Jenyfer Matthews

Though I love to collect kitchen items – measuring cups and spoons, good pans, dishes – and I enjoy eating good food, I do not necessarily love to cook. (Who wouldn’t have a personal chef if one were available??) I do however derive a certain amount of satisfaction from making tasty and well-balanced meals for my family – a task that takes both time, forethought, and some skill – which is why I don’t appreciate it when my children make faces when I serve something for dinner they don’t care for.

There were things my own mother cooked that I liked better than other things and a few things that I didn’t like at all but I ate whatever she cooked. It just never occurred to me to complain about dinner (at least not to her face and until I’d moved out!)

I don’t think it is too much to ask of my own children that they extend the same courtesy to me. I don’t make them eat things that they have tried and genuinely given a fair chance but don’t like. Not everyone is going to like everything. (My mother did not make me eat acorn squash for instance) If I choose to make something for dinner that I know ahead of time is going to be more pleasing to the adults in the house than the children, I will make an alternate selection for them (doesn’t happen much!) But if I make something that the children have eaten 100 times before without complaint and they just aren’t in the mood for it? Tough. Have a bowl of cereal or go to bed hungry. I’m not a short-order cook.

I made it pretty clear a few years ago that I wasn’t going to make macaroni and cheese every night and that I wasn’t interested in hearing negative commentary either. My daughter got the message and rarely if ever says anything negative about dinner. She is a good eater and the way to judge her enthusiasm is whether or not she takes a second helping.

My son on the other hand can be a real pain. If it were up to him, we would only ever eat macaroni and cheese, pizza, and bean burritos. He has no problem making faces or pouting at the table, particularly if I serve chili. He too is a good eater (quantity) but lately his range of acceptable choices seems to be shrinking. Last week he made a big fuss about a meal I have served many, many times before and that he has always liked. I was fed up so I sent him to his room with nothing. He was mad and stubborn enough that he decided to stay there even after I told him he could return if he liked. Eventually he came back to the table, after the rest of us had finished eating, and ended up eating two big platefuls.

When I remarked upon it he said, “It’s good. I forgot that I liked it.”

All that drama because he forgot he liked it? Oy-vey! He’s only 9 years old. If this is going to be a battle of wills, then I’m probably going to be entirely gray by the time he is old enough to move out. I sure hope that he learns his lesson or it might one day his wife be sending him from the table hungry!

There was a time, long ago in what seems like an alternate life, when I set a goal to try a new recipe once a month. Since this year was one long disruption, needless to say I didn’t stick to that goal. I did cook here and there, but mostly I stuck to favorite recipes that I could make from memory. Most of the time I was happy if I could make reasonably balanced meals – new and interesting wasn’t on my agenda.

With life finally settling down, last week was one of the best ones I’ve had for cooking in a long time. I made some old favorites and tried some newer things as well, including jambalaya and cream of cauliflower soup. Those are not technically “new” recipes to me, just things I don’t make all that often.

I did try one new recipe on Saturday morning though and I am pleased to say that in spite of some initial skepticism from my children, it was a total hit – Pumpkin Pancakes.

I pretty much followed the recipe as is was except that I followed the suggestion of one of the reviewers and used 2 eggs instead of 1 and upped the spices quite a bit. The result was wonderful. The pancakes were pleasantly pumpkin-y but not too sweet. The next time I make them, I’ll likely try replacing some of the white flour with wheat germ or ground flaxseed (Ssshhh!).

The rest of my kitchen equipment is due to arrive tomorrow morning from Cairo. Once I get it all organized and put away, I won’t have any more excuses not to cook (except time!). My current goal is to cook a nice meal at least 4x a week. The other three nights? I think may need to assign those nights to the other three members of my family! It may mean Cheerios for dinner but I could live with that once in a while if it meant I didn’t have to cook every night

I’ve cleaned the stove top and wiped out the oven, I’ve cleaned all the cupboards in the kitchen and laid new shelf paper (Is it wrong how much I like the smell of shelf paper?). Overall, the kitchen is ready for action. The problem?

I have very limited tools with which to work.

My things in Cairo have not even been packed up yet, and as yet I have no firm date for when my storage items will be delivered either. All I have is what I came with: an enameled cast iron pot I bought in a thrift store (too beautiful to pass up!), a nonstick pan donated by a friend, and a small cast iron skillet that used to belong to my mother.

As you can see from the mug of tea in the orange pot and the butter knife laid across the cast iron pan, none of these pots is very large. Since I tend to do a lot of one-pot type cooking, it has been a bit of a challenge to produce anything decent for dinner around here lately.

Did someone say challenge?

I admit that I have bought some prepared food here and there. I can hardly help it when I’m always exhausted and crunched for time lately. I have also managed to make some fairly decent dinners. One thing I made earlier this week that was a hit was sauteed onions, garlic, zucchini, and yellow peppers over pasta, topped with a bit of Parmesan cheese. No leftovers that night. Split pea soup was also a hit. I improvised one night and made a pizza using a square boboli crust on the top of the broiler pan (it did at least have bell peppers on it). I also have a small Pyrex dish with a cover that I used to make broccoli in the microwave. Broccoli is my fall-back, make-a-meal-healthier vegetable. I want to make a new recipe I got from a friend for pumpkin chili, but I’ll have to wait until I have a bigger pot!

(Confession: If it were just me, I’d probably eat more like this.)

I miss my gas stove top from Cairo, but that is another topic all together!

Other accomplishments this week include getting phone / internet / TV service. Hmmm… maybe I could just call out for dinner…

At last – the pumpkin famine is over! My local grocery store had double cans in stock this week (for a mere $5.67/can) so after checking the expiration date, I bought three cans. Yes, it’s a bit steep for canned pumpkin, but in the end it boils down to how badly do you want it – as it does for many things in life. And I wanted pumpkin bread, not sweet-potato-substitute-bread.

Pumpkin bread really ought to be called pumpkin cake for all the eggs and sugar it includes. I admit I tweaked the recipe a bit – I cut the sugar by a cup and replaced one of the three remaining cups with brown sugar. I also replaced some flour with ground flaxseed and wheat germ. Ssshhhh! My children haven’t noticed one bit of difference. It’s just vitamin enriched cake now.

This batch didn’t take as long as you might think either – my oven will bake 24 muffins and a loaf pan simultaneously. I love my oven.

While I was in the kitchen I also decided to take advantage of the fantastic strawberries available locally now and make some jam. I don’t have canning jars or fruit pectin or experience, but I wasn’t going to let any of those things stop me! I decided to make freezer jam because it was the best option for a novice like me.

Did I follow the recipe? Sort of. The basic recipe was 4 cups of chopped strawberries, 4 cups of sugar, and a splash of lemon juice (to supply the pectin). I cut the sugar by half – strawberries are sweet enough on their own. It wasn’t such a radical departure on my part – the recipes I looked at varied a lot by how much sugar they used. I used more lemon juice however – more pectin seemed like a good way to go.

I hulled two packages of strawberries, about 800g per package, so probably ended up with about 3lbs all together. I didn’t weigh them, I just guesstimated how many cups there were once I gave them a spin in my food processor. It was more than 4 cups but probably not quite 6 cups. I compromised and used about 3 cups of sugar. It’s kind of appalling how much sugar you have to use, but it helps to preserve it and also makes it set.

It doesn’t take so long for the juices and the sugars to dissolve together. Once it boiled, I let it cook, stirring frequently, for probably 15-20 minutes. If you have a candy thermometer, good for you. I boiled it until it was thick enough to start gelling on a cold spoon, but short of crystallizing into hard candy (been there, done that!)

Did I mention that I didn’t have any equipment or canning jars? Here’s where I went all pioneer woman and improvised. With freezer jam, you can just put it in a container and throw it in the freezer. I did that with some, but I also wanted to try a nifty trick I saw mentioned in the comments of a recipe I looked at and create a seal with a regular old jar – I used an empty pickle jar. Obviously I could have used a smaller jar had I had one or I could have filled this one up more, but I didn’t have a smaller jar handy (I had to get the pickle jar out of our recycling!) and I was hedging my bets! I didn’t want to ruin all my jam, if the jar trick didn’t work out. I boiled this jar to sterilize it and kept it in the hot water until I was ready to fill it using my (sterilized) ladle. I kept the jar inverted for about 15 minutes before I put it in the fridge.

I’m happy to say there was a satisfying pop when we opened the jar this morning.

The jam was thick but also wonderfully spreadable. It’s definitely a spoonable jam. Fairly sweet, but hey – it is strawberry jam. I’d be curious if I could cut the sugar a bit more, but I suspect if I wanted to do that I should just make sure and buy some fruit pectin when I am back in the US in the summer. This jam would be equally wonderful on waffles or ice cream. It certainly was great on my morning toast.

I am totally applying both of these things toward my recipe goals: one new recipe and also dessert for the week…

I have never been one for making New Year’s resolutions. It is hard to think of something that I truly want to change / improve at which I feel I actually have a chance at succeeding. I mean, I could “resolve” to get back down to my high school weight or to run a marathon but realistically speaking, there isn’t much chance of either of those things happening.

This year I came up with what seemed a reasonable goal: to try one new recipe a month. I didn’t limit myself too much – the recipe could be for anything (entree, dessert, etc) and with a whole month to do it, it never felt like a chore or a burden.

If I look back over the year and am honest in my reporting there were times when even a whole month wasn’t enough time. (I traveled a lot this year!) I may have had to fudge on the time here and there by making two recipes in one month to play catch-up, but by counting only total recipes tried over the entire year my count is 17, which is 5 more than required. Yeah me

I even made two new recipes this month in the midst of the holiday madness. I saw a recipe for Bowl of Oatmeal Muffins on the blog of a friend and made those last week. The only thing I did differently was to add some cinnamon to the recipe and on a few I experimented with also adding a dollop of jam before baking. There were a big hit at my house and will definitely be added into my repertoire of muffins.

The second recipe I tried was for corn bread stuffing. I think I may have lived before during the Great Depression or some similar hard times because I really really really hate to waste food. I made the cornbread to go along with the remains of a pot of shrimp gumbo. We finished the gumbo, but not the cornbread – which is odd because my children love cornbread. I could not bring myself to throw out half a pan of cornbread so I decided to make stuffing to go along with a pot of 13 bean soup. I looked at and combined a couple of recipes I found online and it was another success. I think I actually liked the cornbread stuffing better than regular stuffing – however I don’t know that I’d go to the trouble of making a pan of cornbread just to crumble it up for stuffing! (Stuffing is just another way to use up stale bread after all)

All in all, I would call this resolution a success and it is something that I am going to strive to continue into the coming year. Where did 2010 go by the way???

You can’t always get what you want when you want it in Egypt. That particularly applies to holiday foods for whatever reason – perhaps because there are certain foods that seem to be so tightly associated with the holidays that we don’t miss them much until that very moment when we desperately want them?

I had only been married about five years when we first moved abroad and during that time my husband did most of the cooking. It was a very happy time for me I wasn’t working when we moved so it made sense for me to take over some of the cooking at that point. It wasn’t necessarily an easy process because I had to teach myself to cook with actually ingredients, from scratch. There weren’t many convenience options available and the ones I could find were absurdly expensive. Who pays $10 for a brownie mix or a can of pumpkin? Sometimes even what seemed to me to be basic ingredients were hard to come by so over time I had to get good at substituting and improvising.

I didn’t make a Thanksgiving dinner this year, and the dinner to which my family was invited featured many dessert options, but no straight-up pumpkin pie. I do not do eggnog-pumpkin-pecan. I could happily skip the rest of the meal but the one thing I do want is pumpkin pie. I could eat pumpkin pie any time of the year – my daughter is the same way and often requests pumpkin pie for her birthday, which falls in July!

Sadly, there was no canned pumpkin available in the local groceries this year (as yet!), and I have gotten so used to being able to get it that I didn’t bring a can home in my suitcase this year. There were a few actual pumpkins around but frankly I wasn’t up for dealing with an entire pumpkin. Instead, I decided to get a jump on my recipe resolution for December and make a sweet potato pie.

Yes, technically I made the pie in November, but I’m counting it for December. Sue me.

It was infinitely easier to process one large sweet potato than it would have been to process a pumpkin. I microwaved the potato for five minutes before I boiled it for twenty minutes. Then I skinned it under cold water as instructed and since I don’t have a mixer, I popped it in my food processor with the butter and the rest of the ingredients. As suggested in the comments of the recipe, I used evaporated milk instead of regular and added a bit of flour to the filling. It looked a whole lot like pumpkin pie to me when it was finished.

I also made my own pie crust. I admit that for as few ingredients as are in pie crust, I am terrible at making it. It requires a fine touch and I usually handle it too much. I must have done something right this time because this one actually turned out nice and flakey.

The verdict? My husband declared he liked the sweet potato pie better than pumpkin pie and both the children liked it every bit as much. We ate it room temperature the first day and I liked it – but it didn’t seem to me to be quite as rich as a pumpkin pie. More like a diet pie – a “lite” pumpkin pie. I liked it much better the next day after a night in the refrigerator. Then again I like my pumpkin pie cold better too. It would have been better yet with fresh whipped cream but without a mixer, I think I’m out of luck on that.

All in all, I declare the sweet potato pie a success – but not a successor to pumpkin pie. Just an understudy, waiting for an opportunity to snatch the starring role in times of pumpkin famines. It’s always nice to have a back-up plan.

The same day I also made Moroccan Chicken Stew, another success. I pretty much followed the recipe but next time I will up the amounts of all the spices and toss in a bit of chili powder. It was flavorful, but could have used more zing. I’m sure it has more zing as prepared in Morocco!

I imagine that I’ll get to at least one more new recipe in December – I’m really hoping to be able to make my step-mother’s truffle recipe and also have plans to make salt dough ornaments with the children (does that count??). I have to say that my recipe resolution is perhaps the most successful resolution I’ve ever made and I’ll probably continue with it in the new year as well.

I typically do my grocery shopping on Sundays and I know it’s going to be a fairly good week when I have at least three meal ideas in mind when I go. This was one of those weeks and I tried another new recipe last night: Brazilian Black Bean stew.

I love black beans but finding them in Egypt isn’t always easy. Even when you can find them, they cost about $3/can so I brought 5 lbs of dry beans back with me this summer. With the weather finally cooling off a little, I am more in the mood to cook them.

It takes a long time to cook them. I forgot to set them out to soak overnight (of course) so I set them out in a bowl of water at 8:30am. I figured that I could soak them until about 2pm and that would be enough, right? I ended up putting them in a pot to boil just after 1:30pm and then boiled them for three hours before they were finally soft enough to use. We are lucky enough to have our utilities included with our housing, otherwise I’d have to wonder whether I was saving any money using dried beans over canned!

The rest of the recipe / ingredients were easy to deal with. Boil brown rice with a cup of tomato juice (or in my case tomato paste and salt) – check! Saute onion and garlic – check! Peel and cube sweet potato, then simmer – check! Chop chili pepper… this is where things got a little rough.

I like my food to be flavorful, but I’m not a particular fan of spicy hot so I rarely use chili peppers. I am not sure why I decided to go ahead and toss one in this recipe when I have so blithely omitted them at every other opportunity, but I believed the man at the vegetable stand when he told me this variety of pepper was only mildly hot. Right. Flavor aside, he forgot to remind me to be wary of the seeds and the oils and to wear gloves when cutting them up.

Oh wait – he’s an Egyptian man. He probably doesn’t know anything about actually cooking with them!

Everything was in its pot, happily simmering away, as I chopped up the one lone pepper I bought. I pulled the seeds out – I’m not a total idiot – but I did not wear gloves while chopping. And I did not wash my hands immediately after chopping. I did however rub my face. Who needs blusher when you can just rub chili oil into your cheeks?

OUCH!

On the up side, I did not touch my eyes and the stew was fantastic. Definitely something I will make again – however I’ll likely cut the proportions slightly because we have enough for another meal (or two) On the downside, the skin on my face burned for a couple of hours. I can only imagine what would have happened had I bought the HOT variety of pepper!

Dinner tonight? Taco salad. Making fresh salsa with the rest of the cilantro but skipping the chili peppers!

As if October didn’t fly by quickly enough, you ought to see all the notations on the November page of my calendar. My daughter has a three day class trip to Alexandria next week, the following week is the Eid holiday – during which time our family will be taking a three day trip to the beach (Sssshh! It’s a surprise), then the week after that is already Thanksgiving! Where has the year gone!?

I’m always encouraging my daughter to keep up with her homework assignments – encouraging her to do them now even if they aren’t due for a week – so I’m happy to say that I too am ahead of myself a bit with my recipe resolution for the month. What did I make? Beef stew.

For most of you, this wouldn’t qualify as a new recipe but rather an old classic. A staple of cold weather cuisine. Having married a man who has been a vegetarian for most of his life, I have never had the occasion to make beef stew so it’s new to me. It’s only been in the last year or so that my husband has decided to expand his eating options a bit and much to his chagrin, beef is his favorite meat so far. (He feels far less guilty eating fish but sadly, he does not like fish.)

The stew was fairly easy to make and very tasty. My husband said it gave him flashbacks to being a child when his mother made beef stew. I took that as a compliment because his mother was a great cook. My children were attracted by the scent but not as enthusiastic about eating it. Though I enjoyed it, it took long enough to make that I am not sure I’d do it again with such mixed reactions – though I did enjoy using my grandmother’s cast iron pot to cook it in.

The month is still young and I have two more recipes I intend to try: Brazilian Black Bean stew and Moroccan Chicken Stew. Do you sense a theme?

In other news, I have started to format / proof of HERE TO STAY in preparation for the rights reverting to me in the new year. The double edged sword of digital / self-publishing is the impulse to endlessly revise things. I have to keep telling myself that it’s not necessary or even a desirable thing to do at this point. Maybe if I repeat it often enough, I’ll start to believe it? Or maybe having three books for which formatting / proofing needs to be done will simply force me to stay on track and not meander off into the woods…

It’s only Monday and I’m already exhausted.

In part, my lack of energy has to do with having had a busy weekend. Two children, two sports activities each = much running to and fro. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know how they do it. They are, however, considerably younger than I am and almost solid muscle.

I happily sent them back to school yesterday morning and got busy with my own to-do list. After changing all the sheets and getting a few loads of laundry going, I went out to do my grocery shopping for the week. Good news was that I had a frequent shopper discount card to use at the store for 10% off my bill. Bad news was that the ATM on my way was out of cash (not an unusual phenomenon).

I tend to rely more on my credit cards when I am in the US, but in Egypt I prefer cash. Not only because Egypt is the land of fraud and my credit card companies tend to put holds on my cards when I use them here, but also because of foreign transaction fees. I only use my credit cards here sparingly. I had a bit more money than I typically need for a weekly shop so I went on my way.

Miscalculation. In addition to groceries, I bought next week’s soccer snacks, plus a few other “fancy” treats for the children’s lunches. In the end I spent nearly all the cash I had, even with the discount, and I had not yet done my produce shopping.

I didn’t let that stop me however. I have never yet taken advantage of it, but I know that my vegetable seller will give credit. I could in fact just pay up once a month if I wanted. I decided in this case that I would try another ATM on my way home and pay him when he delivered my things. When I asked him if this was okay, he not only agreed immediately but he offered to give me a loan so I could do my grocery shopping. How’s that for service?

The second ATM had money and I was able to pay them at delivery. Somehow it doesn’t bother me to pay my credit cards off once a month, but I don’t like the thought of owing the vegetable man money!

I spent the rest of my day in the kitchen washing fruit, doing dinner prep, and planning school lunches for the week – after having cleaned all of the bedrooms and floors upstairs. After the children returned home we did snacks, homework, and headed out for tennis lessons.

Readers have asked me how I come up with new story ideas. The problem is not the ideas – the problem is finding the time to write anything.

I’m guest blogging at Killer Fiction today, reminiscing about my own childhood family vacations. Stop by and keep me company – and tell me about your family vacations.

And don’t forget that tomorrow, July 31st, is the last day to take advantage of the sale on my latest release SEPARATION ANXIETY, available at Smashwords.com. For those of you holding out for a paperback, good news! The trade paperback will be available for sale very soon at Amazon.

I also thought I’d share the new recipe I tried for July: Beer Margaritas. Talk about easy and tasty – and very refreshing on a hot summer afternoon.

Beer Margaritas

2 – 12 ounce cans of beer (I used Corona)
1 – 12 ounce can of frozen limeade concentrate
12 ounces of tequila

Pour into a pitcher and mix well. Serve over crushed ice and consume with friends.

ETA: SEPARATION ANXIETY is now available in paperback on Amazon!

Have a great weekend!