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Apparently using a wooden spoon makes it harder to do. But taste better.

Takes even longer if the butter is cold. Don’t ask me how I know that.

I was asked to make cookies. Actually, my wife was making cookies and I stepped in when she had a call with a family member. The call was long enough that I got through the whole batch of cookies. Making these cookies got me thinking…

Thinking about my aunt Hylda. Hylda was my dad’s aunt – his mother’s sister. She took care of my dad and his siblings when my grandmother was convalescing after losing a lung to tuberculosis. My grandmother living into her 80s is something miraculous that I will always be grateful for.

Hylda would take care of us kids, too. When I was young, I never realized how close my dad was to my aunt and how much of a role she had played in his young life – if I had, I would have probably been nicer to her. She and I didn’t have a particularly combative relationship, but we certainly didn’t see eye to eye. She didn’t suffer fools gladly and I was just the right age, and enough of an insufferable fool to, well, you know.

She tolerated me well enough, but she really liked my older sister, Rosemary. This isn’t a case of ‘you were loved better than me’ – it was a point of fact. A fact that I’m happy to acknowledge. They had a great trip to England one time and there were all kinds of fun times which I was pretty happy to just not be a part of.

Anyway, Aunty Hylda would come and take care of us after school. She would make sure we didn’t kill each other and she would keep us fed with all kinds of baked goods. She never married, as she had lost a boyfriend ‘during the war’ and just never really got around to finding another. Can’t say I blame her, after surviving that time in history all bets are off.

We never spoke about it. Not that it was any of my business. We learned that his last name was the same as hers – Chambers – and that he was an air gunner on a Lancaster bomber that was lost over Germany in 1943. She was a Spitfire mechanic and they met at the airfield, apparently. He had asked her to marry him and she had said that she would agree once he met her family. He was lost a few days later in a raid that took the bomber to Munich, which was about as far as a Lancaster could go from an air base in England.

He was her third boyfriend who was lost. ‘Red’, as he was known, (officially Walter Owen Earl) faded away, except in memory. No one knew anything about him. Hylda died in 1988, never having known much more about Red, except that he was gone forever.

He was gone, that was true, but there is a ton of information on him. In a very strange stroke of luck I had a conversation one evening with a fellow and we were talking about wartime service from our families. He mentioned there was a book on Canadian airmen who had been lost and he offered to look Red up.

We found Red. He is buried in Durnbach Cemetery near Bad Tolz, in Southern Germany. He is buried with the other members of his flight crew who perished on the 7th of September, 1943.

My dad and I went to visit in 2007. God, it was a while ago. It was a lovely day in Germany and we found the grave without any trouble. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission does an amazing job keeping the cemeteries in perfect (and I mean perfect) condition.

We brought some of Hylda’s ashes so they could finally be together.

And so every year, about this time (near Remembrance Day in Canada – November 11th) I think about Red and Hylda. And I take advantage of the ancestry.com offer of free access to their war records to see if I can find anything more about him.

This year I downloaded basically his entire military file – mostly forms and details. Red was a typical guy, had a couple of issues with being AWOL but not too bad (docked a day’s pay). He was “Of good appearance. Keen and alert, nervous temperament. Good physique and carriage. Capable of full flying duties. Air Gunner”.

Guess you didn’t have too high a bar to cross to be able to blast away at incoming fighters.

His service record is full of entries, this and that. And, of course, the last one is ‘Presumed Dead 7-9-43’. I fear whoever wrote that entry wrote it often.

Red was a simple guy. Only son of a widow, 30 years old, salesman for a sewing machine company.

When I cream butter and sugar together to make a few dozen chocolate chip cookies to keep my teenagers from starving, I think of Hylda.

I think of how she used to cream the sugar and butter together with a wooden spoon, even though we had all kinds of electrical devices in the house. It was her way of making it just right.

I don’t have the patience for that, I use beaters and suffer the indignity of imperfectly creamed butter and sugar in my cookies. Still an insufferable… Well, you know.

I think I would have enjoyed Red’s company. We probably wouldn’t have much in common, except that we would probably eat too many fine cookies, which is as good a common ground as you can ever ask for.

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Every year, about this time

40 jars out of 5 boxes of tomatoes. I was going for more pulp, but there is a little water in there… Live and learn

Every year, about this time (Late August, September) I do a couple of things: I read, The Closing Down of Summer by Alistair MacLeod. It’s a melancholy reminiscence of a hard-rock miner, touching on all kinds of themes, but the one that I hear is the simple notion of leaving a comfortable existence behind and having to get back to work. Or ‘Back to porridge’ as my wife would say.

The other end-of-summer thing I do is I can some tomatoes. Yes, they’re actually in jars but somehow ‘jarring’ tomatoes makes me think that the tomatoes are going to do something to surprise me.

I’ll detail the process in a later post, but for now I have 40 new jars of tomatoes to go downstairs. Throughout the year, whenever we need tomatoes, up a jar comes. That’s pizza sauce, chili, any soup or sauce that requires tomatoes – here they are.

Ripe (actually, they sort of got away from me and I had about 10% of them spoil – never happened to me before), organic, perfect.

If I ran the numbers on the tomatoes, I would probably find that buying them by the case in actual cans would be more cost-effective.

But that’s not really the point. For me, the jars are a year’s worth of potential, waiting to be tapped. Like a pre-paid account at a resort or summer camp, I never have to worry about whether or not we have enough. There always seems to be another jar. Having a basement full of preserves is comforting. We’re ready as we can be for the coming winter. Well, we’re more ready now that the tomato cupboard is full.

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A Lament, of sorts.

Her father was in France, and he was supposed to be home for May.

I’m not particularly nostalgic. Wait, never mind, I can’t possibly defend that. I’m not excessively nostalgic. Much better.

I had an opportunity to do some work in a city in the centre of the province – Kamloops. Nice place, amazing scenery – it’s actually a desert – gets about 2 inches of rain per year. Three hours north of the border. Strange place, Canada.

Kamloops is about an hour’s drive from Salmon Arm, where my father grew up. He emigrated with his family after WWII. They came from Birmingham, or what little was left of it after the War.

My brother commented once that our grandfather wasn’t much of a traveler. However, he did pick up and move his family to Western Canada from the middle of England, which as far as my brother was concerned (and I agree with him) probably used up all of my grandfather’s wanderlust – what little there might have been of it.

I knew both grandparents rather well. My mother (for which I will be eternally grateful to her for) insisted that we get to know them. As a consequence spent a lot of time with them, and with my aunt Hylda, my grandmother’s sister, who was the one who actually found Salmon Arm and got them to move West.

To the title of this post – my lament is that I didn’t pay near enough attention when my grandmother was cooking. Well, baking. She could do a decent meal, even though she was British (ha) but my God, could she bake a pie.

I lament I didn’t pay more attention. It wasn’t up to her to show me her secrets – which she would have done, no question. It was up to me. I lament that the dominant paradigm was that men (and boys) just didn’t spend much time in the kitchen and were never really asked to help or given much instruction. I close my eyes and I really want to picture her making her pastry. I think I can remember her rolling it out, and I certainly remember this great floral apron she had. I remember the tiny kitchen of their split-level house; I remember the fact that there was no dishwasher and we all had to take turns washing dishes – thankfully my gender didn’t preclude me from that task. But picturing her deft touch with the pastry eludes me.

I really want to ask her about her cherry pie. And her apple pie… And the pumpkin pies she used to make…

I want to know how she did it. How she survived the unrelenting bombing; survived having measles when she was 3 and losing an eye ; surviving tuberculosis and living for decades with only one lung… And, of course, how her pastry was just so much better than anyone else’s. The British Reserve was in play, of course. Not for the pastry, but for the rest of it, definitely. And she didn’t want to talk about such things. She was always much more interested in politics and current events.

I can find the perfect pie recipe in a book, but of course it’s not quite the same thing.

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Perfection. No, really. Perfect

Perfect fruit.

My wife prefers nectarines to peaches. As in, nectarines are amazing; peaches are, well… OK…

I didn’t realize I had a position on such things, but then I was reminded of an afternoon in Paris many, many years ago – probably 1991. I was sitting in a plaza and I bought a couple of peaches from a greengrocer.

They. Were. Perfect. Perfectly ripe, juicy, peachy (duh) and absolutely sublime. As a consequence, I have always been more of a ‘peach’ guy. My wife tolerates this transgression the same way she tolerates most of my foibles – with undiminished grace and dignity.

I hadn’t thought about that anecdote until a whole case of nectarines showed up at our house a few days ago.

Every year, yours truly along with several families in the neighbourhood, buy tomatoes from a farm in Oliver, BC. It’s an organic farm and the roma tomatoes they grow are pretty amazing. Every year we take about 150lbs of tomatoes and turn them into a few dozen jars of sauce for use throughout the year. Now that I’m on a pizza kick, I’m using a lot more of said tomatoes, but it looks like we’ll only have a few jars left from last year before the next lot gets added to the cellar.

In addition to our tomato order, we also get a few pounds of garlic and a box of nectarines. Apparently the nectarines were so ripe that the farmer drove down that part of the order last week. Tomatoes show up tomorrow.

And the nectarines are perfect. Perfect as in perfect. I think I ate 4 of them yesterday. I eat fruit like this with no guilt at all. It’s fresh, organic, incredibly sweet, chock full of who knows how much nutritional goodness…

It doesn’t get any better than this. I’m speaking here in a specific way – there is no way that a nectarine, grown by anyone, anywhere, could be superior to the fruit that was sitting in front of me up until about 10 seconds ago. More about the objective value of the fruit itself, rather than the experience of eating it.

This is one of the cool things about ingredients – they have their flavour and they have their ‘best before’ but the taste is pretty linear. There isn’t any way to prepare or to create a better result. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, everything aligns and you can eat these things when they are absolutely at the peak of their goodness. No amount of creativity can change that.

Ok, fine. I’ll allow that it might well taste better being eaten in the plaza next to the Centre Georges Pompidou. It’s a nectarine from BC, not a miracle.

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You’ll live! Sheesh…

They’ll never wilt.

“You Won’t be Poisoned”


This was a standard comment from my mother when we asked what was happening for dinner. “offer it up” was another regular response when any questions were posed about meals, but I’ll leave that for another time. The conversation went like this:

  • Kid: What’s for dinner?
  • Mom: Food, some of which you have had before and I know you can tolerate it because I have seen you eat it with my own eyes.. Yes, I have. Don’t look at me like that.
  • Kid: Uh, really? I was hoping for a different meal, all of which I have decided ten minutes before dinnertime.
  • Mom: Well, that wasn’t on the menu. (gesturing to the menu we had with daily dinners listed. Anyone was welcome to go ahead and cross off what was listed and make whatever dinner they wanted for the family. Yeah, that didn’t happen very often)
  • Kid: Well, I’m not sure…
  • Mom: You won’t be poisoned.
  • Kid: *shrug* OK.

“You won’t be poisoned”. I sometimes wonder what she meant by this, aside from the obvious assurance that the grim reaper was not going to visit us at the dinner table no matter how dark our teenage minds were.

Part of me thinks she was saying, “Good grief, what do you kids expect? Eat it! You’ll be fine! It might not be exactly what you were looking for, but for goodness’ sake, I can’t hit it out of the park every evening. And besides, I’m not going to kill you with this.”

Exasperation? Resignation? Exhaustion? Little of each? Not really sure. She always said it in a kind way – rarely angry, usually just outraged or, more likely, impatient and by 6PM on a rainy Thursday, rather done with the kids.

Or it’s possible she was saying, “Trust me. I know what I’m doing here. I wouldn’t put you kids in danger. You’re the most precious thing in my life.”

Nah. Option “A’ for sure.

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Of all the best laid plans…

My goodness, they grow up quickly. Now she’s 17.

What do you do if you’re out of ideas? When your kids eat an endless supply of junk food that appears, seemingly, out of nowhere? When you just don’t have the ability or the energy to do something about it?

Or when you’re out of ideas for helping kids with anxiety, or with migraine headaches. Or both. Or Math homework. Because the parent in you wants to tell them to just get a good night’s sleep and eat some healthy food. Hey, it might not solve everything but it’s a start. Generally comments like that are not welcome in conversations with teenagers. Who knew?

Breakfast used to be pretty good. We had a system down. Mondays were this, Tuesdays, that. Wednesdays were these great egg sandwiches I would do with English muffins. But then my wife started fasting in the mornings, and the kids can barely get themselves out of bed on time, and it has descended into something really not worth doing. And a certain someone (not me, my goodness, no) was grazing on the English muffins so when I reached for them they were unavailable. It’s hard to cook when you don’t have all the ingredients.

One kid leaves the house, always late, always hungry. The other leaves the house on time but with not nearly enough food to keep her going through the day. And now that no one is going anywhere in a hurry due to COVID, it’s even more chaotic.

Then they come home and have a huge snack, or eat when they arise – some time in the mid-afternoon – and they aren’t hungry for dinner.

They’re getting to the age where they can’t be punished. Heck, they’re well past that age. I’m totally out of ideas. I want to say, “here, eat! It’ll cure what ails you.”

But to no avail. Oh well. What is it they say about ‘fighting the good fight?’ Is that a timely thing to say or think? I hope so. Gotta be something in that box that Pandora opened.

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Mystery Coffee

I think I got it right – not really sure.

A few years ago a friend of mine sent me a stock photo request for a cortado coffee. I had no idea what one was. As it turns out, it’s a Spanish coffee, where the milk ‘cuts’ the espresso. So a 50-50 mix of coffee and espresso. I had never heard of one before. Apparently they’re consumed in glasses, rather than cups, and apparently they have steamed milk but not froth or foam.

I didn’t make the sale on the stock request, even though I shot what I thought were some rather nice photos. I even used some film.

But I ended up making and consuming a fair number of these drinks. I have never really seen one except in photos in a search engine. Still don’t know if what I’m doing is right. I’m sure there are a bunch of baristas out there who roll their eyes at such abominations as this.

But it’s my narrative now, and this is my cortado. It’s more like a 2:1 mix of milk and espresso, and I do a bit of latte art on the top, such as it is. The Rorschach test on the top of this drink is either a puppy or a tornado. It’s hard to tell.

I’m rather partial to them now. My afternoon go-to coffee drink, especially in the summer.

Not as strong as a macchiato and with more substance so you can enjoy it longer. That’s the only problem with straight espresso. It’s over before it starts.

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Pistachios

Don’t forget to collect the shells and put them where they belong. No, not there. Yes, there.

Here in Betty’s kitchen there is always something to snack on. It’s pretty dangerous, but when we come to visit, we are allowed to not eat all the pistachios, apparently. I struggle to keep my hands out of the bowl, though.

If I were a younger man, I would be reaching for the muffins in another bowl, but I can resist those these days.

It’s hard being in someone else’s kitchen, especially if you want to cook. I have known my mother-in-law for 25 years and she has always had this kitchen. It underwent a fairly big renovation a few years back but the mixing bowls are still in the same place they have been for ever. And yet, I struggle to remember where they are.

I’m out of place here. The coffee is different, the ingredients are different and in different spots (see above). The Drawer of Requirement is still the same, though. Every kitchen has one of those.

But we have created epic meals here over the years, she and I (and my wife, other family members). I have had a lot of fun and there is a ton of history here, at least for me and I’m sure everyone else in the family.

So I can tolerate (barely, but that’s my inner-snob talking) my mother-in-law’s choice of coffee, and the fact that when she renovated her kitchen she didn’t put in a heated floor so the tile in the wintertime feels like you’re wandering around on 18-inch square blocks of ice. I can also overlook the fact that she has never had a toaster and she uses a toaster-oven to toast bread, which takes forever and regularly sets off the smoke alarms. Don’t get me started on her dull knives or the fact that her non-stick pans are ‘still good’ more than a decade after they stopped being non-stick.

I can tolerate all that (not that it’s much, really – and let’s be honest here – she is perfectly happy with the kitchen the way it is)

It’s easy to tolerate because of that bowl of pistachios. The one that is always on the counter, saying, “welcome”, and “dig in” and “lower right corner, next to the baking pans. How long have I known you? How many hours have you spent in this place?”

Always with a lot of love, that’s for sure.

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Guess I should talk about the title of this blog

Not that it’s that earth-shattering. I live in Canada and dontcrowdthepan.com was already taken. But the link to the .com version of the title doesn’t get you anywhere. Maybe it’ll come up at some point. Maybe not. I’m not going to spend too much time worrying about the .com aspect of the site.

The saying comes from the idea that if you’re browning a piece of food in a pan and if you pack in too many pieces of food too close together (crowd the pan) then you won’t get good browning on the food. I’m not sure what the rationale is for this – scientifically – but it’s true. Happens to me all the time.

There is a bit more to it than that, though. I really struggle with getting good browning on my food when I’m cooking it. Maybe I’m too impatient. Maybe I pack in too many pieces of food in the pan. Maybe the pan isn’t hot enough. Maybe it just isn’t a priority.

It’s a simple thing to remember, but really hard to do in practice.

No one ever complains, either. If I don’t crowd the pan it’s for my benefit, not for my family. As long as I can get something on the table – that’s the priority.

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Shallots.

A few years ago we went for dinner at a local restaurant – lovely spot. I had a dozen kussi oysters all to myself. Strangely, my wife and kids weren’t interested. But to the title of this post, there was this shallot mignonette that was so tasty and what was amazing about it was how finely the shallot was chopped. We did a salad for lunch today and in the making of the dressing I was reminded – I need to chop my shallot more finely. It was too chunky by half.

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