Drag Me Kicking and Screaming

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My Best Brownies — Lower in Carbs, Quicker than A Mix, and Tastier Too.

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I don’t know about you, but other than a modest mortgage payment, our monthly grocery bill is the single-biggest bite out of our budget.

I’m big on fresh vegetables and lean meats, so before cutting back on them, I cut convenience foods, mixes and processed foods of all kinds. I never used them much anyway, and cutting them is an easy way to cut back on the grocery bill and still live well. Plus, our bodies thank us, as well as our wallet.

Needless to say, I bake a lot from scratch.  My favorite brownie recipe — better than any boxed mix or store-bought brownie — is a conglomeration of an old Diamond Almonds recipe that I used for years and my own low-sugar modifications, which I finally settled on after a lot of trial and error. The texture of these chocolaty brownies is moist and somewhere between cake-like and fudgy. Both are really yummy!

The original recipe is easy and, other than the optional nuts, calls for only six ingredients. Mine is just as easy and adds three ingredients — Splenda, baking powder, and (optionally) virgin coconut oil.

Here’s the original:

1 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup softened butter
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup dark baking cocoa

Blend the first 4 ingredients, then mix in the flour and cocoa.
Fold in 1/2 cup (or more in my case) nuts if desired.
Sprinkle 1/2 cup nuts over the top.

Pour into a square brownie pan.

Bake at 325 degrees for 25-30 minutes, or until you can insert a toothpick and pull it out nearly clean. That is, it will have a crumb or two sticking to it. If you wait until the toothpick comes out perfectly clean, the brownies will probably be drier than you would like.

Also, because I use cocoa rather than melted baker’s chocolate, I add a couple of extra tablespoons of vegetable oil or butter.

My Low-Sugar Brownies

I like to watch my sugar intake, but I can’t claim these are low-carb brownies because of the flour and sugar, but as brownies go, I think these are pretty close to low carb, if that matters to you. I also use a bit of virgin coconut oil (which is really good for you) rather than veggie oil.

Here’s my recipe:

1/2 cup softened butter
3 tablespoons coconut oil or softened butter
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup granulated Splenda
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup cocoa

Cream the sugar, Splenda, eggs, vanilla and butter. Add 3 tablespoons of coconut oil at this time if you’re using it. If not, add two to three extra tablespoons of butter. Mix in the flour, cocoa and baking powder. Fold in 1/2 cup nuts if desired.

Pour into a square brownie pan. Sprinkle with another 1/2 cup nuts (I use more).

Bake at 325 degrees for 25-30 minutes, or until you can insert a toothpick and pull it out nearly clean. It will have a crumb or two sticking to it.

These brownies are deliciously tender when warm, but they’re so delicate, they also break up too easily when warm. I found they hang together just fine after I allow them to completely cool before cutting and serving. Waiting is a problem, though, I must admit.

If you’re stricter about carbs than I am, you might experiment by trying 1/2 cup of soy powder (not soy flour, which tastes awful) instead of the flour. Or maybe compromise with a 50/50 mix of flour and soy powder.

Peasant Foods

Posted in All Posts, Frugal Living, Simple Foods

Easy as Pie, A Tribute

Posted in All Posts, Simple Foods

My mother was anything but a gourmet cook, though my siblings and I all thought she was a good home cook. Alas. We were deluded.

Mom used only three savory spices: salt, pepper, and chili powder. If it involved hamburger and canned tomatoes, it had all three. If dinner was fried (always past any tenderness), she used only salt and pepper. And dinner was always one or the other.

I’m pretty sure it never occurred to her to use fresh or even dried herbs, and had anyone suggested she use them, she would have poo-pooed the idea as nonsense. Actually, she would have said, “Tuh!” That’s what she always said when she thought an idea was ridiculous. “Tuh!”

Vegetables were canned and often grey. Salad was unheard of until the 1970s, when for some reason she decided it would be a good idea to serve salad. She also added stuffed cabbage to her repertoire around that time. Who knows why. It calls for tomato sauce and hamburger, so why not? She didn’t need a recipe — tuh! Just roll cabbage leaves around browned hamburger with chili powder in it, pour on some tomato sauce, and there you go.

Once when she was staying with me for a few weeks, with admiring curiosity, she said, “where did you ever learn to cook like this?” She was impressed. Oh, herbs and spices, sweet victory to you!

Make It Do, Wear It Out, Use It Up.

A child of the Great Depression and of Swedish pioneer homesteaders, she absolutely would not throw anything away. Libraries of folded paper bags lined our pantry. Stacks of magazines grew like mushrooms in our otherwise tidy living room. Pencil stubs waited among stray thumb tacks and rubber bands for new lives in the grubby little hand of a four-year old artist.

And food — throw it away? Sacrilegious! For sport, sometimes my friend Amy and I would stand in the refrigerator door and count the number of jars and bowls that had mold growing in them. The garbage disposal would have been useless except for dead mice. When she occasionally caught one skittering across the floor, she beat it with her shoe, and then sent it through the garbage disposal for good measure.

She told me once that when she was a little girl, their cabin caught fire, and though she made it safely out, she ran back in through the flames to save her doll. No way was she was going to let that doll go to waste.

OK. She ran back in because she loved the doll. But I bet you anything she couldn’t stand the idea of it going to waste, either.

One time when I had to bring flour to school to make papier mache, she gave me old flour with worms in it because she didn’t know what else to do with it, but she sure as shit knew it would come in handy someday, and it did. Boy, did I take a flogging in art class that day.

When she and my father went to Florida after all my older sibs had moved out, they left me home to soldier on with my high school studies. While they were gone, some of my friends spied a keg on the front porch of a nearby fraternity. They asked if we had a hand truck. I said yes, and the next thing I knew they were running down the middle of Wells street, in the dark, pushing a hand truck loaded with stolen goods. (Then they went back to the fraternity and asked to borrow a tap.)

After the ensuing party, it was time for a good clean up. I had no choice — someone had thrown up and left a big slimy mess on the carpet. So I took full advantage of my burst of domestic energy. In our foyer —  which was a small enclosed room we almost never used — I happily, finally, closeted the many towers of dusty magazines that my mother was sure she would get to reading some day.

She just about died when she got back. She asked not how I was, but, with her head swiveling round and round our huge living room, she demanded, “where are all my magazines!” I definitely heard a hint of hysteria in her voice. I showed her the stacks in the foyer. “Tuh!” she said.

So anyway, she was a bit of a hoarder and not much of a cook. But boy could she bake. She had worked for a bakery when she was a young woman, and there, she learned to turn a pastry. She knew her stuff. Her cinnamon rolls — oh! Every time I think of them, I yearn for them. I so wish I could make those risen, golden pinwheels. And she could throw out cakes like anyone’s business. Her pie crust was flat-out unbeatable.

I may not have mastered cinnamon rolls, but I did master pie crust. I remember when, shortly after I married the first time (of three times), I asked her how to make it, even though I had probably watched her do it a hundred times. What she offered me was as much technique as recipe.

The Secrets to a Fine Pie

She told me to dump two heaping two-cup measures of flour into a bowl. Add a dash of salt. Then take a half a brick of lard and cut it into the flour. It has to be lard, not shortening. To this day, when I taste someone else’s pies, I can immediately taste the difference. In fact, I can usually tell just by looking at them whether they were made with shortening or lard. Pies made with shortening always have edges that look as if they’ve been fried.

Anyway, cut the lard into the flour, and then start working it with your hands, crumbling it “until it’s mealy and the lumps are pea-sized.” But — this is also very important, she warned — keep a light touch. “If you over work the dough, you’ll get the gluten going and it’ll be tough.”

Next add water. It has to be ice cold, which helps to keep the dough from becoming gluey. I usually keep mine in the fridge until I’m ready for it. She didn’t know exactly how much water, but she cautioned me that “after the first quarter cup or so” to add only a few tablespoons at a time until the dough congealed, but remained pliable. Too much water will make the crust tough.

And don’t forget — keep a light touch! At this point that’s easier said than done. Tuh, I say.

Time to Roll

Now all that’s left is to form the dough into soft balls about the size of a big baseball, plop each one on some flour that you’ve spread out to keep the dough from sticking to the rolling surface, and start rolling. I also flour my rolling pin.

When you’re baking a fruit pie — especially berries — it’s also a good idea to toss the fruit in a little flour before dumping it into the crust. Then pour about a cup of sugar on top of the fruit. (Actually I like less, because I love the fruit taste and don’t want it artificially sweetened too much.) Then add a nice sprinkle of cinnamon and a bit of nutmeg and cloves — go easy on the nutmeg and cloves.

Add five or six little knobs of butter here and there, put on the lid, pinch the edges all the way around to seal them, and if you haven’t already, dock the now assembled pie. My mom always made little chevron cuts in the center, and I do too. Put the pie into a 325-degree oven until a thin knife blade can easily penetrate the fruit inside. Insert the knife through one of the docking holes. Start checking after 45-50 minutes.

Thank you. Now I can say I have carried on the tradition and prevented the recipe from going to waste. So go forth. Bake pies!

“Tuh! You forgot to tell them about basting the crust.”

Oh yeah, use a pastry brush or even your fingers to baste the pie lid and edge with milk or cream. Your pie will look beautiful.

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