Outdoors Come In

Reasons to keep a chunk of outdoor ice in your freezer:

1. It probably contains DNA!

2. It's going to make a really good icepack after I fall on the other ice outside and need the swelling to go down.

3. It's crunchy and delicious when the attached sand covers other things in the freezer.

4. It's really convenient if Matthew runs out of ice for his drinks while I am out of town.

5. It's a good reminder of how cold and icy it is outside, because I keep forgetting that we're in the middle of a 6-month long, dark, impossibly freezing winter.

6. It's a nice puck for kitchen hockey.

7. It will be a good weapon in case of an intruder.

8. It will be a good tool with which to explain slipperiness to a young child.

9. It will be a good tool with which to explain the Bergeron Process to myself or other adults.

10. Ice harvesting is coming back into style.

11. It's a perfect addition to an icebox, should I receive one as a gift.

12. With it, I can lay the foundation of the first Chicago Ice Hotel.

13. The outdoors just got a little less hazardous!

14. It will remind me of my dear Meghan, who chose the ice hunk from all the other ice hunks and carried it home from our beach walk because, well, carrying home ice hunks is important.

It Was Christmas

 

Birthmark

Yoga For Skeletons

Girl Vs. Onion

 
Onions and I, we have quite a history.

I've spent many years (by this I mean my whole life) feeling really, really particular about onions. And I would like to announce right now that I am NOT proud of it. Even when I was a faux-meat-loving vegan for awhile, even when I was vegetarian for a much longer while, I've never felt so strongly about not eating a certain food. It's been a bumpy road, but I'm here to tell you that things are getting better. In the past few years, I've really come around, and I'm trying to get away from my onion aversion. I am working on a new respect for this creature, this force, the Onion. It's insane, really -- there are some onion formats that I am currently so in love with that I would spread them on my body and eat them three times a day, but others still make me wince a little. But you should hear the whole story.

I need to start by saying I have absolutely no idea how or why I started the war. And that's the odd, odd thing with food relationships -- they are so complicated, and usually there is no logical explanation for our feelings about certain items. When it's something very potent or textural or overwhelmingly odorous, we have a bit more of an excuse. It just all seems especially strange when the Food In Question is something as benign as an onion. And it's even more ridiculous when you consider my first encounter. It all goes back to (you guessed it) my childhood. I'm certain my mother could give you a more complete play-by-play, but I'll see if I can muster up some sort of truth.

Okay, so it was the onions in the meatloaf. That's the first memory of feeling completely averse to a food. I saw the tiny, tiny onion bits inside the meatloaf, and I wanted to die. I couldn't stand the thought of those bits. They didn't taste like very much, but they were so obtrusive, and they froze me in my tracks. I refused to eat them. And I mean refused. Oh, my poor, poor mother, the abused chef. Just trying to put a dinner on the table, and look at what she gets! A total whiner. An onion-fearing, inconsolable lunatic at her table. Such abuse I inflicted, such unnecessary dinner table antics. Why did my parents keep me?

I could identify an onion a mile away. Okay, um, four miles away. There was no sneaking an onion by me. It couldn't be done. I would sort through my meatloaf with the hands of a tiny surgeon, reducing the whole thing to rubble on my plate. There were so many tiny pieces that I'd get exhausted halfway through and give up on the meatloaf completely. I remember wanting so badly to not be bothered by them, the awful onions. And, even then, I was truly confused about why I was so disturbed by them. I had no wretched history with onions. They had never done anything to me. At that point, I really hadn't ever even eaten one, for crying out loud! How on earth could I know that I didn't like it?

I'd sift through soup and spaghetti sauce, too -- anywhere there might be an onion was a place that onions needed to be extracted from. Raw, cooked...get it out of there! My mother was patient beyond belief. She was likely boiling on the inside, growling through clenched teeth to my father when I was out of earshot why won't she just eat the damn onions! But, with me she was patient, and when a fib didn't work (those aren't onions in the meatloaf, honey! They're crackers!) she obliged me and made some of the muffin-tin meatloaves without onions. She had read the books. She knew that it (supposedly) takes a child up to seventeen tries of a food before they like it. But I'm sure she had no idea that "seventeen tries" actually meant thirty-one years.

I didn't want anything to do with raw onions for years and years. Eventually, about a decade ago, I came to understand the scallion, and we've been madly in love for years. I've tried to get on board with the other kinds of raw onions, and discovered that they give me a horribly pained belly, although at this point it's much like the boy who cried wolf, and I'm not sure anyone actually believes me when I tell them that. I might not even believe myself. There are some extreme mind games involved with me and the raw onion. So acidic! So pokey inside my body! So smelly on the breath! So smelly on the hands! So offensive! So invasive! So pungent!

But listen to this. When it comes to a cooked onion these days, I start to swoon. Yes, swoon! Melt with glee! Drown in my own saliva as I dream of them! Oh onions, as long as you are thoroughly cooked, I love you. I love you grilled onions, I love you fried onions, I love you onions in soups and sauces. I love you leeks! And shallots! I love you ramps! I love you powdered onions, dehydrated onions, and most of all, I love you caramelized onions. Marry me, caramelized onions!

I recently strayed from this "cooked is okay" rule, though. I found myself at a restaurant in San Francisco, eating a really special pad Thai, complete with all these super-fresh, local vegetables. Amazing things lurked inside this dish. Including onions. Barely cooked white onions. And I turned into a baby. I gingerly poked at them, dragging them as inconspicuously as possible to the side of the plate. This is rude! I told myself over and over. Stop doing this! This is terrible restaurant behavior! But I couldn't stop. Granted, after all these years of onion avoidance, I have gotten quite adept at such surreptitious onion-relocating strategies. But I appalled myself. I ate one to confirm that I didn't like it. Crunch, crunch...uh, no. Not good. But why?! It didn't taste especially bad -- in fact, it was flavoring the dish really nicely. It crunched, but I typically love things that crunch. It didn't look scary like kimchi or oxtail or a clam does. There was only one explanation. I was at odds with only the idea of the onion. Just the idea of it. It wasn't even that much of a relief when I realized this, because I just felt like a superficial brat. I was back in high school, surrounded by the stabbing words of The Snotty Girls. Oh, Tammy, it's not that I don't like you, I just really hate cheerleaders and you happen to be one!

On one hand, I feel that in order to be a reasonable grown-up, I need to learn to (semi-happily) eat everything. Part of me really is convinced that when someone doesn't like something, they just haven't ever had it prepared the right way. On the other hand, I feel that I should move on, that I don't need to waste my time worrying about not liking a certain food. Everyone has foods they don't like, right? Our palates all react to flavors differently, right? Even Matthew, who will eat from the garbage can if you let him, cannot possibly stand to eat a beet or "the crunchy part of the lettuce", and my dad doesn't want to deal with couscous or orzo or tofu. My mom will not touch oatmeal with a ten-foot pole, and my brother does not want you to give him a sweet thing, not a cake or a chocolate or a candy. My aunt does not want to even talk about tomatoes, and I have several friends who can't even be in the same room as goat cheese. A friend of my mother's doesn't want garlic in anything, ever, and I had a friend in college who really didn't want to ever see any sort of white, creamy anything -- dressings, sauces, cheeses. Another friend won't eat a mussel to save her life (oh, wait, that's me) and another friend won't even think about eating anything that has been pickled.  So I can have my onion policy, right? I am working on my redemption song. See?

Dear Onion,
I think you are really beautiful. I love your rings, and all the colors that you come in, especially purple. I like the way your layers peel away, and I like that there are so many metaphors in the world that use onions in order to teach us things. I appreciate that you have very large cells so that you can be easily examined with a low magnification, and I think it's pretty special that onions were even used in Egyptian burials and used for currency during the Middle Ages. Even though you make me cry when I cut you open, I have learned that you are only trying to protect yourself, and I guess that's okay with me. I like that you are very healthy, and extremely versatile. You are so neat, how you do all that growing underground and then you come up and say, What's up now, sucka! I think it's amazing that you have been growing in the world for so, so long, and I can store you for a long time, which is convenient. Even though you are toxic to most animals, you have a lot of human friends, so try not to worry so much, okay? I have had a hard time loving you in all your forms, but I am working on it. I hope you can understand.
Write back soon!
Love from Chicago!
xoxox

The Terrible Infection

December = Sugar

We all know it's true. December can't even really exist without sugar. It. Is. Everywhere. 

The second after we've gnawed the last bits of Thanksgiving turkey off the bone, we're lined up outside the market, loading our carts full of sugar bags, quaking under their weight as we lug them home so that we can pour them down our throats as quickly as possible. Okay, okay, so we typically dress the sugar up as cookies and candy, but, still. It feels very much like we might as well be standing underneath the C&H sugar factory's giant spout with our mouths wide open, bracing ourselves for a month of sugar intake. Willy Wonka, hold onto your hat.

The first immense sugar rush of the season came to me on Friday night, when I posted myself at a bake sale table, surrounded by a harrowing cloud of sugar all night long. I had pretty much already put myself in sugar smell overload the night before, when I baked myself into a dither. My olfactory system was so overwhelmed by the sugar that I didn't even taste a single thing that I made that night (I know, I know, huge tactical error -- good cooks always taste their wares before sending them out into the world -- but I couldn't possibly put one sugar smidgen inside my body. I couldn't!) 

The next day was the bake sale, and I made another mistake called not eating dinner before sitting down at the bake sale table for four hours. Agh! Five minutes into the whole thing, I became quite willing to give an arm for a non-sugar food item. But, you know how this turns out. I pulled through! I took one for the team! I sold that sugar like my life depended on it! I even ate cookies for dinner because that's what champions do! Ah, but let me tell you -- it was all completely worth it because our proceeds went to a really amazing cause, First Slice, which is a non-profit that provides hot, healthy meals to the hungry and homeless here in Chicago. They are starting a 3-meal-a-day program for homeless teenagers in January, and, well, I was just honored to help. Even if it was only by cooking up some sugar and selling it to my fellow December sugar-vacuums.

Highly Versatile Blondies
This is one of the things I made for the bake sale. They are so good. 
The recipe is adapted from a Cooking Light recipe, which is pretty much the same as this one except it calls for egg substitute instead of actual eggs. I've tried it both ways, and I think I like the egg way a little bit better. I don't know how a recipe with this quantity of butter and sugar made its way into Cooking Light magazine, but I suppose that isn't my mystery to solve. I'm just the baker, for crying out loud.

2  cups all-purpose flour  

2 1/2  cups firmly packed light brown sugar
2  t baking powder
1/2  t salt
10 T unsalted butter
2 eggs
cooking spray 

Preheat oven to 350°. Lightly spoon flour into measuring cups and level with a knife. Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl.

Place butter in a small skillet over medium heat. Cook for 6 minutes or until lightly browned, stirring occasionally. Pour into a small bowl, and cool for 10 minutes. 

Combine butter and eggs, stirring with a whisk. Pour butter mixture over flour mixture and stir just until moistened. Usually when I get to this point, my mixture is still pretty dry and crumbly, so I add in about 1/8 cup water so that the batter will hold together. Now you can add in extra bits! I used walnuts and coconut, which was a perfect combo. You could try any kind of a nut, or chocolate, or maybe white chocolate. Or confront the Sugar Demons head on and add in broccoli! Peas! Cauliflower! (Okay, don't really do this.)

Spoon batter into a 13 x 9-inch baking pan coated with cooking spray and smooth top with spatula. It will be very thick, this mixture. Bake for 30 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pan on a wire rack.