The industrialization of Great Britain and the United States ended the extensive celebration of the Christmas holiday which began at All Saints’ Day or Halloween with the largest, most extravagant feast held on January 5th or January 6th, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, depending on if you counted from Christmas Day or from St. Stephen’s or Boxing Day. This time was ruled over by the Lord of Misrule or in some countries, the Boy Bishop. The general order of things was turned on its head–peasants were lords, play was the work of the day, and special foods untasted for most of the year were the basis of feasts. The fields were fallow and little agricultural work had to be done. Masked balls; pantomime plays; caroling with the expectation of food, drink or coin in return; honoring the animals and fields with bonfires and wassailing; giving tokens of appreciation to loved ones and food and clothing to the poor or one’s tenants were all part of this extended time of revelry. Many of the traditions of Twelfth Night were held dearly enough to be shifted to other holidays that still burned brightly as single days of celebration. Begging door to door evolved into contemporary trick-or-treating (which seems to be currently on the wane). The elaborate Twelfth Night cakes and tarts migrated to Christmas with the gold coin baked inside. Masked balls migrated to Halloween and continued into the Carnival season, as well. Pantomime survives in England and Epiphany, Twelfth Night’s more religious moniker, survives as an important holiday especially in Spanish-speaking, largely Catholic countries where cakes are baked and children receive small gifts to celebration the adoration of the Magi at the birth of Jesus. Epiphany also marks the beginning of Carnival.

In the rush of our modern lives when some of us work right through Christmas and New Year’s Day, the thought of a twelve-day holiday seems like a ridiculous endeavor. And, it is true, modern life does not bend well to celebrating from October first to January sixth and then right on to Mardi Gras. Unlike our agriculturally minded forebears, we don’t have a whole season of downtime. But, I do think there is much to be learned from these now bygone observations. These celebrations revolved around spending time with family and friends and engaging with one’s whole community. They centered on a spiritual life that celebrated a rebirth of the sun or the birth of a savior. We may not believe as these same ancient or more recent forebears did, but we can choose to celebrate each other without the trappings of our material-centered modern holiday where the Christmas season begins in July only because that’s when the Christmas decorations show up in stores. We can choose to adopt this time as our own time of rebirth, re-centering, recuperating, reconnecting…reveling.

One thing about teaching culinary arts and working in a non-related field at other times is that one doesn’t get to spread one’s culinary wings very often. Curriculum is set and I’m not the one doing the cooking in class anyway. My retail job only allows for cooking in so much as I can bring treats to work to a receptive audience, for which I am grateful. But aside from weekend dinners with leisurely cook times (ha, like that happens anytime between Halloween and New Year’s Day), there isn’t much pull or challenge for culinary imagination or menu planning.

In an effort to feel like I am doing something worthy with the talents given and to have an outlet for my creativity, I took on the job of cooking the Wednesday night fellowship dinner at my church. (For those who have been reading along you already know, but we are Unitarian Universalists.) Three Wednesday’s a week, I get to cook for a serious crowd, 50-70 people depending on several factors. No reservations, so I have to be ready to feed the max but don’t want to have copious amounts of leftovers either. A challenge I can sink my teeth into, Yay! Another challenge I have set myself for this task is to buy as much organic food as I can within the budget and to make food that appeals equally to omnivores and vegetarians.

The first foray into this adventure, I had my mom riding shotgun. Today is Wednesday, again, and I am flying solo. I have discovered that I will have to set my sights on things I can accomplish in chunks by myself until I can get it down to a well-oiled machine of deliciousness. For the first night, I did roasted fall veg with either chicken gravy or mushroom gravy and sauteed greens with add-ins (balsamic vinegar, dried cranberries, pomegranate seeds, and feta cheese) and pineapple-carrot spice cake. We very nearly didn’t have enough food. Tonight I am kind of winging it as I didn’t think I would be doing the heavy lifting. We are having a baked potato bar with homemade chili, ala Dad, with a veg version I like to call Mega-Bean chili. I also made some of the decadent brownies, in case a potato bar just didn’t seem like enough. To paraphrase Nigella Lawson, “That’s me, never knowingly undercatered.”

For your own chili-ing pleasure I am passing along the Mega-Bean recipe.

1 block of firm tofu, frozen, thawed, pressed and crumbled (optional)
6 oz. dark beer
6 oz. real sugar cola (Blue Sky is my standby, but Coke will work in a pinch)
2 Tablespoons soy sauce (or if pescatarian, Worcestershire sauce)
2 teaspoons cumin
2 teaspoons coriander
1 Tablespoon salt or to taste
3 Tablespoons chili powder (I make my own fiery blend, I just wouldn’t recommend the commercial ones with cinnamon for this application as it can make the chili have an off-putting sweetness)
3 to 4 large onions, small dice
2 to 3 cloves of garlic (or lots more if you like), minced
2 quarts tomatoes (if you don’t have home-canned, I like the Muir Glen fire-roasted ones)
3 to 4 cans beans, I like a mix of kidney, pinto, black and garbanzo (you can also add a can of vegetarian refried beans or mash a can of pintos to thicken the chili)

Season the tofu with soy sauce, cumin, coriander, chili powder and salt and saute in a large skillet until chewy, breaking it up into smaller pieces as you go. When the tofu is done add the onions and saute until translucent. If you are skipping the tofu, add the seasonings directly to the onions and start there. Scrape all of this into a deep stock pot and add beer and coke and simmer until almost dry. Add tomatoes and simmer another 20 minutes or so to break down the tomatoes and let everything mingle. Add the beans and simmer a further half hour or so. It is good at this point but is truly at its best the next day, warmed to a simmer.

Notes: If you like your chili in the four-alarm range, you can add a small scotch bonnet or habanero to the pot whole. “If it buss, it be real hot” so gently simmer the chili with this little packet of heat floating in. You can also substitute about a pound of dried beans, cooked of course, for the cans. I tend to go with one bean when doing this, usually pintos or Jacob’s cattle beans as they are easy to cook and very creamy when made from scratch. Save the cooking liquid to add to the chili. There’s lots of flavor in it and it helps thicken a little, too.

Yes. I am lame and have fallen sadly, woefully behind in posting. Life is, well, life is good but many other things bid for my time. I wish you and yours the warmest Thanksgiving wishes with friends and family (the birthed into kind and the chosen) around a big table laden with all your holiday favorites prepared most traditionally down to the Durkee crisp onions or with the wildest gourmet flights of fancy, whatever floats your gravy boat.

Now that summer is winding down, the CSA basket seems to be in overload. This week we got another watermelon (barely finished the one from the week before), more eggplant, more crook-neck squash, more okra, more potatoes (gods, we have so many potatoes) and more tomatoes. It is truly an embarrassment of riches. This has been the best value CSA we’ve had. Nary a mess of greens in sight after the first couple of weeks.

This week we also got some pears. I had apples leftover from a previous week and some blackberries I’d frozen from a couple weeks back. I encased all of this in a hot water pastry crust (eh, not thrilled) with some sugar, cardamom, cinnamon and flour tossed in for good measure and baked it off while roasting eggplants on the lower level to scoop out and freeze for more babganoush than anyone will ever want to eat. (My fellas don’t care for the aubergine, to say the least.) The pie is fine. The apples and blackberries are lovely but the pear stayed a bit too rocky for my liking. I should have steamed them first. Note to self.

We have also been getting spaghetti squash, which I love. I’ve made a couple different ragu/marinara type sauces to go over the top of it, in true spaghetti fashion. Keifel and Jules approved, which meant Julian ate squash somewhat willingly. I also have a freezer full of beans to get to, but when I mentioned a pinto beans and cornbread supper to Keifel he was unimpressed by the idea. I, however, am very much looking forward to it, even if I have to eat by myself, as I have had to do with the copious amounts of okra (fried but I have yet to achieve my mom’s quality on that particular preparation).

Having all this produce about makes me long for canning with my parents when I was still at home. It was often back breaking but always pleasurable when enjoying the fruits of our labors in the drab of winter. Canning solo doesn’t have the appeal, though I have done it a time or two, putting up jam or applesauce. I can still remember all my father’s careful instructions about how to wipe of the rims before setting the lids on and slowly lowering the jars into the water bath to avoid splashing boiling water about or knocking the jars together. I’m glad these things stick with us. I wish I had more time to do these things now.

Our CSA this year is with Fogg Hollow Farm in Pulaski, Tennessee. Things have begun and we have lots of gorgeous eggs and strawberries and I am still working too much to play much in the kitchen, or on the blog. I had to post a pic of the eggs, though. Pale blue and eggy plus. How I’ve missed fresh eggs!

So working three jobs and trying, sometimes failing, to meet previously agreed upon social and volunteer obligations makes one’s family adjust to leftovers that go on and on, sometimes for a full week. I think Keifel may never eat white chili again. But, bless them, my husband and boychild have been troopers and as they are both pretty handy in the kitchen themselves, we haven’t survived on toast and Cheerios or warmed-over Chinese takeout. Well, not for weeks at a time at least.

Today, Keifel and I managed to team up for a slam dunk of a dinner. Now I don’t know that any Trini worth their salt would proclaim the delicious leftovers in our fridge authentic in any way other than a Trini was involved in the making. But, damn, if Keifel and I didn’t make some good chow.

The shopping was done almost two weeks ago, as canned and frozen bits stay that way. I made an auxiliary trip earlier in the week to get the things that don’t cotton to canning and freezing so much. Over the course of the last three days, Keifel saw to it that the chicken thighs went from freezer to fridge to thaw and then seasoned them in his special kitchen cabinet/fridge door kind of way. I’ll leave that to your imagination or to a comment in Keifel’s own realm to get to the bottom of that.

This morning, while driving back from collecting Julian from his Spring Break adventures, Keifel called to see if I would put together the green seasoning to speed along his cooking this afternoon. I pulled out the NAPS girls’ cookbook, one of the bibles of Trini cooking for the uninitiated, and turned to page 255 and the recipe for green seasoning. Now understand that this is an exercise fraught with pitfalls. A large one being that we have seen chadon beni all of one time in Nashville. A wilted pile of it was given to me by one of the produce guys at Whole Foods. Apparently, I can order it but who has time to remember to do that. Again, for those not familiar with this particular Caribbean/Latin American staple herb, it’s also called culantro or shadow beni. It looks kind of like arugula but not so curvy and tastes like cilantro on steroids. Okay, so that is issue one. Dealt with by purchasing a huge hunk of cilantro and using the tender leaves and the fragrant stems. Issue two is less easily surmounted.

Some time ago this bottle arrived at our house in the arms of a friend of Keifel’s. It was a repurposed plastic bottle (formerly home to fruit juice, perhaps) lovingly filled with what looked like blended grass clippings and smelled of cilantro, garlic and vinegar but was in fact her mother’s Green Seasoning. It lasted some time, as vinegar-preserved items will and Keifel was exuberant every time he opened it to liberally bathe some chicken thighs or pork chops. I remember that look on his face and I remember the smell. I am a good cook, but I am not awash in the teachings bestowed range-side in a Port-of-Spain kitchen. This makes me a little nervous.

I use the NAPS girls instructions as a jumping off point. The herbs in my possession are a little less than perfect with the passage of time in the crisper drawer but they are fine. The grocery did not have fresh thyme and the herb garden here is still in the planning stages. Before me on the counter I have a huge bunch of parsley, an equally large chunk of a row of cilantro, a clam-shell box of chives (the worst for the wear of the lot), a head of garlic, three limes, a bottle of vinegar and some dried (I know, cooks of a Trini persuasion–or any, persuasion for that matter– look away now) thyme. I get out the mezzaluna and its board and start murdering the herbs. All of the them and the diced up garlic, too, go for a spin in the food processor with some white wine vinegar, the juice of two of the limes and a little bit of water. The kitchen smells suspiciously of that fruit juice bottle. I carefully scrape as much as humanly possible into a mason jar, secure a lid tightly and place it in the fridge. It looks like a jar of very fresh grass clippings or a wheat grass smoothie, heavy on the wheat grass.

Keifel returns and pronounces it a triumph. He suggests that it hasn’t had time to mellow so it isn’t as good as N’s mom’s. I know he is lying but I appreciate the fib. He adds that to the marinating chicken, burns some sugar in oil and browns the chicken, adding canned black-eyed peas (’cause you can’t get canned pigeon peas at Whole Foods) and lets that stew. We discovered early on that cooking the rice and peas together made for mushy peas (and not in that cute English way) and hard bullets of rice. Rice was made separately with some coconut milk and a little ginger. Together they were amazing. And I get to eat it for lunch tomorrow, too.

I’m not sure what happened to the January thaw, though we may be getting it now. I will say that being under the weather when the weather involves single digits and windchill factors is no fun at all. I am on the mend now despite the fog horn cough and still feeling like standing up long enough to do the dishes is enough exercise for the day. It has given me time to ponder what constitutes comfort food for me. Given the dearth of groceries and the fact that everyone was sick over the course of the week and therefore grocery shopping wasn’t happening so much, what I was craving and what I was actually cooking and eating weren’t entirely in sync.

I have long established that when I am sick, I tend to want gruel. I know that sounds terribly Dickensian but it’s absolutely true. Though if by gruel you mean watery gray ick with chunks in, we are probably not talking about the same think. What I really want to eat might more appropriately be called porridge. For lunch this week I had polenta made with milk so it is kind of like corn pudding with a little butter and salt and later in the week steel cut oats made an appearance, also made with milk to the same effect but I added some cinnamon and a little raw sugar. I also really craved eggdrop soup which my faithful and dear husband supplied via China Dragon. The proprietress swears by hot and sour soup which Keifel said made him feel better but when it was my turn, not so much. I find it bitter rather than sour and it had something oddly textured in it which did not appeal. When you can’t actually taste anything, texture is pretty important.

The thing I really wanted was my mom’s potato soup, which has, of this I am certain, Herculean healing powers. It is a fairly simple milky broth with herbs and a little butter, onions and potato chunks cooked until the edges are soft and sloughing off to thicken the soup. Sometimes she adds some cheese to make it a little richer, but really the peasanty version is the real deal and what I would prefer when I am on the couch under three layers of blankets and shivering. When I was little (and sick all the damn time), I don’t really remember much about what Mom or Dad made. I do remember orange sherbet or lime if the store had it and lots of Gatorade, because that was before the days of Pedialyte and its ilk. I also remember chicken noodle soup, but I think it might have been Campbell’s. The potato soup doesn’t enter my memory bank until later. College maybe? When I had my wisdom teeth out. Another thing I am also certain of is that Mom’s potato soup also has the power to make even the deep ache of heartbreak lessen, if even for a brief moment or two. I think I may have lived on potato soup for a week or two during at least two of my most trying times. There really isn’t a recipe so much as a talk through:

Mom’s Potato Soup, as I recall:

1 pound floury potatoes
1 large yellow onion, halved and sliced pole to pole or julienned
About a tablespoon of butter
1 quart of liquid, about half milk and half chicken stock or water
Fresh thyme leaves
Salt and pepper to taste
Handful of grated cheese, Parm or Gruyere being the better choices (optional, of course)

Peel and slice the potatoes about 1/4″ thick, cutting the bigger slices in half if necessary. Set aside in a bowl of cold water, while you do everything else. In a soup pot that will hold about 2 quarts, melt the butter over medium heat until foamy. When the foam subsides, add the sliced onions and saute until softened and translucent. You really want to cook them just about as done as you want them here as they won’t soften much after you add the liquid.

Once the onions are to your liking, add the liquid (milk and broth) and the drained potatoes, the thyme and about a teaspoon of salt. Cook until the potatoes are soft and the edges have started to round off. You can make a choice here to leave as is or take out about a third of the soup and puree in a blender to add back as a further thickening agent or you can hit it a couple times with a stick blender (which is safer and less messy–if you are using a blender remember to take the little cup out of the lid and loosely hold a towel over the hole while you puree the soup portion. This will keep you from scalding and painting yourself with exploding potato soup. Trust me.) When you are happy with the body of the soup, taste for seasoning and add more salt and the pepper as you desire. If you are going to add the cheese, take the soup off the heat and add a small amount at a time, stirring until it melts before adding more. If you add the cheese it is very important that you do not allow the soup to boil. Serve immediately.

I can almost guarantee that you will never be served this soup in a four star restaurant, but sometimes that just isn’t what I’m looking for.

Hope your winter holiday is the loveliest of lovelies, whatever you are celebrating.

Okay, I know. I am suppose to be grading papers. But, but… it’s fall. It’s still fall, at least here anyway. The leaves are still clinging to the trees in their Crayola shades and the air is crisp but not bone-achingly cold, yet (not that we get much of that here). The sky is a little gray today but moving in such a way that it might be clear later. All of this and a hot latte make it hard to grade papers. I want to be doing something else. I should be writing…does this count?

I do love that the cold weather cooking has begun in earnest. There are batches of chili and turkeyherd pie made and consumed or frozen. Two loves of pumpkin bread with pepitas and dried cranberries have been dispatched. I find myself wanting tea in the afternoons instead of my usual all day coffee binge.

Julian and Keifel have been supportive of the newly returned to vegetarianism. I really thought there would be more of an adjustment, but I made the decision to be more flexitarian to make it easier on them and on me. It is more work than a Tuesday night will bear to cook two separate entrees, as the boys are not on the veg bandwagon. I have been making things that can be easily partitioned. It seems to be working. Last night’s turkeyherd pie was actually 1/3 Woolton pie homage, though no turnips were harmed in the making. I mixed the usual sauteed veg with some Puy lentils and used veg stock as the gravy liquid in both sections. The boys got some lentils in their turkeyherd and I got some turkey juice in my Woolton-esque, but it’s all good. My return to vegetarianism was not meant to be religiously scripted. I don’t think that would serve the ongoing dinner peace well.

Now, I really must get to those papers.

Get out there and vote today. Obama, McCain… doesn’t matter who for, just go to the polls and voice your opinion.