Other Ways

Last weekend we spent some delightfully analog time in Vermont with friends. The snow has been subpar this year, but the ski places were making it work with what they had. The excellent Wild Wings (cross country) center has a simple warming room with a wood stove sporting a little propellor on top like one of those old-fashioned beanies and whirls with the rising heat, dispersing it throughout the room. Equipment rentals and a day ticket come out to a fraction of what a similar arrangement would cost at one of the downhill ski resorts—minus the lift lines—so I’m officially a convert. We worked up a sweat along streams and over bridges on the quiet wooded trails, which had been hand groomed by a shovel-wielding crew (an Instagram post the day before showed them literally moving snow by the shovelful from the woods onto the trails). After a day like that you feel simultaneously beat up and at peace. It’s Vermont at its finest.

The house we’re renting this year might not be everyone’s jam, but it suits our crew just perfectly. The original part was built in the 1920’s I think, and the foundation is constructed around a natural spring, so the first thing you see upon descending into the basement is a boulder with actual spring waters trickling out of it and into a small diversion ditch that leads them gently outside to join a stream that feeds into the larger stream that traverses the property. You would think this setup would breed mold and rot and all sorts of moisture problems, but everyone who goes down to the basement marvels at how the air smells pure and crystalline somehow.

The overall vibe of the house is 1970’s hippie family compound, with homespun paintings and lots and lots of dark wood paneling, and a quirky accumulated library from 100 years of bookworms (1968 Whole Earth Catalog, anyone?). There’s even a harvest gold upholstered Barcalounger, which is highly coveted fireside real estate; as soon as someone leaves it to fetch a drink from the kitchen, there’s always a kid waiting to swoop in and claim the spot. The floors are Vermont soapstone—the deep green of a forest swimming hole and just as chilly. Among the house’s quirks is a perpetual draft, which we counter with chunky sweaters and a dawn-til-dusk fire in the fireplace. Our 10-year-old has taken to getting up in the pre-coffee hours and making the fire himself; we’ll find him seated criss-cross on the hearth, feeding shreds of cardboard into the flames, gazing glassy-eyed into his creation…much preferable to staring at an ipad.

After this weekend, during which we enjoyed outdoor sport and worked an impossible puzzle and ate collaborative meals and slept under ancient quilts, we made the long drive back to the city, where the shock of Manhattan was real—the wall of skyscrapers along the FDR streaked by, brightly lit, looking like futuristic pod dwellings. “What is this strange place we live in?” I thought to myself. The next morning no one in my family wanted to get up, and then we had to walk a block out of our way to avoid the usual film crew that had claimed our street as their own. An alligator was found this week, emaciated and lethargic, floating in our local park’s lake.

Is it time to live another way? To move somewhere quieter and sweet-smelling and more wholesome? Impossible to fathom, though in some branch of the multiverse my kids are fire building and woods roaming on the daily. The community is just too good here and we’re not ready for change. A non-NYC friend recently asked me how we’ve survived this long in the city and I answered: “We’re kind of like prisoners who’ve been incarcerated for a long time and can’t figure out how to move on in the outside world. It’s like Morgan Freeman’s character in Shawshank—We’re institutionalized.”

At some point during the weekend a text pinged in from my sister, though when she sent it is unclear as service is blessedly spotty out there. She’d scrawled an excited note about some miso chocolate chip cookies she’d made. She’s more of a savory cook—an excellent one—and mostly only bakes under pressure from her children, so I knew I had to try this one. You’ve probably seen a lot of miso added to baked goods lately, and done well, the addition of this subtle umami element is worth the hype. Add brown butter and irregularly chopped dark chocolate chunks, and the goodness is almost too good to take. It’s a bit of a departure from a classic, basic chocolate chip but worth the journey.

Pan banging results in a flatter, denser, chewier cookie

Cassie’s Miso-Brown Butter-Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Ingredients:

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter PLUS 2 tablespoons butter for browning both softened at room temperature

• 1 heaped tablespoon dark miso paste (light or medium is fine too)

• 3/4 cup granulated sugar

• 1 cup dark brown sugar, packed

• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

• 2 large eggs

• 2 1/8 cups all-purpose flour

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 2 1/4 cups dark chocolate chunks or chocolate chips

Instructions:

1. In a small saucepan heat the 2 tablespoons butter over medium heat, watching carefully. Once the butter develops golden colored flecks and a nutty aroma, remove from heat and stir in miso paste until smooth. In a medium bowl, cream together 2 sticks of butter plus sugars with a mixer until smooth, then blend in the miso brown butter. Add the eggs and vanilla until just incorporated. In two additions mix in flour until just blended (no streaks of flour) but do not over mix. Using a spatula, stir in the chocolate chunks. Put dough in the refrigerator to chill at least an hour.

2. While the dough chills, preheat oven to 350°. Scoop dough into balls roughly the size of ping pong balls and space on parchment- or silpat-lined trays about 2” apart. Bake until edges are golden brown, around 12-15 minutes depending on your oven (check often—they should look slightly underbaked). Remove and give your pan a good bang on the counter so cookies flatten—this will make them denser and more chewy. Sprinkle a little flaky salt on top and allow to cool and firm up before removing them from the tray.

Sausage Rolls and Flaming Pudding

When our girls were small, and their brother was nothing but a speck of stardust, we would sometimes steal away between Thanksgiving and Christmas. We’d ditch school and head to England, because that is where Ben’s extended family lives and there was usually some excuse—an anniversary party or a birthday—that didn’t take much arm twisting. His Granny was alive until a few years ago, and when she celebrated her 91st birthday we didn’t hesitate to fly over for it. We’re so glad we did.

Those trips weren’t always easy. Toddler jetlag deserves its own circle in hell, and during that first mini-vacation, England was in the clutches of a cold snap. Our hotel room’s window was stuck in a “cracked open for ventilation” position, ushering in an Arctic blast that left us all sniffly and ill-slept; the girls’ noses ran like faucets the entire trip. London is magical around the holidays, though, and its delights soon outweighed the trials of travel as we wandered the glittering streets way past bedtime every night. We made the obligatory visit to Father Christmas at Harrod’s, and he was so convincing I’m sure he extended the lifespan of our daughters’ beliefs. They squirmed and shotgunned pastries through high tea (“top tea” as they called it). The Winter Wonderland amusement park had sprung up in Hyde Park, and we spent hours on the kiddie rides and trying our luck at archery games, sub-freezing temperatures be damned.

In the countryside, hoarfrost blanketed graveyards and hedgerows, making everything look as though a giant hand had brushed it with icing; none of the pictures I took managed to capture the magic. When our fingers got numb we took refuge in warm, dark pubs where we drank warm, dark beer. The girls lived on mediocre chips and fruit pastilles. I don’t know how much they actually remember of these trips, though, especially that first one—if you ask them they’re probably recalling photographed scenes. And in this digital age our lives have become collections of crisply photographed scenes. (My own early memories are tinted orangish, no doubt because I’m actually remembering 70’s era photos rather than the occasions themselves).

The girls are teens now, and we haven’t been back to England for years. Playing hookie is now a no-no, and casual travel is all but impossible in the omicron age. Our holiday traditions, though, will always be partially British, just like our kids are. Typically, we’ll cap off the Christmas feast by dousing a Christmas pudding in booze and lighting it on fire. Someone runs it around the dinner table while it burns, as many times as possible before the flame dies out, because the more laps you can make the more prosperous the coming year promises to be. And Christmas would never be Christmas in our house without piles of sausage rolls, which often sit on a platter beside ham biscuits, a Virginia tradition from my childhood.

Christmas is never really the same as it was the year before, but it’s these little traditions that keep it festive. I’m experimenting with a vegetarian mushroom version of the sausage rolls and will keep you posted. For now, I give you our traditional recipe, both the short and the long versions….

Easy sausage rolls:

Ingredients:

• 1 package good quality, all-butter puff pastry (I like DuFour, in U.S. freezer sections)—defrosted overnight in refrigerator

• 6 or so good sausages, either sweet Italian variety or something sage-y. Feel free to experiment with non-meat varieties.

• Flour for rolling

• 1 egg, lightly beaten in a bowl with a few drops of water

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 450°. On a lightly floured surface, lay out the puff pastry and gently roll it with a rolling pin until it’s even in thickness and just slightly compressed. Next, squeeze sausage from its casing and lay it vertically along the left side of the dough, in a couple of inches from the edge. Pat the sausage into an even strip, about 1 inch thick. Discard the casings. Now you’ll want to work out the width of the pastry needed to surround the sausage, allowing enough dough to overlap slightly. With a sharp knife, cut the dough parallel to the sausage. Brush edges with a little bit of egg and fold the dough over the sausage, until the sausage is completely surrounded. Press the edges firmly together to seal; you can use the tines of a fork to make little crimps along the edge. Now you should have a long strip of dough-wrapped sausage. Cut it into equal pieces (Size is up to you! We like them bite sized) and lay them on a lined baking tray. Cut small slits into the tops and brush with egg.

2. Bake at 450° for about 10 minutes, then lower heat to 375° and bake for another 10 minutes or longer, if needed. Pastry should be puffed and golden brown and the sausage cooked through and sizzling around the edges. Serve hot or room temperature. I like to serve them with mustard for dipping.

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Traditional Sausage Rolls from Scratch:

(This recipe was given to me by my mother-in-law, Pauline:)

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JuJu's Tea Cakes

(Originally Published here December 9, 2011)

I’d been working on a post about Brussels sprouts, when all of a sudden I woke up one morning and Wham! was on the radio singing “Last Christmas”, and the tree people had come down from Vermont to re-forest the corner of Kane & Clinton. This means, by necessity, that letters for Santa have been painstakingly scrawled in childish hand, and Good Curious Elf has begun his nightly patrols. We’ve already been swept into the whirlwind of the Christmas Spectacular and tree viewing at Rockefeller Center, and we've handed the tots off to the grandparents for the more onerous Manhattan errands. So suddenly, shredded Brussels sprouts with lemon and cappellini, as much as I love that dish, seems colossally un-special. It’s time for some baking, and I’d like to share a cookie recipe that, for us, always kick-starts the holiday season. It’s not the most original one you’ll see in this year’s cookie line-up, but it was my great-grandmother’s. That sounds even more impressive when I tell my daughters we are baking their great-great grandmother’s cookies, the ones my mom used to make with my sister and me every December.

Mrs. Julia Butterworth, known as “JuJu,” lived in the tiny town of DeWitt, VA. This is not the first time I’ve written about her here. Since she reached the venerable age of 96 I got to know her for a handful of years, but those being my youngest years I only caught her in glimpses, which at this point in my life have gotten muddled together in a grainy black-and-white montage. I imagine her with a nimbus of snow-white hair and old-fashioned eyeglasses, slimly built and simply dressed, with a sweet, old-lady smile. I suppose, now, I know her more from Mom’s stories than anything else and can almost feel the feeling of climbing in between cold sheets in her guest bedroom, peering out at the dark shadows that gathered in the corners of her old farmhouse. I can hear the birds chirp in the morning as I imagine stealing into her garden to pull sweet young turnips from the dirt, warm underfoot in the Virginia sun.

And so, following her recipe for “tea cakes,” rolling out the buttery dough and pressing down onto the cookie cutters and snapping a crisp cookie between my teeth, I almost believe I can visit with her for a while and bring my daughters along to meet her. They don’t yet appreciate time passed and memories preserved as I do, but they adore a good tea cake and beg for them year round. We’ve been known to pull out this recipe at Halloween or Valentine’s Day, too, merely as an excuse to wield cookie cutters.

There’s nothing especially elaborate or new about this recipe, it’s just a good, solid one for this old-fashioned type of cookie, which inhabits the space somewhere between a butter cookie and a sugar cookie. In spite of what the name might suggest, there’s nothing cake-y about them–especially when rolled thin as we’re in the habit of doing in my family. Juju had two different versions: the “everyday” ones baked with Fluffo instead of butter and cut thicker in the shapes of bunnies, with raisins for eyes…and then the fancy “tea cake” rendition for special occasions: made with real butter, rolled thin, cut in a variety of shapes, and decorated prettily with sprinkles. That’s the kind my mother made with us at Christmas. It was part of her slim repertoire of sweet treats, and in fact the only thing we ever baked during the holiday season. But she was a decent baker and had her opinions about how things should be done. The dough had to be stretched whisper-thin and lightly adorned, preferably with 4mm silver dragees. My sister and I used to torture her by loading on the colored sugar, as much as a cookie could physically hold, as soon as she turned her head…and gleefully watched her horror when she turned back around to discover our handiwork. As I make these cookies with my daughters every year, I catch myself falling into the same OCD patterns, tensing up as they pile on the crystallized red dye #5. But I hold myself back, letting them unleash their little creative demons.

Around here, it’s not Christmas until a round of these cookies gets made, and flour dusts the whole kitchen, and the house fills with their buttery-sweet smell. I do roll them wafer thin, a habit which demands a little more work and watchfulness (they burn in a flash). My preference is for cookies that are golden and a little toasty around the edges, with a hint of caramelized flavor. I am also partial to the glittering dragees, even though I’m not quite sure what sort of metals we’re ingesting (note: I prefer the 2mm size to the 4mm; they’re more like birdshot than BBs and much gentler on the teeth).

Truly, the best thing about these cookies always was–and still is–the raw dough. Rich and vanilla-scented, with a sugary crunch between the teeth, it is the very essence of what cookie dough should be, and there is no better anywhere. I still gobble up the scraps as I roll and cut. Mom used to give us each a beater off her 1968 hand mixer–the one she still owns in spite of the gaping hole in its casing and exposed wiring and gears within (“I keep things until they die,” she'll proudly tell you). We would strip off every atom of dough with our tongues and stick our heads into the empty mixing bowl for good measure, until somewhere along the line there was a salmonella scare, and a dough-laden beater acquired the same, suburban menace as a raccoon out in daylight or unwrapped candy on Halloween. It became every parent’s responsibility to keep cookie dough away from children’s mouths, and so Mom fell in line. Still, we managed to swipe our fingers in the dough bowl while she wasn’t looking and later, growing bolder, to steal down to the refrigerator where the dough rested, peel back the plastic wrap and break off hunks of chilled dough, which was even better, somehow, than it had been at the freshly-whipped stage. After she got wise to our ways and threatened to cut us off from Christmas sweets forever, our deceptions grew more intricate, and we honed the art of opening the fridge swiftly with a well-timed cough to mask the sound, and with a potter’s skill, of molding the dough back into place after prying off a sugary chunk.

Enjoy this recipe any way you like: pressed thin, left thick, modestly or garishly sprinkled, iced, pale, tawny at the edges, or burnt to a crisp. Enjoy the meditation of flouring the board and rolling out the dough. And if you happen to be making these with kids, savor the way you're forced to slow down a bit during the holiday season. Let go of your control freak side for a moment and make a terrible, floury, sprinkly mess.

Recipe: Juju’s Tea Cakes  

Ingredients:  

• 2 sticks butter (8 oz.), softened at room temperature 

• 1 ½ cups sugar (the natural kind works if it’s finely textured)  

• 2 large eggs (or one Jumbo)  

• 2 ½ cups all-purpose flour plus extra for flouring cookie surface  

• 1 tsp. good-quality vanilla extract  

• 1 tsp. baking powder

Instructions:  

With an electric mixer, cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla and beat until combined. Sift dry ingredients together into a separate bowl, then add to the butter mixture in two additions. Mix until just combined. Scrape out of bowl and shape roughly into four disks, wrapping in plastic wrap or parchment. Chill for at least an hour, or overnight, until firm.

When ready to make cookies, preheat oven to 350º. Leave dough out at room temperature for 20 minutes or so, until softened and workable but still cold and somewhat firm. Prepare trays with either parchment or silpat. Ready a clean surface and rolling pin, along with some extra flour for dusting. Lightly dust your work surface and rolling pin and roll out cookie dough, working from the center outward and rotating the disk for the most even thickness. When you’ve reached about between 1/8" and 1/16” thickness (or as desired), cut out your cookies with floured cutters of your choice. Transfer to prepared cookie sheets (a dough scraper really helps) and decorate as desired. 

Bake, checking frequently, between 15 and 25 minutes. Ovens vary widely, and much depends on how thinly you've rolled your dough. When done to your liking (I like them golden around the edges), remove tray from oven and cool cookies before handling. They keep in an airtight container for a couple of weeks.