• Springy dip

    May 12, 2010

    I’ve been on a dip kick. It started with these naked babes and went downhill from there. I made hot artichoke dip and no one in my family liked it but me. (There’s gotta be something seriously wrong with people who don’t like hot artichoke dip. I refuse to justify their strangeness.) I served pesto torte. I bought the ingredients for guacamole and pico de gallo. (Can you tell that I’ve recently acquired Pioneer Woman’s cookbook?) I made double and triple batches of pita chips multiple times.

    In fact, I have two more bags of pitas sitting on the counter just waiting to be dressed with butter, chopped up, salted, and baked. If you haven’t made them yet, you really must. We are all absolutely nuts about them. Head over heels in love. True love.

    And I served them to company this weekend and they commented about them several times, impressed that I had added no extra seasonings.

    They’re really good.

    If, by chance you missed my post about them, or the link for the post in the first paragraph, I’ll include it again right HERE. I’m just trying to make it easy for you.

    Okay, I’ll stop now.

    (Please make them.)


    Back to the dips.

    So I was talking pesto torte and baked brie and salsa (well, not the salsa, but I could’ve been) and then Mavis up and said, What about the hummus, huh?

    And I said, Dang! She’s right! I forgot the hummus!

    So now I give you the hummus. It’s my favoritest hummus recipe. I can eat embarrassingly enormous quantities of it.


    That is, if I were to be the type of person that gets embarrassed about my hummus consumption. But I’m not. The stuff is good for you. There is nothing to be ashamed about.

    This hummus is not only nutritious, pretty, and creamy, it’s lemony, garlicky, and parsley-y. (Say “parsley-y” three times fast and you’ll feel like you have the palsy. Or maybe it’s just me?)

    It’s filling enough to be a main dish, and if the mono-color offends you, serve it with some carrot sticks and fresh fruit.


    Go on, now. Make it. Throw you and your buddies a springy dip party. (When summer hits, you can branch out and make it a skinny dip party. If you’re that sort. But if you do that and get embarrassed, don’t blame it on the hummus.)

    And whatever you do, spring or summer, DON’T FORGET THE PITA CHIPS. (Geesh.)

    Hummus
    Adapted from The Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen

    The fresh parsley and lemon juice are crucial. Do not use substitutes.

    2 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
    1 large handful of parsley
    2 scallions, roughly chopped
    3 cups cooked chickpeas (or 2 15-1/2 ounce cans), rinsed and drained
    6 tablespoons tahini
    6 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
    1 teaspoon salt
    1/8-1/4 teaspoon cayenne
    1/2 teaspoon cumin

    Place all ingredients in a food processor and pulse till well-mixed and creamy. (Or, if you prefer, you can leave it a little chunkier.) Taste to correct seasonings.

    Store in a tightly lidded container in the refrigerator.

    Serve with crackers, PITA CHIPS, or fresh flour tortillas.

    About one year ago: Rhubarb Sorbet

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  • Warts and all

    May 10, 2010

    I landed upon a new blog one morning this past week and it put me in a deep, dark, dank, foul mood. The mother/blogger had a skinny waist, smooth skin, and seven kids. She dressed like she worked on a New York runway. She was gifted with a camera. She hammed up life in ways that I don’t even dare to dream of. For example, to celebrate Easter, she created a backyard fairyland complete with a white-gauzy Sukkot tent (yes, wrong analogy), a table spread with linens and giant bouquets of flowers, real chairs, and glass platters of iced goodies, candies, and the like. Her kids were magazine-worthy in their pastels, sundresses, be-ribboned hair, and chubby pink bare feet. Clean bare feet. Everyone was flashing smiles right and left.

    As I scrolled through her blog, I got grumpier and grumpier. Everything was peaches and cream to the nth degree, and the deluge of God-talk didn’t help matters. I felt like I was suffocating.

    (Let me say here, the woman may be a real dear. I don’t know her, and I wish her nothing but the best. These musing just come about as a result of my quick observations, some slap-dash judgment passing, and the resulting emotions and personal insecurities. Forgive me.)

    That night I ranted to Mr. Handsome about the blog. He looked at me, bemused, and said, “If you don’t like it, why are you reading it?”

    He was missing the point entirely, and I told him so.

    It took a lot of thinking and some conversations with some people other than Mr. Handsome before I figured out what was bothering me. It wasn’t that I envied the women (well, except for her stunning figure). I certainly have no desire to make gauzy tents in my backyard or to dress up my kids for photo shoots. Shoot, half the time my kids look like they just came out of the bush, dirty, stinky, and with burrs in their hair. (And sometimes it’s even worse than that. When I got back from town the other morning, Yo-Yo was sitting on the porch in a clown suit, a blue wig atop his head and a red clown nose strapped to his face. Miss Beccaboo was wearing a conglomeration of things, including an old lady’s blue zip-up bathrobe, a sequined red skirt with black poodles on it, a see-through cape, a scarf, and a sunbonnet. She had stuffed her underwear so that she was fat, in an inner tube sort of way. It was a sight to behold.)

    No, the thing about the blog that rankled me was this: presenting life as though it consists of just sundresses and cherubic children is dishonest. Life holds both beauty and pain. To talk only of the one part cheapens the whole.

    Not to mention that it puts thirty-four year old women who have to comb through their children’s hair on a daily basis to ensure all the lice are gone in a very bad mood indeed. (Excuse the bad sentence structure. I’m not going to nitpick it.) (And yes, the lice are gone.)

    Plus, I have some serious issues with employing God-talk to condone peaches-n-cream stories.

    The next morning I discovered another blog. This mother/writer was nearly killed in a plane crash two years ago. She survived, but her face is horribly deformed from the burns, and she’s still undergoing surgeries. She has four lively children, a lived-in house, a caring husband, and a new perspective on life. She grieves the loss of her old self, but she’s ever so thankful she’s alive, able to press her disfigured lips against her babies’ soft, perfect skin.

    This blog did not rankle. I was challenged, saddened, grateful, and inspired. I stood up from the computer and viewed my own home, a home filled with clown suits, burrs, arguments and head lice, with new eyes. My life is rich, no white gauze necessary.

    I don’t blog everything about my life, to be sure, but I try to be candid. When I first started this blog, I felt like a con artist. I was only writing about bits and pieces of my life. If I talked about packing Mr. Handsome’s lunch, then I worried that you would think I always pack his lunch and that I’m much nicer than I really am. If I talked about my kids cheerfully doing their chores, then I worried that you might think they always did their chores like so. But as I built my blogging history, I became more dimensional. I didn’t worry so much about pulling the wool over your eyes. I was more or less (hopefully more) showing you who I am, warts and all.

    Not everyone is inclined to splat as freely as I do, and some people splat even more. Honesty takes many forms, but the bottom line? A sugar-coated life (either blogged about or not) is not at all nourishing.

    Still, I have a long way to go.

    Just the other day I stopped at my friend Kris’s house to pick up something and she came over to the car to say hi to the kids. She and I started talking about movies, and I mentioned that my kids weren’t going to be allowed to watch the traditional Sunday night movie because earlier that week they had, unbeknownst to me, snuck the TV up to their room and watched a movie. When I had called up to ask what they were doing, they said they were having a reading party, the little stinkers.

    Yo-Yo piped up, “You shouldn’t be telling your friends about the stuff we do!”

    “I tell my friends lots of things about you guys and they still love you,” I said (rather patronizingly).

    Yo-Yo’s retort was swift and logical. “Well, then I should tell your friends about how you really are at home! You do all kinds of stuff that you don’t tell them about!”

    Kris chimed in, graciously smoothing things out, “As do all of us. And we still love each other.”

    Apparently I have not yet attained Atticus Finch’s ability to be the same in house as on the public streets (some days I don’t even try all that hard, I admit). This failing of mine is one of my warts, no doubt about it.

    Maybe I engineer more gauzy structures than I’m aware of?

    And that, my dears, concludes today’s ramblings.

    Cheerio!

    About one year ago: The mother of his children.

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  • Nekkid

    May 7, 2010

    I’m not going to be able to not talk about food for the couple of weeks while I wait for my new computer to get here. I just can’t. This means that any new recipes I post will be pictureless. (My computer is so full that it’s groaning. It spazzes out if I try to upload even one itty-bitty picture.)

    This grieves me. I love to look at pictures of food. I love to take pictures of food. I love to write around pictures of food. But it’s just not happening.

    Perhaps I’ll update these posts later with pictures, but perhaps not. It depends on many things, such as the amount of time I have on my hands and whether or not I remember. I’m just a reed, blowin’ in the wind….

    (Now, on May 17, new and improved, with pictures!)


    Two Sundays ago I was polishing off a bag of Stacy’s Simply Naked Pita chips while sitting on the sofa in the downstairs bedroom. Shortly thereafter a gigantic kettle of boiling chicken broth exploded across the kitchen. Because I was staring at the bag when the eruption occurred, the image of that empty bag of pita chips is now seared into my brain for eternity.


    Those pita chips became an obsession. I wanted to make them. I had to make them. I googled and read and googled some more. Everything I read said they were a cinch to prepare. So I bought a bag of pita bread, coated the pitas with melted butter, sprinkled them with lots of salt, hacked them up, and popped them in the oven.


    That evening when Mr. Handsome mentioned he was kind of hankering for a snack, I scurried to change into my birthday suit, wrap myself up in plastic wrap, and fetch him the jar of chips.


    Okay, so only the last part was true. But really, that scene from Fried Green Tomatoes where the plump wife outfits herself in nothing but plastic wrap in hopes that her husband will notice her is one of my favorite parts. That and the part where she repeatedly rams her car into the back of another car that dared to take her parking space.


    So I gave Mr. Handsome the chips, listened to him crunch for a minute and then said, “So waddaya think? Are they as good as the bought chips?”

    “No,” he said. I wrinkled my nose and turned back towards the sink. Darn, I’d have to do some more experimenting.

    “They’re better.”

    Yes! I did it! I can make pita chips better than Stacy! I’m a naked pita chip superhero!


    And now, by following the simple instructions outlined below, you can be a superhero, too!

    If, for whatever reason, the chips don’t turn out exactly right, remember—there’s always plastic wrap.

    With pesto torte


    Naked Pita Chips


    I used Toufayan pitas, but I think any pita would work. Do not, however, substitute the pitas with flatbread; flatbreads do not have the air pocket and are therefore not as light and crispy.

    1 12-ounce bag of pita bread (about six pitas)
    4 tablespoons butter, melted
    salt

    Brush both sides of each pita with the melted butter. Cut the pitas into wedges or squares. Pile them on a cookie sheet and sprinkle generously with salt. If there is any remaining butter, drizzle it over the pile of cut pitas. Use all of the butter.

    Bake the pita chips at 200 degrees for 2-3 hours, tossing every hour, until dry through and through. And then toast them a little more. They have to be dry, dry, dry.

    Add more salt as needed.

    Cool the chips to room temperature before storing in an airtight container.

    Serve these with hot artichoke dip, pesto torte, and/or baked brie. Or abandon the adornments and eat them buck naked.

    The chips, I mean, not you.

    About one year ago: Mr. Handsome’s sandwich

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