Nacho night

As usual, I had no idea what I was going to cook for dinner tonight. Then I found out that today is the International Day of the Nacho.

I don’t know when I first heard of nachos, but the first time I remember eating any was one night fairly early in my marriage. We were heading home from somewhere late in the evening, and Jon noticed that I was “fading” (when I haven’t eaten in a while – even just a few hours – I have very little energy and I have trouble thinking clearly). Since I have trouble making decisions at that point, he made one for me – we stopped at a nearby Denny’s and he ordered an appetizer of nachos for me to eat while I figured out what I wanted.

It must have been nachos supreme, because it was a very large plate covered with a heaping pile of tortilla chips, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, refried beans, hamburger, olives, peppers, sour cream, and who knows what else – gaucamole, maybe, which I love and Jon hates. It was more than enough for two of us to eat, so we abandoned thoughts of ordering anything else. And we took the rest home in a box.

At some point I must have tasted nachos served the way I most often see them today – just a pile of tortilla chips and some “nacho cheese” poured over them. My husband and sons like that kind of nachos, but I’ve never liked the nacho cheese. At first I thought it was the “nacho” seasoning, but now I think it must be because it’s processed cheese, which I’ve never liked.

I don’t know if I ever thought about the origin of nachos before today, but I’m sure I assumed it was based on a traditional Mexican dish, just like tacos. I know the “Mexican” foods I’m familiar with have been Americanized, but at least most of them have their roots in traditional Mexican cuisine. But it turns out that nachos are of fairly recent origin, the time and place and “inventor” are known.

Cheap, easy, healthy: pick two of three

Sometimes I think my biggest job of the day is figuring out what to make for dinner. I like cooking, when I have the time and an idea of what I want to make, but neither of those conditions are met very often. I tell myself I’ll sit down over the weekend to plan out meals for the week ahead, but it doesn’t happen. The fact that the supermarket sales run from Wednesday to Tuesday doesn’t help.

My tendency to “fade” when I haven’t eaten in a while doesn’t help either. (I’ve been tested at least three times for low blood sugar but the tests never show anything; the doctor recommended I just eat frequent small meals.) I eat a mid-afternoon snack, but by the time I finish work at 5 PM I’m ready for dinner. By the time I actually get home it’s hard to think of anything that appeals to me. (For whatever reason, the more I need food, the less I want it.)

So I look for easy meals to reduce time and effort: breaded chicken patties are a family favorite (so are veal patties, but they are almost impossible to find around here), Hamburger Helper has a few varieties my sons love, and frozen hamburger patties grill so much better than the ones I make myself. But those solutions all cost extra, and aren’t terribly high on the list of healthy foods.

There are easy-to-prepare healthy foods too, of course, but those cost even more. And I know how to prepare healthier meals (if need be I can find a recipe in my collection of cookbooks, which include healthy, quick, and easy in various combinations). But that takes time, and generally advance planning so I have the right ingredients. Once in a while I think of something I’d really like to make and plan ahead. But not very often.

Recipe for fresh fish for dinner

• Remember to sign up your child for the company-sponsored children’s fishing tournament. Also put it on your calendar so you don’t forget to go.
• Find a fishing rod. Also take a bucket just in case you catch something.
• Bait the hook. Help your child cast the line.
• Hold the fishing rod while your child gets a snack and a drink. Think of things to talk about when your child gets bored.
• Put on a new worm when the old one stops wiggling (or if a fish eats the worm).
• Notice when the bobber finally goes under. Let your child reel the fish in.
• Take a picture of your child with the fish. Remove the fish from the hook. Realize that it’s not one you can keep, and throw it back.
• Start with a new worm again.
• Notice the bobber went under again (wonder why these two worms were so much more appetizing). Have your child reel it in.
• Take a picture of your child with the fish. Remove the fish from the hook. Realize that it is one you can keep (bluegill only). Put water in the bucket and put the fish in the water.
• Offer to keep fishing, but agree to go home when your child decides one fish is enough.
• Listen to the water slosh in the bucket as the fish tries to jump out. Hope it doesn’t jump out in the car.
• Wonder how to prepare the fish for dinner. Look online for instructions on how to fillet a fish.
• Find a second website because the first one was too complicated.
• Find a fillet knife. Now find a knife sharpener. Ask husband to sharpen the knife.
• Wonder how to kill the fish, which is still flopping around. Get squeamish and let husband do the deed.
• Wonder how fish can still flop around after he killed it. Wonder if it’s like a chicken with its head cut off.
• Go ahead and try to start cutting it anyway. Once the head is removed it will stop moving.
• Wonder how many fish you have to fillet before it gets as easy as they make it sound on the website.
• After fifteen minutes of effort, produce two small fillets. Get rid of the rest of the bloody mess.
• Heat oil in a skillet. Rinse the fillets and dry with a paper towel, then cover in flour.
• Fry the fillets. It doesn’t take very long because they are very small.
• Share the fillets with your child. They are delicious because they are fresh, and because you caught the fish together.
• Be glad you don’t have to catch and kill your food every day.

Useful inventions: egg cooker

A lot of cool-looking new kitchen gadgets don’t turn out to be all that useful. My SaladShooter is in a drawer somewhere, because unless you slice/shred a fair amount at a time, the extra work to assemble it, disassemble and wash it is as much trouble as the work it saved. My wonderful Pampered Chef foaming soap dispenser stopped working and no amount of cleaning would fix it – but now I don’t need it anyway because I can get a foaming soap dispenser, complete with foaming soap, at Wal-Mart.

We got some kind of device at a white elephant exchange that was supposed to make it “onion petals.” I like onions rings, but never got around to trying the thing. Instead we tried to sell it at a yard sale, and then gave it away to a thrift store. Other gadgets sit in drawers or in a box in the basement, ones I’ve held onto but haven’t used in so long I don’t remember where they are.

But I think I’m going to get more use out of my Cuisinart Egg Cooker. I asked for it for our anniversary last month, and my husband took me shopping to get one. We looked briefly at the one advertised on TV, then picked the Cuisinart instead. My experience of “As Seen on TV” products has not been all that positive.

I finally got around to making space for the egg cooker on the counter, where it has to share room with the toaster and coffee maker and waffle iron, all of which get used fairly regularly. Then I set it up, and read the instructions. I had wondered how in the world it knew how long to cook the eggs – that was after all my reason for buying it, because I always end up forgetting to set the timer when I boil eggs or not hearing it when it goes off.

Support the economy – enjoy some ice cream

Ehow.com really does tell “How To Do Just About Everything.” For instance, in case you were wondering how to celebrate National Ice Cream Month, here are six easy ways, complete with ingredients list and instructions. I particularly like #4, making an ice cream sandwich. (I would advise, however, to let the ice cream soften some before smooshing it between the cookies, and then freezing it before eating, so you can savor the taste without having to eat in a hurry before it makes a big mess.)

I have eaten very little ice cream in the past year and a half, and don’t miss it a great deal. It used to be my biggest temptation, but after a few months of abstinence I discovered it didn’t taste as wonderful as I remembered. Lately I have been enjoying a bowl of vanilla yogurt mixed with fresh fruit (strawberries or blueberries) as my evening treat. It’s just as delicious as ice cream, and it doesn’t leave me longing for seconds.

Still, I wouldn’t want to let down the dairy industry - or Ronald Reagan, who designated July as National Ice Cream Month in 1984. The International Dairy Foods Association explains that

The U.S. ice cream industry generates more than $21 billion in annual sales and provides jobs for thousands of citizens. About 9% of all the milk produced by U.S. dairy farmers is used to produce ice cream, contributing significantly to the economic well-being of the nation’s dairy industry.

Last month, to celebrate the end of my stint in the Tot Lot at day camp – and to enjoy a cold treat on a very hot day – I treated myself to a small bowl of ice cream at Culver’s. I selected their flavor of the day, which happened to be Berries and Cream. I used to have to drive by to learn their flavor of the day, or stop in and pick up the monthly calendar, but I just discovered that they have a widget on their website that lets you look up the day’s flavor where you live. To make it even more handy, Culver’s lets you email or blog the widget, so here it is.

Today’s flavor, at our local store, is Double Marshmallow Oreo. Mmmm! Now if I drove to Davenport, I could have Georgia Peach today. If I lived in Ankeny or Des Moines, I could get Mint Brownie.

I used to think that mint cookies and cream was the best ice cream flavor I could think of, followed by coffee mixed with Heath Bar bits. Ben & Jerry’s makes both, with Mint Chocolate Cookie voted twelfth most popular (it scores 4.46 out of 5), and Coffee Heath Bar Crunch close behind (sixteenth and 4.42). Today, though, I am thinking their Berried Treasure sounds very good (blueberry and blackberry chunks with lemon sorbet swirls), even if it only scores 3.84 from customer voting. It’s even recommended in Eat This, Not That.

Fortunately, I’ve found that I can enjoy thinking about ice cream – and then enjoy eating my yogurt and blueberries (both of which are in the list of eight foods to eat every day in Eat This, Not That). Besides, the yogurt industry may be miniscule compared to the ice cream industry, but eating yogurt supports the economy too.

What a dessert can teach

We ran out of ice cream sandwiches, so we had to get inventive to make dessert. Of course, my younger son had been wanting to make a dessert, ever since I brought home the book Boredom Blasters, which I had checked out from the library in search of ideas for playing with the children at day camp last week. It gave us fun both at camp and at home doing Slapstick Story Time (similar to Mad Libs). Then he noticed the Alien Candy Factory.

It has recipes for Marzipan Monsters, Saturn Swirls, Martianmallows, Chocolate Space Spiders, Plutonian Pretzels, Asteroidough, Rocket Raisin Balls, Truffle UFOs, and Interstellar Space Junk. (Also fortune cookies, but they looked like too much work, just to make something we can get anytime at the local Chinese buffet.) Some of the recipes called for ingredients I didn’t have (almond paste, chow mein noodles), or ingredients my son doesn’t like (raisins). But Saturn Swirls sounded perfect.

When I was a child, I used to try mixing chocolate chips and peanut butter to try to approximate the delicious taste of Reese’s peanut butter cups. Now I see what my mistake was – I used too much peanut butter and too little chocolate. Saturn Swirls are made using four parts chocolate chips (by volume, not weight) to one part of peanut butter. Melt the chips in the microwave, mix in the peanut butter (but not completely – you should still see swirls of lighter brown), drop by globs onto wax paper, and freeze.

The instructions say to freeze until they reach the atmospheric temperature of Saturn or until they become solid, whichever comes first. I suspected it would be the latter, but just to be sure I had to look up the temperature of Saturn. Not surprisingly, it’s extremely cold up in the clouds above the “surface” of the planet (being a gas giant, that word doesn’t apply very well), dropping to about 285 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) at the top of the clouds. But it gets a lot warmer lower down.

I found estimates of “surface” temperature anywhere from 140 degrees below zero (Celsius) to minus 20 (Fahrenheit). It turns out that Saturn actually generates heat, 2 1/2 times as much as it receives from the sun. NASA explains that “Many astronomers believe that much of Saturn’s internal heat comes from energy generated by the sinking of helium slowly through the liquid hydrogen in the planet’s interior.” I didn’t understand why that would generate heat, but another site explains that

Like an oily salad dressing, the gases in Saturn’s atmosphere are very slowly separating, with the lighter gas rising up and the heavier gas falling down. As this happens, friction between the molecules heats the gas, accounting for the extra heat.

I learned a few other things from this experiment. The commercial freezer in our basement freezes Saturn Swirls very quickly (but not to the temperature of Saturn’s surface, unless you use the highest estimate). Fingers melt them even more quickly, so make them small enough to pop in your mouth in one bite. And I think they could use just a little more peanut butter.

Guest blogger reports lucky catch

My guest blogger today is a 9-year-old storyteller with a great imagination. Most of his stories involve monsters, heroes, and superpowers, and audience participation where possible. But he also is excited about the opportunity to contribute to my blog post today. (Actually I told him we would work on it together yesterday, but it took until today to get photographs transferred from the camera to the computer.)

Yesterday I caught four or five fish. That’s not all. According to Dr. Gipple (we were at his family’s pond), I caught the second or third biggest catfish and the biggest bass, I caught with two poles, I caught the most fish and most species. I also ate catfish.

You may notice the shirt worn by our lucky fisherman/blogger: “This is my lucky shirt” (also his favorite/lucky color green). It certainly seemed to be the case yesterday. After catching two bass and a bluegill, he was asked to help reel in a catfish hooked on another pole. Turning his own pole over to Mom, he made the catfish catch, then returned to find another bluegill hooked on his own line (helpfully retrieved from the pond by Mom, who wanted a chance to do something besides watch the fun).

Having caught so many fish, he decided to give someone else a chance to catch some. So he went off with some other children to see the sights (a waterfall, though he told me it was much smaller than Niagara). Meanwhile his lucky pole (or maybe it was my green T-shirt) proceeded to catch two or three more bluegill (we threw them all back, keeping only the catfish). I nearly landed a catfish, even though my line lacked the special hook and stinky bait designed for them, but the teenager trying to help me managed to lose it.

At home, I fried up the catfish (kindly dressed by Dr. Gipple – on right side of picture at left), and we both enjoyed it very much. Fish tastes great when it’s fresh, especially when you have caught it yourself.

Help for a brown thumb

I have generally tried to do things for myself if I can, rather than asking for help, though I’m more than willing to accept help that is offered with things I don’t know how to do. My husband sometimes complains that I need to ask for help more often, whether it’s with bringing in the groceries (I’ve always prided myself on how many bags I can manage to carry), lifting heavy objects, or getting the dishes done. But if I can do it without help, I’m not likely to think about asking, unless I don’t feel well.

I’ve always preferred self-service gas stations, do-it-yourself kits, and self-guided tours. Part of the is a desire to save money, and part of it is the introvert’s preference for solitude, but part of it is feeling that it’s cheating to get help with certain things. Growing up, we weren’t allowed to use cake mixes, as we were expected to make things from scratch. As a young wife, I initially resisted buying mixes for macaroni and cheese, Hamburger Helper, and other common cooking shortcuts. But shortage of time and the discovery that the finished product really tasted pretty good eventually won me over.

Until last year, I always insisted on growing garden plants from seeds. That’s how my father taught me to garden when I was a girl, and my cucumbers grew so abundantly that sometimes I gave the surplus to the local health food store. But the gardening I’ve tried the last few years has been less successful. I’ve tried growing herbs in the garden, and when that didn’t work I tried growing them indoors first. They grew fine until I put them outdoors, at which point they all died.

The marigolds I planted with my son to try to discourage rabbits from nibbling at his zucchini plants grew just fine. But the zucchini plants never produced more than a few flowers (as best as I could tell from studying gardening websites, all the plants were “male”). Then last year at a farmer’s market, we came across a tomato plant for sale. It already had some small green tomatoes on it, and I decided it would be nice to have something grow in the garden that I could actually eat. I probably got just enough tomatoes off it to recoup the cost of the plant – but they were all vine-ripened and delicious.

This year I helped my son plant flowers, which seem to do a bit better than vegetables for us. But for my own garden, I purchased some zucchini plants, tomato plants, and a spearmint plant from a local garden store. They’re not as far along as that tomato plant I bought last year, but at least they’re growing – and a day after being transplanted into my garden they’re still alive.

Last year I tried the same thing with different plants (peppers and squash, I think), but later in the season, and using just the soil I had dug up in the yard. All the plants promptly withered and died. This year I bought a bag of topsoil to cover the dirt I had dug up (in a different corner of the yard this time).

I clearly don’t have a green thumb. So while a part of me dislikes starting my garden this way, it will really be nice if I finally get to make the zucchini bread I promised my son when we started his garden two years ago.

Cheese is not cheesy

As I cooked cheesesteaks for dinner, I found myself wondering why the word “cheesy” has a negative connotation. Our family loves cheese, and making a meal “cheesy” is a good thing around here. (I’m not sure how many pounds we go through in a week, but it seems I’m constantly buying cheese – string cheese, cheddar and cojack for sandwiches, block cheese for snacks, and shredded cheese for salads, tacos, scrambled eggs, and casseroles.) Yet while the first definition for cheesy is “containing or resembling cheese,” the more commonly used second definition is “of poor quality; shoddy.”

To a cheese connoisseur, I suppose my cheese might be considered “of poor quality,” since I generally buy prepackaged store brand cheese, reserving purchases of more expensive cheeses from the deli for holidays. Even the jarred Alfredo sauce that my family loves is probably only a distant cousin of the sauce by that name produced by a professional chef.

Still, that wouldn’t explain why something as wonderful as cheese – even the inexpensive cojack we eat so much of – would come to be associated with “shoddy.” I figured it couldn’t have been a cheese lover who came up with that. So I checked out the etymology – dictionary.com is great for looking these up – and found out that it had no relation to the word cheese at all.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (one of several references included at dictionary.com), by 1818 the British in India had borrowed the Urdu word chiz (“a thing”) and used cheesy to mean “a big thing.” By 1858, cheesy had evolved a slang meaning of “showy,” which led to the modern, ironic sense (“cheap, inferior”) by 1898.

So there you have it. Cheese is not cheesy – except in a good, mouth-watering way.

A little bit of nostalgia

This morning, in our small group at church, we were offered a choice of sweet or sour snacks (generally someone brings treats, whether storebought or homemade). The sweet was rocky road brownies, which – I was told – were very sweet. The “sour” wasn’t really sour, just tart – rhubarb crisp. I declined the brownies, and eagerly took a serving of rhubarb crisp.

I’m not sure how old I was when my mother stopped cooking rhubarb. She had gradually been moving towards more healthy eating, since having to give up chocolate when she was pregnant with my older sister (her colitis no doubt played a role in this process). She still made some desserts when I was little, so long as they were relatively healthy desserts – rice pudding and Indian pudding were two of my favorites. I don’t know if the stewed rhubarb counted as a dessert or not, but I always enjoyed eating it.

I’ve had rice pudding occasionally over the years, but never any as good as what I remember my mother making, in that oblong yellow casserole. I haven’t ever had Indian pudding since then, and haven’t attempted to make it myself, especially as it has a long baking time at a low temperature, and I don’t know that the rest of my family would want to join me in eating it. I have had strawberry rhubarb pie sometimes, and possibly rhubarb pie, but I don’t remember having stewed rhubarb since I was a little girl.

Everyone else at the table this morning – at least those who tried the rhubarb crisp – exclaimed at how very tart it was. That’s how a couple of them like it – including the husband of the woman who made it – but they still thought it was very tart. I tried it – and liked it very much – and thought that it was barely tart at all. I don’t know if that means my tastebuds aren’t very sensitive, or that I just have tasted skewed to the tart rather than the sweet end of the spectrum (since giving up most sweets, I find most of them taste too sweet when I do try them).

In any case, I happily accepted a bag of rhubarb stalks to take home, though I had never cooked rhubarb in my life and wasn’t sure what I’d do with them. But if my mother, who never learned to cook growing up (her family had servants to do cooking and housework) and had to teach herself from Fannie Farmer’s cookbook, could cook rhubarb, so could I. I pulled out my Fannie Farmer (not my mother’s copy, but one my husband’s grandmother gave me, our first Christmas together), found the recipe for stewed rhubarb, and got started.

I admit I didn’t follow it exactly. For one thing, it called for a pound of rhubarb. I figured I had at least two pounds, but no scale to weigh it on. So I doubled the recipe, except the sugar, since I didn’t want it too sweet, and I left out the lemon rind since I didn’t have any. My mother had a kitchen scale, but I bet she didn’t have any lemon rind either, and I bet she cut down on the sugar too. (Actually, she would have used raw sugar rather than white, but I used what I had.)

She wouldn’t have gotten busy on the computer (of course not – PCs didn’t exist back then) and forgotten about it. After a while, my husband asked if I was making cookies, and I dashed to the stove to find the rhubarb had boiled over and I had burnt sugar on the burner (which is what my husband had smelled). But that washed off, and the rhubarb came out so well I had two bowlfuls.

Mmmmm!