The Days I'd Gladly Crumble

It’s a sad fact in the lives of the fairer sex: there will be no less than three days a month allocated to the dark recesses of victual Sodom & Gomorrah in which no snack food will survive my estrogen soused cravings. Let’s take, for example, the 12-pack box of generic ice cream sandwiches in the freezer. “What 12-pack box?” My husband asks. Exactly my point.  

So what to do when there’s no novelty ice cream treat outlet? No forgotten stash of tortilla chips in the cupboard? No year-old stray gummi bears smushed into the stiff crevices of that bag of Succotash in the freezer (What? You don’t eat your gummis frozen?)? What if you’re in the advanced rabid stages of PMS with nothing to nosh?

Just follow me you hormonal, weepy, cranky, bloated, blemished, ravenous train-wreck.

 
Behold the apple crisp. Or blackberry crumble. Or blueberry Brown Betty. You can call it whatever the hell you want, the point is this is fast. And in all likelihood, you have the ingredients on hand. And those ingredients just happen to be on the “lady times” approved food list: butter and sugar. More importantly, it’s delectable.  

Let me just establish my crumble edict first, no oatmeal. None. Oatmeal has no place in a crisp, a crumble or a Brown Betty in my world. Now that we have that out of the way, here’s the recipe.

Fruit Crumble

Here’s the beauty of this recipe: you can use just about any fruit you’ve got around. I'd stay away from the extra mushy varieties, like plum, banana or apricot but if that’s all you’ve got, go forth with my mixed blessings. Sliced apples and frozen fruits are perfect. You can save some extra crumble in the fridge and sprinkle on top of muffin batter or coffee cake batter.

Ingredients

For Crumble:
1 pound of butter (4 sticks) melted
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup brown sugar
½ teaspoon salt
5 cups flour

Fruit:
I usually use 5 to 6 sliced apples or two 10 ounce bags of frozen fruit (blackberry is my all time favorite).

In a large bowl, combine all crumble ingredients and stir together. Keep working the crumbs with your spoon or your fingers until the butter is absorbed and forms clumps.

In a baking dish, 8x8 Pyrex for example, layer fruit directly into the pan and then sprinkle crumble on top.  Don't worry if the fruit is still frozen.  

Bake at 350 for 45 minutes or until the fruit starts to bubble and the crumble is golden brown.

Somebody's Got a Birthday!

Happy Birthday Jesse!

Why Nancy Silverton Should Rock Your World (or how not to cheat on your Mother Sponge)

I ran a marathon in Hawaii once. Now, before you think to yourself “Lordy, what an accomplishment” or alternatively “Lordy, what a self-referential narcissist,” I’ll just write for the record that I was lucky that I finished before nightfall. I spent half of my running time trailing a pocket-sized octogenarian, my legs as long as her entire body, using her as a reminder that I’d already let a guy in a bear suit and a man in full Darth Vader regalia pass me, so I’d better stick with grandma to inspire me to finish or face utter humiliation.

Why was I telling this story again? Oh yeah, Hawaii. So my husband, my sister, our friend Jonathon and I were staying in a lovely hotel in Oahu and one evening we had dinner outside by the water. And since I was going to be running a stupid number of miles the next day, my pit crew and I carbo-loaded on the breadbasket. And we proceeded to have that dialogue we all have when we’re eating great bread:

“Delicious. Why can’t we get this at home. It must be the local water.”

So we asked the waiter, “Who makes your bread here?”

“We get it from La Brea Bakery. It comes par-baked.”

GAH! La Brea Bakery! That Nancy Silverton is an evil genius. Back in the day in Southern California, she was a one woman American bread revolution. Working on her artisanal starter and breads until they suited her rarified palette, she then went on to build a bread empire around her genius loaves. And to get the same quality bread in Hawaii as you’d get in L.A., the breads are par-baked or partially baked so the remainder of the browning takes place on site and you can sit on the beach in Oahu and suck down a loaf of crusty just-baked blessedness.
But you want to share in her invention, not just the finished loaves. And you want to make a starter as she would and then create loaves that satisfy your rarified palette. And you’re not buying into my “cheater’s” sourdough starter wherein I have you add instant yeast to get your bubbly bacteria jump-started. Fine. Be that way.

I’ll give you a running start and share her natural starter recipe. To proceed any farther into her world, I urge you to buy her book Nancy Silverton’s Breads from La Brea Bakery.

For the starter you’ll need:

2 cups organic bread flour
2 cups spring/filtered water
½ pound organic stemmed red grapes
1 large piece of cheesecloth. Preferably made from organic materials.

Mix the flour and water together in a large bowl.
Place grapes into a neat bundle inside your cheesecloth and tie it off to keep the grapes contained. Crush the grapes gently to release some of the juices/sugars. You’ll notice that on many fruits, there’s a slight film. That’s a naturally occurring yeast. That along with the fructose are going to give you a gorgeous starter.

Submerge your grape sachet into the flour slurry. Leave, covered, at room temperature for about 6 days, stirring every few days. After the 6 days, take out the grapes and feed as you would any other starter. If you’re keeping it out of the fridge, feed a cup of flour every day along with a splash of water. If you’re keeping in the fridge, feed the same amount every 3 to 4 days. What next? Buy her book!

Sowing My Salty Oats

I’m such a turd sometimes. I’ll go around for years saying things like, “Yech, I’ll forgo the free spa pass. I loathe massages.” It’s a fundamental flaw in my character, one that needs complete and permanent eradication. I’ll declare definitive and detailed partialities. When in fact, I’m really just talking out of my ass. So maybe I never enjoyed the creepy guy in German class giving me an impromptu shoulder rub. Why that translated into a lifetime of turning down professional, aromatherapy infused deep-tissue goodness I’ll never know.

Here’s a humdinger that I spouted for a decade, “Nah, I don’t like oatmeal/raisin cookies. But thanks for offering.” On what occasion did an oatmeal/raisin cookie ever offend me? I don’t recall ever having had a bite of one and spitting it out in rank disgust. Maybe it wasn’t my all time favorite but still. That’s no reason to get all uppity and snooty about it. And when I played with a few recipes, I discovered that Oatmeal/Raisin cookies are pretty much my favorite cookie. Ever.

Will I ever learn?

Salty Oats

6 oz (1 and ½ sticks) butter (slightly colder than room temp)
1 cup brown sugar
½ cup sugar
2 eggs
1 t. vanilla
1 t. baking powder
¼ t. baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
½ t. cinnamon
1 ¾ cups AP
2 cups oats
1 cup raisins

Extra coarse grain salt to sprinkle on top

Preheat oven to 350

Combine flour, cinnamon, 1 teaspoon salt, baking powder and soda into a bowl and whisk together. Set aside.

In your mixer with paddle attachment, cream together butter and sugars until light and creamy. Add eggs one at a time. Leaving time between each incorporation so that each egg is fully integrated into the batter before you move on. Add vanilla. Integrate just like the eggs.
Slowly add flour mixture until just combined. Add oats and mix for a few seconds before adding raisins.  

CHILL mixture in refrigerator for at least ½ hour. CHILL! CHILLL CHILL CHILL! This is important, I don’t know if I’ve made that clear. So I’ll say it again, CHILL THE DOUGH.
Scoop dough with medium sized cookie scoop and press down on the dome of the dough to flatten just a bit. Sprinkle the top of each cookie with a wee bit of coarse salt.

Bake at 350 for 12 to 15 minutes, turning the cookie tray every five minutes to make sure the cookies brown evenly.

Angel F#*(*@&#!ing Food Cake

Of all things to openly declare my mortal enemy, I’ve chosen something touched by the divine. At least that’s what the recipe says, “Angel Food Cake.” Not Devil’s Food, not Satan’s Sandwich, not Beelzebub’s Brown Betty. Angel Food Cake. I, Gesine Vanessa Bullock “Sneezie” Prado, declare war on Angel Food cake.

So there.

I’m surprised that you haven’t been keeping up with my on going skirmish with heaven’s fluffy sugar H-bomb. I mean, we’ve been waging this war for years. Quite loudly. With all manner of colorful language thrown in.

“What’s with this stupid f$(*@#(*&#$ing thing! If it doesn’t fall in the oven, it slips from the f(*#$(*&!ing pan while it’s upside down cooling. And what kind of sh@(*&#tty cake requires being held upside down in suspended animation for an hour? That’s no angel. That’s a damn self absorbed demon cake.”

Some of heaven’s corporal creatures have been caught in the cross fire of my ground war. For instance, I didn’t bother telling Agnes that I had an Angel F-ing Food cake in the oven one afternoon. The protocol in my culinary foxhole is to make all manner of biblical pronouncements on the eve of putting the damn thing in the oven.

“If thou darest slam the door, thou shalt face the wrath of lunatic baker lady!”

“Thou shalt not speak above a whisper in this pastry sanctum sanctorum, unless thou wishest to push crazy baker lady over the edge.”

You know, the usual.

But it was the end of the day and it was just Agnes left at the shop. And she’s a sweetheart. Really. Her name means “Lamb of God” and she does right by it. So I didn’t bother with the standard standing on tables, flashing my canines and pounding my chest. I figured Agnes would be chill. So when I checked on the accursed thing and it had cratered, I didn’t think much of it, don’t get me wrong, I threw a tantrum. But I didn’t blame anyone but that stupid, evil cake.

The next came out well but upon flipping it upside down on a wine bottle, it decided that it would be hi-freaking-larious if it shimmied out of the pan a wee bit early. HAHAHAHA! That cake is such an evil scamp.

Somewhere along the fifth try, my body encrusted in egg whites and self hatred, Agnes came along to smooth my feathers. She’s good at that sort of thing.

“So what’s wrong? Why all the profanity?”

“Oh Agnes, I hate Angel Food. I know it’s blasphemy but it keeps crapping out on me.”

“Huh. Angel Food? You’ve been making Angel Food this whole time? And you didn’t make an Angel Food proclamation? “

“Yeah. I suck.”

“Yeah, well, let’s see. Was there an Angel Food in the oven about 3 hours ago?”

“Yup.”

“Oh. Goodness. Hmmm. Well, you know, ____________ had just come in. And she was being herself unmedicated.”

“That’s not good, go on.”

“So I had to get a bag of ice from the back freezer. Because she demanded an ice drink in the middle of a blizzard. And it needed to be broken apart a bit, so I pretended that the stove was her cranium and proceeded to slam the ice against it.”

The rest of the story has been redacted by the Food and Drug Administration’s "Censorship of Explicit Violence Against Food" Board but rest assured, Agnes and I are still terribly good friends.

So you’d be surprised to hear that when I received a copy of Gale Gand’s beautiful new cookbook “BRUNCH!” that of all the recipes, the first one I went to was “Angel-Food Muffins.” Because there’s nothing that says "psychosis trigger" like a recipe that makes 12 of the little f@!&$ers instead of just one.

So here was my deranged thinking, “If Gale Gand says this is possible, then it’s possible.”

I was also alone in the kitchen.

Whether I like to admit it or not, I really like Angel Food and maybe, if I split it up into 12 portions, one would survive. And I didn’t have to turn them upside down.

Her recipe calls for diced frozen cranberries, which I think is a lovely addition to an otherwise thunderously sweet concoction. But I didn’t have any and I wasn’t going to add weight to the batter. And what do you know, they came out beautifully.

Which leads me to ask the question, if you make a successful Angel Food Cake and no one is there to witness the miracle, does it count?

Get Gale Gand’s book, “BRUNCH” when it’s released this April. She tamed my baker’s demons with some lovely recipes.