Kris(mas) Kringle

As we near Christmas, I look into the freezer and find the napoleon of Kringle boxes from Christmases past. My aunt and uncle have sent them every year for a while now. Last year they sent two. They used to send Play with Your Food wall calendars, which we all loved, especially the kids, but then they somehow got onto the Kringle kick. For those of you who may be wondering, Kringles are a Danish confection--large rings of flaky, buttery pastry, filled  with various fruits or nuts or chocolate, or a combination of two or more, and glazed with a rich icing. I love them, especially the chocolate pecan ones, but I am the only one in our family who eats them and they're too big for me to eat all by myself, so after a helping or two into the freezer they go and are rarely pulled out again. Each Christmas, the newest Kringle box is slid to the bottom of the pile, so the oldest becomes the top stratum of the layer. Once I discovered that my cousin's half-Danish daughter loved Kringle, I tried to fob at least some of the newest Kringle off on them, but that put only a small dent in the tower of boxes.

Still, I am sad at the thought that this year it looks like there will be no new Kringle to add to the stack. My aunt is in a nursing home now, with early onset Alzheimers. She won't be ordering any Kringle for sure and I don't know if my uncle will be taking over for her. Nothing has arrived so far, so I'm guessing that this particular holiday tradition has come to an end, as all things do eventually. I am amazed that the simple act of opening the freezer and looking at a pile of pastry boxes can evoke so many memories and so much nostalgia. This Christmas, I will pull out one of the Kringles and savor it, remembering my aunt and uncle with every bite.

Mystery meals

My dad was a Depression-era kid, which no doubt contributed to his reluctance to ever throw anything out. His mother was, to put it charitably, not the best cook. And she was never willing to throw anything away either. If my dad didn't drink his orange juice with raw egg in it for breakfast, it would be waiting for him after school (I'm amazed that he never got salmonella!). To this day, I can make him shudder just by murmuring "oatmeal." And then there were the mystery meals. To save money during the Depression, my grandmother, who could never resist a bargain, but that's another story, would buy unlabeled cans from the grocery store. My dad and his brother never knew what they were having for dinner on any given night: Soup? Canned peas or beans? Legend has it she once opened a can to find it contained dog food--and served it up.

Now, there's nothing that scary in my freezer (though my daughter might beg to differ). I know that everything I've tucked away in there is something that I was happy to eat, at least at one point. So I wasn't too worried when I pulled out a few tupperware containers to thaw and waited to see what dinner would consist of. Ah, Indian food, plus a little bit of homemade beef stir fry. Not too shabby, though this wasn't leftover takeout from our usual place, so I had a bit of a hard time identifying the dishes. There were some sort of vegetable fritters in a sauce, all well and good, and a blazingly hot chicken dish that I think my son had ordered and not eaten. That called for some raita and I had some thawing on the counter. But, as I'm guessing you all know, raita is something that does not freeze well. No problem: I had some plain Greek yogurt that would do in a pinch. I just had to pick up some fresh rice and tamarind sauce and I was good to go.

I got two dinners out of that batch of leftovers and am still working on the leftover spaghetti and meat sauce--man that stuff seems to be lasting forever! But after a week of non-stop leftovers, I am going to make something fresh tonight! My only concession to Mother Hubbard will be a side dish of black beans that I've pulled out of the pantry.

And tomorrow I am going out for dinner!! I have a coupon for the Irish Inn at Glen Echo: live Irish music and Guiness-battered onion rings, here I come!

Have your cake...

I have been wondering how I'll ever use up all the flour and sugar in the pantry without gorging on baked goods, so when I was invited to a party to celebrate my dance teacher's wedding and asked to bring something to eat I thought, "Here's my chance! I'll make a cake!" Of course, I didn't think at that moment of the challenge of making a cake without much in the way of equipment: the nine-inch cake pans and most of the bowls and measuring cups and spoons are in Vienna already. But never mind, I was determined to meet the challenge. In my zeal to embrace that challenge I forgot that I actually do still have my Kitchen Aid mixer, so somehow I wound up using a hand mixer--with mismatched beaters.

But I did find exactly the three ounces--and not an ounce more--of baking chocolate in the cupboard. Also two unopened boxes of semi-sweet baking chocolate and a container of Hershey's cocoa, all of which I was able to return to the store. And I was able to use of most of one of the two half-used boxes of cake flour in the pantry, plus most of an open bag of dark brown sugar, and an entire bag of powdered sugar. A few well-timed holiday parties and I may be able to use up all or most of the remaining bags of flour and sugar.

Lacking those nine-inch pans, I baked the cake in a single fourteen-inch pan. I didn't feel up to trying to split that single layer (and the cake had bit of a San Andreas fault running across the bottom), so I just frosted the top and sides, creating, in effect, a giant cupcake.

Get to the party--much oohing and aahing over the cake--only to discover that my dance teacher and her new wife are Vegans. Oh well!

Leftovers make strange bedfellows

I decide to start the challenge of emptying out my food storage by clearing the fridge of the leftovers generated by my daughter's recent visit. I know there is leftover Indian food and take-out from Moby Dick's House of Kabob. (And no, I don't know why a restaurant serving cuisine from a landlocked, primarily Muslim country is named after that great Puritan seafaring tale of cetology and revenge. I don't think they have any fish kebabs on offer, even.)

I pull out the ziploc of rice and the various tupperware containers, anticipating a hearty meal, only to discover that the mice, two legged or four legged, have already had at them. There's about a quarter, maybe a third of a cup of rice and about two tablespoons each of dal, chicken tikka makhani, and saag makai, plus some raita. So I add the grilled onions and tomatoes that are all that's left of the kubidah platter (those same mice have made off with the rice and kebab), some leftover grilled asparagus, and the last little corner of flatbread. Tasty, if eclectic. And not quite as filling as I had hoped. Good thing there is also half a Milky Way milkshake from Good Stuff Eatery. The perfect dessert, it just fills in the corners nicely.

Bon Appetit!

Waste Not, Want Not

I'm moving to Vienna, Austria, in mid-January and I have to empty out my pantry, cupboards, freezer, and fridge by then. I already sifted through the pantry for things I could ship over: the six bottles of River Garden Kitchen Maple Balsamic Vinaigrette, two quart jars of treasured sourwood honey from the Smokies, four jars of Maui onion mustard, and assorted other spices and condiments. But that still leaves a pantry crammed full of stray cans of beans, canisters of rice, and seemingly endless half-empty bags of brown sugar:

Exhibit 1

And then there's the freezer, which contains half a dozen ziplocs of homemade roast beef hash, the makings for more hash, bits of various loaves of bread, and an entire Napoleon of boxes of Kringle (story to come):

Exhibit 2

Of course, I could just dump it all in the trash just before I leave the house for good, but that would go against the homily reiterated throughout my childhood: Waste not, want not.  
Words to live by in my home growing up. My dad is famous for never wanting to throw anything out: "This bit of cheese is still perfectly good! You just need to cut off the moldy bits and it's fine." Of course, he did wind up in the hospital once, with a jellied uvula (is that really a thing?), after eating some canned meat that he had left opened in the can in the fridge for awhile. And his mother was even more famous for never throwing anything out. My cousins and I would come for a visit and she'd say, excitedly, "I still have that root beer from your last visit!" Never mind that that previous visit had been a couple of years earlier.
So throwing all that food out really goes against the grain. Plus, my husband has already moved to Vienna and I'm here, as I said, till mid-January. So eating up that food will help keep the expenses of maintaining two households down. 

I'm looking forward, not without some trepidation, to the creative challenge of crafting meals out of whatever I happen to pull out of the pantry or freezer on any given day. My goal: to finally reach the status of Mother Hubbard's cupboard.