Pinch nutmeg
1 1/2 Tablespoons butter cut in tiny dots
1/2 cup grated cheese (optional)

Bake the pie shell in a preheated oven at 425° F.

To keep the pie shell from sliding down the sides and puffing up at the bottom, prick sides and bottom well with the tines of a fork.

Line the bottom with a double thickness of cheesecloth and cover it with small clean stones, which you have gathered at the beach and washed, or with 1 inch of raw rice. Keep the rice and use it again and again.

Distribute the ham on the bottom of the baked pie shell.

Beat the eggs and cream with the seasonings in a bowl until thoroughly mixed.

Pour on top of the ham.

Scatter the butter dots and cheese, if you use it, on top.

Set on rack in the middle of the oven and bake for 25-30 minutes until Cottleston pie has puffed up and browned.

Serve immediately while piping hot.

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly,
Ask me a riddle and I reply:
"Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie."
-- Winnie-the-Pooh

Let's start with the obvious charms here, before the defects: It's a quiche! It's a quiche, for kids! Also, it gives you something to turn to when you read Pooh to a kid who then asks, "What's Cottleston Pie?"

Now, some of the problems: We are to preheat the oven to 375° F, but then blind-bake the shell in a 425° F oven? I say: preheat to 425° F, and drop it to 375° F as soon as you're done blind-baking.

Also, the recipe neglects to suggest how long you should bake the crust for. How about "until it starts to brown slightly."

Finally, really, this must be said: Cheese is not optional. Cheese is mandatory. First, it's a quiche. Second, it's cheese. Take One Cookbook... is decidedly pro-cheese. I'd recommend using a nice Gruyere here.

This is a timely recipe; tomorrow, I'm meeting up with some friends to bake some Pies for Peace. Nothing quite like baking pies to put a bit of concentrated good into the universe. In the past, we've not done any savory pies, but maybe it's time to change things up a bit.

Radish Sandwiches with Bread and Butter Prickles

I've loved radishes since I was a small kid. The only way I had them back then, though, was cut into "roses" and soaked in cold water. Spicy, crispy, wonderful. Nowadays, I'm more likely to sauté radishes in butter until they're yielding, melty, and sweet.

The Pooh Cook Book goes for a more traditional radish prep: tea sandwich style.

Radish Sandwiches with Bread and Butter Prickles

1 small bunch young red radishes, washed and dried
6-8 bread and butter pickles
Mayonnaise
Sandwich bread or crackers

Grate the radishes and moisten them with mayonnaise to a firm spreading consistency.

Spread the mixture on thin slices of sandwich bread or crackers.

Sprinkle with bread and butter pickles cut into prickle shapes.

Prickle shapes: [[blog note: line drawing here]]

Without the prickles these taste and look a little like lobster salad.

"What's the matter?" asked Pooh.
"Hot!" mumbled Tigger.
"Your friend," said Eeyore, "appears to have bitten on a bee."
Pooh's friend stopped shaking his head to get the prickles out...
-- The House At Pooh Corner

Two things I never had as a child: radish sandwiches, and lobster salad.

I like how a (presumably) spicy sandwich is tied with this quote, and the artistic direction to cut "prickles" from the pickles. There's a little line drawing in the recipe, with four randomish triangles. Long and skinny, short and squat, I think the idea is just to cut small, irregular shapes. A bit thorn-like, if you want.

This would be a quick addition to an afternoon tea, as sandwiches, or, heck, as an unusual dip if you added a bit more mayo to steer away from "firm spreading consistency."

Jelly Omelet

I grew up in Oregon, but have spent half a lifetime below the Mason Dixon line. Still, I was shocked the first time I heard someone ask for jelly on an egg sandwich.

Sure, I've put pickles (sweet and otherwise) with peanut butter, but... jelly with eggs?

Yes. Jelly with eggs. Witness this offering from The Pooh Cook Book:

Jelly Omelet

(Yield: 1-2 servings)

2-3 eggs
Small skillet, 7-inch
1 Tablespoon butter or margarine
2 Tablespoons jelly
Salt and pepper

Break the eggs in a bowl, add a little salt and pepper, and beat with a fork until the yolks and whites are thoroughly mixed.

Heat the skillet with the butter and pour in the beaten eggs.

Keep over low heat. When the bottom of the egg mixture is firm and the top soft but not runny, spoon in the jelly evenly over the back half of the egg surface.

Loosen the egg mixture on the unjellied front half around the edge of the pan. Tip the pan away from you and flip the front half of the egg mixture over the back half.

Let it sit for a minute before serving.

...humming to himself in a rather sticky voice, he got up, shook Rabbit lovingly by the paw, and said that he must be going on.
"Must you?" said Rabbit politely.
"Well," said Pooh, "I could stay a little longer if it -- if you --" and he tried very hard to look in the direction of the larder.
-- Winnie-the-Pooh

This, in a cookbook for children.

To this day, I've not mastered flipping an omelet in the pan (rolling/flipping it as it makes its way onto the plate is a different matter). I'm tempted to explain the "mix eggs, then heat pan" as a tailored instruction to a less-than-experienced child chef; for anyone who can crack and whip 3 eggs in quick order, I'd get the pan on the heat first thing.

It may also be my nearly unholy love for pork products, but... this would be great with crumbled bacon in it.

My early lack of exposure to this delight just goes to show I came by my love of cookbooks late; Fannie Farmer's famous tome has recipes for jelly omelets going way back.

A Very Nearly Tea

One of the things I love about The Pooh Cook Book is the variations -- several recipes will be done two or more ways, to suit particular (or even picky) kids' tastes. Case in point, a warm and soothing beverage, kid-friendly because there's not a speck of caffeine:

A Very Nearly Tea

One 4-cup earthenware teapot

I
5-6 carrot tops, feathery leaves
Orange honey
   or
Honey with a few drops of orange juice
   or
Honey and a small piece of fresh or dried orange peel

II
5-6 sprigs of parsley
Lemon honey
   or
Honey and a slice of lemon
   or
Honey and a piece of lemon peel

Fill a 4-cup earthenware teapot with hot water and set it on an asbestos pad to warm.

Fill the tea kettle with cold water and bring to a boil.

Wash the carrot tops or parsley.

When the teapot is warm, spill out the water and fill the teapot with carrot tops or parsley. Twist them so that they are thickest at the bottom of the teapot.

Pour boiling water onto the carrot tops or parsley and fill the teapot.

Let it steep for at least 20 minutes.

For carrot-top tea, put orange honey in a teacup before pouring in the carrot-top tea.

For parsley tea, put lemon honey in the teacup.

Serve with lightly buttered curls of Fairy Toast.

Christopher Robin was at home by this time ... and he was so glad to see them that they stayed there until very nearly tea-time, and then they had a Very Nearly tea, which is one you forget about afterwards ...
-- The House at Pooh Corner

It just sounds... homey. I like thinking of this tea, though, especially for young gardeners. I never used my carrot tops for anything -- the Lawrie family let me plant a row or two of vegetables. The only tops I was fond of were beet tops -- loved the greens, hated the roots. Ah, youth.

Fairy Toast is the recipe on the next page, and basically involves shaving thin parings of bread off a stale loaf and toasting them in the oven on a baking sheet until brown and lovely.

The mention of an asbestos pad tickles me -- I can't imagine recommending someone use asbestos, and doubt that the asbestos content was actually necessary here. So, let's recommend an equipment switch here, and use a trivet, or a hot pad, or something protective.

The Pooh Cook Book, by Virginia H. Ellison; Popovers for Piglet

When I was a very little girl, I loved the library more than almost anything else. I fought to get my library card (I could read early, but didn't bother to learn to write my name until forced), and remember churning through the downstairs collection. One day, I checked out The Pooh Cook Book, by Virginia H. Ellison.

Oh. OH! I loved this book. I loved it so much...I forgot to return it. More than once. I think I must have paid to have it replaced at least three times. I remember finding one lost copy shoved deep down in the couch months later. Finally, my mother bouht me my own copy. I loved it. Even the foreword pulls me in:

The Pooh Cook Book is particularly useful for special occasions, real or invented, and meant to make what might be an ordinary day into a festive one -- almost as good as a birthday or a holiday. A small amount of imagination can turn the simplest dish into a party dish to celebrate the first day of school or the last, losing a first tooth, a rainy day in summer, the first snow of winter, or the first snowdrop or crocus or violet of spring.

All the recipes have been tested more than once. Most of them are simpler to do if you have a sister or a brother or a friend who can measure out ingredients; butter muffin tins and cookie sheets; help lick spoons and bowls; be a tester and taster of samples of everything.

Every recipe is somehow related to Winnie the Pooh (usually through a prodigious use of honey), and has a quote and illustration from Winnie-The-Pooh or The House at Pooh Corner. It's just a charming book.

I don't remember making many recipes from it, but I do remember making one recipe, over and over.

Popovers for Piglet

(Preheat oven to 425°F)
(Yield: 8-12 popovers)

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup milk
2 Tablespoons honey
1 Tablespoon melted butter or margarine
2 large eggs

Grease the muffin tins.

Sift the flour and salt together.

Add the milk, honey, and melted butter, and stir to blend.

Beat in the eggs.

Fill each muffin tin just under half full.

Bake 25-30 minutes or until sides are rigid and the top and sides of the popovers are brown.

Do not open the oven for 25 minutes to peek or the popovers will fall and not rise again.

If you like popovers dry inside, slit each with a sharp knife and bake 5 minutes longer.

Serve with honey butter or plain butter.

"I wish Pooh were here. It's so much more friendly with two."
-- Winnie-the-Pooh

I've never slit the popovers to dry them out. Never saw the point. And, as it was the 70s in Oregon, I never used butter; we were a margarine kind of people. This recipe has never, ever failed me; not once has a popover failed to pop. When my mom would have one of her friends over from college (so, this would have been 3rd grade for me), the grown ups would make soup (usually a chilled fruit soup), and I'd get to bake the popovers.

...I need to go buy some eggs.