What's Cooking as the Year Ends and Begins

Tourtiere - French Canadian meat pie

I asked friends to share some of their New Year's Eve and New Year's Day epicurean traditions on Twitter and Facebook. Saying goodbye to the old and blessing the new can bring out deep and complex traditions of delight.

One of my fondest New Year's memories was when I was living across state in Menasha. A friend, born and raised in Europe, invited us to share a meal of New Year's lentils for luck. Beyond the warm friendship and sharing of a meal, the subtle flavors she coaxed from the lentils brought them from legume to legendary. 

I blogged about our tradition last year - cassoulet shared with friends.  What else are people preparing?

Cheryl: We are having a New Year's Eve homemade pizza, and a New Year's day breakfast. Jim calls the breakfast a "lumberjack breakfast;" I don't know why. (Eggs, potatoes, onion, cheese, ham or sausage or Canadian bacon, sometimes breadcrumbs, all together in a skillet.)

Melissa: Homemade pasta for New Year's Eve and homemade pierogis for New Year's Day....oh,and Bailey's cookies on New Year's Eve!

Ally: On new year's day, everyone I know eats black-eyed peas for luck. I've been informed that this is very southern. :)  My grandmother also insists on collard greens!

Jennifer Ann (in response to above):  SUPER Southern. This WI girl had never heard of such a thing until she married a Texan. Oh, a Cuban friend of mine makes us eat 12 grapes at midnight (1 for each clock-stroke) and you make 12 wishes!

Roxane and Steve: Venison/veggie stew and Bloody Mary's with our own pepper infused vodka. 

Meagan: Collard greens, black eyed peas & ham on New Years are a Southern tradition for luck & prosperity. I'm slow-cooking a soup with collards, peas and a crunchy bacon garnish...hopefully it will trick my husband into liking greens!  

Sue: Some day I'm going to get a taste of that cassoulet! But I do have my jar of herring ready for the stroke of midnight!

Stacy:  We do tourtière on New Year's Eve.

I can't help but want to share in all that delightful food. Happy New Year, my friends!

 

The Power of a Made Meal

For the past ten days, both Lloyd and I battled a seasonal flu that had us down low.  Low energy, low appetite, low brain, low motivation.  At the same time, our refrigerator was not staying cool  - we had to keep it closed as much as possible to maintain safe food temperature. So we were limited in food at hand while we had repair folks out twice over five days fixing the problem.

Canned soups became the food of necessity. And we got tired of them very quickly.  After five days, with a refrigerator fixed, I finally had enough energy that I could stop relying on a can opener.  We started eating the real food we love again.

We had purchased a small bundle of pork from our CSA and with our final delivery of potatoes and onions, our first home-cooked meal after a week was scalloped potatoes with ham. I used an old recipe from Betty Crocker, a carefully used mandolin, parts of a ham steak and plenty of potatoes and onions.

It was comfort food from both our childhoods - a welcome homecoming back to making our own food again. It seems like a small thing, but the moment I could summon the energy to make a meal of real food again made me feel immeasurably better.

For the past few days we have been able to make our own simple meals again - pancakes, lambburgers, cooked carrots, oatmeal, scrambled eggs, scotch broth, roasted fish, pasta with our own sauce. We feel the comfort of familiar flavors and believe in the healing that a meal made with our hands from scratch makes possible.

 

The Art and Play of Candy - The Recipe

After our family history and a bit about the process, here is the recipe and sources! We keep the house cool during the process (65F or less) so the chocolate can cool without streaks.

Turtles
2# small pecans (Trader Joe) 
2# small unsalted, unroasted cashews (Weavers Country Market, Fall Creek, WI)

Spread nuts on parchment paper-covered rimmed baking pans (I use six 12"x17" pans purchased from a restaurant supply store).

2# Wilbur milk chocolate (in blocks) (Weavers Country Market)
2# Wilbur dark chocolate (in blocks) (Weavers Country Market)

Caramel (from Pearl Vonyx, a neighbor from our childhood)

Mom's beat-up old 2 c. measuring cup
for the syrup. Gotta use it!

• 3 1/2 sticks of salted butter
• 2# light brown sugar
• 2 cups Karo syrup
• 1 can Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk
• dash (or more) salt - this is my secret - I go towards the more so my caramels aren't as much sweet as interesting!
• 1 T. vanilla

Melt butter over medium heat. Add the rest of the ingredients. Stir constantly for about 45 minutes until the temperature reaches 247F. Let cool for a few minutes. Then drop small amounts of caramel on the nuts, using a spoon or candy funnel. Cool completely.

Chocolate

Cutting the chocolate blocks

Melting the chips

Hand dipping the chocolate onto the caramel pecans

Chop into small chips and place in small metal pan. Put the pan in a non-reactive skillet with 3/4"-1" of water held at just below simmer (keeps the chocolate at a temperature of between 110-112F). Add water when necessary. Stir chocolate until melted, pour onto a marble and temper (push back and forth over the surface of the marble) to 87F for milk and 89F for dark. Using spoon or hand, drop chocolate onto the cooled caramel-nut clusters. Cool and pack into boxes or tins, using wax paper or parchment paper between layers.

And that's how a batch of turtles gets done - an hour to make the caramel and get it on the nuts. An hour to cool. Two hours to chop, melt, temper and dip. An hour to cool. An hour to pack.  Then a chance to test the result and decide if these little beauties are good enough to give away (YES!!).

Each and every time I repeat this annual holiday ritual, my mom is close to me in thought and heart. I hear the echoes of the laughter, the chatter and the warmth of my sisters and aunts and cousins who worked at the prodigious task of making the candy. Each sweep of my hand and squeeze of chocolate brings back a sense of home and holiday. And I am so grateful for this beautiful skill my mom shared with me. Happy holidays!

The Art and Play of Candy - The Process

In the last post, I talked about how I got to be a candy maker.

Whenever I do something so infrequently, I worry that I will have lost the knack of it. But somehow, making turtle candy always comes back. My hand remembers. That and the sheets of brief notes that document the process and history of our candy journey. Mom learned long ago not to trust her memory, and daughter of my mother, I rely on these previously written jottings.

Candy making is an adventure. Each year something is introduced into the formula - a better way to melt the chocolate; a new source of nuts to buy; a "never-buy-that-brand-again" epiphany; an introduction of an instant read thermometer or a way to keep the sticky caramel from clinging to the pan (line them with parchment paper!).  The early notes from the eighties, written in my Mom's tiny handwriting - how many pounds and what kind of chocolate and nuts - include who came to make candy and how many days the candy was made. Notes on temperature, clues on sources for ingredients and even prices might show up in each yearly paragraph.

For us, candymaking is about tradition but also innovation and experimentation. How would those dipping chips work (not so well)? What if we first did a batch of caramels to wrap and then did the batch of caramels for turtles (oooh, that was a keeper in terms of kitchen efficiency and helper energy)? What is the perfect temperature to make sure the caramel isn't too sticky of too hard (I know!  Who could believe how many times that has changed!!)?

One such innovation? In the last post, I described how mom and helpers would use spoons to drop quarter size dollops of hot liquid caramel onto the nuts spread over the pans. This was quick and almost frantic work. Once the caramel was done, we had about fifteen minutes to work with it before it began to stiffen and harden. We had to wait a few minutes to begin because it was too hotly runny to set. So it was a race to get it onto the nuts in distinct small pools and not burn ourselves or have it harden too much to slide off the spoon.

A casual conversation one year about how Al poured the caramel at Seroogy's (through a big funnel with the flow controlled by a wooden stick) led us to our biggest innovation. That and a visit to the Vanilla Bean, a Madison candymaking and baking supply store which stocked this helpful tool. Pouring the caramel into this little white funnel with a ball-ended stick let us quickly - and safely - drop just the right amount of caramel on the nuts by quickly lifting the stick up and down to control the caramel flow. It was lightning fast.  From three or four people pouring the caramel, one can easily do it.  While a small detail, it took alot of the unpleasant labor from the day. Oooooh. Innovation!

Stirring the caramel

This year's fun was provided by our new instant read thermometer, an unexpected addition. I usually use two other methods - my old candy thermometer and our cooking timer/temperature probe. I use the stove time probe to get a general sense of the temp but have never trusted its accuracy in candymaking where a few degrees difference in temperature means a batch of candy lost. The candy thermometer was the final arbiter of caramel doneness.  I could rely on the probe to beep when we were near the right temp and use most of my 45 minute caramel-stirring time playing games, daydreaming or reading.

Tools of the temperature trade

But this year, my old dog candy thermometer lagged 8 degrees behind the probe and I knew I was in trouble. I grabbed the instant read, popped it in and got a close reading to the probe. Saved! I also used the instant read thermometer to see what temperature my tempered chocolate was. I never used a thermometer for this, just the feel of the chocolate and look of the drips. I was delighted to find the temper at a perfect 87F. Cool!

So, in the process, I get a chance to wrap myself in tradition and experiment like a mad scientist.  No wonder I look forward to candymaking each year.

In the next post, the recipe!

The Art and Play of Candy - The Story

Holidays are not just times for friends and family together, but also a time of more baking and making from scratch. Somehow, these seasons of thanks and traditions call even the most die-hard processed food eater back to try a recipe remembered and treasured from childhood.

It is definitely the season for sweet treats from scratch. Cookies, cakes, candy and sugary delicacies that take extra effort and time are labored over and served or given as gifts with delight. Some people have a huge range of goodies they make.

I have just one, really. I make turtles - homemade caramel with hand-tempered and dipped chocolate over pecans or cashews - carrying on the tradition I learned from my mom.

Pull your chairs up to the fire, my friends, and let me tell you the tale of how someone who.does.not.like.sweets. became the torch-bearer for a family gastronomic tradition.

We did not always make turtles in my family. We made caramels, popcorn balls, fudge, peanut brittle and cookies of all sorts around the holidays.  But turtles didn't enter our lives until after one of the saddest days our family experienced.  My dad died unexpectedly at the age of 51 in September, 1971. Mom had been a homemaker and active volunteer, and coach, caregiver and general for us seven kids, three of whom were still at home when we lost Dad.

With no employable skills and mourning her sweetie, it was a tough few months. A family friend who owned a small candy shop asked Mom if she was up for helping during the busy holiday season. Mom was grateful for a chance to earn money for the family to supplement the life insurance and social security (dad worked at a factory so additional income was high priority to make ends meet). And so began our journey towards turtles.

Mom packed candy the first year she worked. The mad-house busy season for candy shops is October through Valentine's Day...sometimes extending to Easter. All hands on deck.

By the next year, the owners needed help hand tempering and dipping chocolate and so mom's apprenticeship began.  The Seroogy's tempered and dipped their chocolate the old-fashioned way - on marble, manipulating and smoothing the pool of chocolate back and forth by hand (muddy-gush!) over and over until it reached it's just right temperature to dip the candy in - too hot and the chocolate would be streaked with grey (the dreaded "charlie"); too cold and it "set up" in gnarly and ugly lumps, undippable.

Candy at mom's house in the 80's

Making candy with  Auntie Lu in the mid-80s

Within a year or two, in addition to the candy we traditionally made at the holidays, hand-dipped nuts and turtles were introduced into our holiday sweets-making repertoire.  By that time we older siblings were out of the house - married and starting families, in college, in jobs.  Mom invited us back for candy-making days that turned into parties with an aunt or cousin sometimes joining my sisters and me. I was hooked.

We would make two batches of caramels and wrap those 300-400 chewy tidbits and make two batches of caramel to make the 800 or so turtles plus chocolate covered nuts. It was an all day job - starting at 8 or 9 am and continuing through the day until the last turtles were cool and boxed at 8pm. We ate soup at lunch and one of us would pick-up a carry-out from Kroll's, a local burger joint, for supper.

Tempering by hand

Mom did all the tempering and dipping. We kids spread the nuts on the pans, used spoons to pour a quarter-size dollop of hot caramel onto the nuts and kept the double boiler full of melting chocolate so mom didn't have to pause in her dipping - we would just add more melted chocolate to her marble, while she held up one chocolate covered hand and announced with a laugh and a twinkle in her eye, "Nickle a lick!".

Her time at Seroogy's brought her to master level at tempering and dipping. Just by the feel of the chocolate cooling from hot to perfect, and the look of it dripping off her hand in thin strings told her when the velvety ooze was at the perfect dipping temperature.  She invited us all to try our hands but the temper and the delicate twists and manipulations eluded us apprentices and our efforts produced interesting shapes that tasted great but were not easy on the eye.

As the years went on and lives got busier, all my sisters couldn't make the candy-making day and our numbers dwindled.  Mom was getting older and we downsized batches to make the day more reasonable.  I began to temper and dip under mom's tutelage (I think I never missed a candy-making year so mom thought it was about time!).  With her encouragement, I went from apprentice to journeywoman over the thirty years we made chocolate.  In the last few years of her life, slowed by Parkinson's, my mom gave me the reins for all the dipping and I became the master under her careful eye.

And so my own candy journey began. In the next part, we'll leave the story and get down to the brass tacks of the process and recipe for turtle making!