The Quiche from Yuggoth

Here you go: The Lowish-sodium Quiche From Yuggoth!

The tentacles broke off, but you can see one where I propped it up. I was surprised and pleased at how tasty it was. Too bad more people aren't going to get to eat it, but if you want to try it for yourself, here's how:

Preheat oven to 350 F

Pastry for one 9-inch pie:
1 cup white flour
about 10 TBSP/1/3 cup Fat of Choice (I used unsalted butter)
1 tsp curry powder
3-4 TBSP cold water. I just put some water and ice in a measuring cup and kept dipping till the dough came right

Cut fat into flour and curry powder till you have roughly pea-sized bits. Add water, one spoon at a time, tossing in between, till all flour is moistened, pastry almost cleans side of bowl, and you can form it into a ball, then flatten the ball, without it falling apart. There'll probably be a little loose floury stuff in the bottom; if so, set that aside. Roll out dough nice and thin on floured surface, fit carefully into pan, trim edges. Roll trimmings between palms to make tentacles or other desired substances to extrude from filling, arrange artistically according to your talents. Place pie plate on top of cookie sheet, set aside.

Filling:
4-5 oz. shredded Swiss cheese
dollop of olive oil
3-4 green red onions, sliced, as far up as the leaves remain firm
1/2 pound fresh mushrooms of choice - I just used the cheap white button ones
1 small red pepper, chopped fine
2-3 sprigs fresh oregano or TBSP dried
dash ground yellow mustard
4-6 eggs depending on whether you're using small, medium, large, or jumbo.
3-4 TBSP skim milk
blue food coloring

Spread cheese in pie shell. Saute onions, pepper, mushrooms, and oregano in olive oil until mushrooms are properly grayish brown and shriveled. Don't let the chives and oregano burn. Spread this mixture on top of cheese.

In the bowl in which you mixed the pie shell, beat mustard, eggs, food coloring, and milk together with the leftover floury bits; if you're so good at making pie crust you don't have any, add in a TBSP or so of flour or cornstarch for thickener. The thickener will probably clump a bit, so break it up as well as you can, but but small clumps won't hurt anything. When it's a good consistency for scrambled eggs and a reasonably even shade of green, pour mixture into shell.

Shell will be very full indeed; this is why you already have it on a cookie sheet. It's easier to put into the oven without spilling if you're handling the cookie sheet instead of the pie pan. Bake 40 minutes or till set. The olive oil may ooze a bit and mislead you into thinking the eggs are still sloppy, so stick a knife into the center to be sure. The top will be puffed up as it comes out of the oven but will relax as it cools.

Serve hot. Reheats well in microwave at 2:00 minutes on high for one slice, makes a nice breakfast with fried potatoes. For lunch and supper, side dishes of greens and potatoes are recommended.

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Please note that in order for this to remain a lowish-sodium dish, homemade pie shells and Swiss cheese are recommended. The curry powder replaces the salt in the pie crust. You could also try garlic or onion powder, but I found the faint curry flavor just right for a light, flaky crust. Swiss cheese has half or less sodium than almost every other cheese. If sodium isn't an issue, any medium cheese can be made to work, but vary your spices accordingly; ditto on the vegetables. A good swiss-mushroom-spinach quiche is a joy if you add dashes of nutmeg and black pepper. I know the nutmeg sounds weird but trust me, you want it in all your spinach dishes.

Metaphors only go so far

I can go on at length about the ways in which sewing and writing are alike; or gardening and writing; or cooking. All are creative. All involve extensive periods of drudge work and apparent negative progress. All can be done professionally or as a hobby, to formula or idiosyncratically. All have rules that, once you understand them, you can decide to break.

But you know how sewing isn't like writing? I get to decide when I'm done, and then I can use the result. Making my first pair of slacks was tough, and they aren't perfect; but when that cool front came in, I wore them. I cobbled together a blouse out of red and blue remnants, realized that required a white skirt, made the skirt, put star-shaped buttons on the blouse, and now I'm ready for the Fourth of July. Nobody can tell me to go back and fix this or that if I've decided the outfit's good enough. I don't have to submit it, collect rejections, review and tweak it every six months or so, unpick the waistband because an editor thinks it might wear better with a dart in the back, try out three or four different styles of button, and then get rejected anyway until I give up and it's packed away in a drawer, never to see the light of day.

And cooking isn't like writing, because not only do I get to sit down and eat the result without consulting anybody (whether or not my husband or the gaming group, my usual cooking audience, cares for it) but because if I mess it up there's no fixing it. Scorched rice stays scorched. I can't fix it by deleting the brown bits and adding some sauce. If I want rice, I eat it with that smoky aftertaste or I start again from scratch in a new saucepan.

And gardening isn't like writing because - well, for one thing, because I'm not remotely good at it. But even there, once in awhile, the jasmine blooms, I rake out some edible potatoes, and the mint doesn't entirely die back in the drought. But revision is a much, much bigger deal in gardening than in writing; and although adverbs sometimes grow all over a manuscript like rye grass, getting them out doesn't blister my hands.

Results. I'll take them where I can get them.

Idea Garage Sale: Life Among the Carnivores

In 1998, I realized that I don't like meat, so I stopped eating it. I did not stop preparing it, as I was living at that time with two people who did like meat, one of whom would not eat crunchy vegetables and one of whom would not eat food while it was hot.

Not only did I start enjoying my food more (hot, crunchy vegetables! Yum!), I suddenly got healthier. It wasn't cutting out the meat per se that made the difference; it was the increase in fiber and nutrients and decrease in sodium that happened when I felt at liberty to cook food the way I prefer it, as fresh as possible. However, the degree of interpersonal conflict in my life rose. Where before I was only in the petty political struggles of a household - cook vs. dishwasher, dishwasher vs. dishwasher, consumer vs. cook, in all of which conflicts I, as sole cook, was invariably the loser - now I found myself constantly at loggerheads with society. People took offense at my vegetarianism no matter how little it impacted them, behaving as though my selection of one dish over another was a personal attack, assuming that I was attempting to one-up them in a kind of conspicuous moral consumption, and launching into scathing criticisms of positions I hadn't taken. Prospective hosts would apologize for not knowing what to feed me, and act surprised when I pointed out that most of what they ate wasn't meat, either, and I could dine well on what they considered to be side dishes.

So I started writing a book in my head, and have been writing it ever since. I call it Life Among the Carnivores, but the subtitle keeps changing. At the moment, it's something like Cooking, Housekeeping, and Hosting in the Real World. American schools don't teach nutrition well and don't discuss the micropolitics of food at all, so the emphasis would be on giving the reader - envisioned as a young adult on her own for the first time - the tools necessary to make the choices that suit her best and negotiate the irrational responses other people have to those choices.

Yeah, because there's nothing young adults love more than having a wise older adult pass on her hard-earned wisdom. :rolleyes:

Oh, sure, there is a need for such a book. Judging from the historical performance of advice books the need even translates into a market. But I'm not a professional nutritionist, or chef, or caterer, or even a home ec teacher. I have no platform on which to build this book.

That doesn't mean that, if I ever got this book out of my head and onto a page, it wouldn't be a good and useful book. But - in the real world of publishing - in order to sell it to other people as a good and useful book, I would have to spend time positioning myself as an expert and convincing people that they want to take my advice. I'd rather spend time writing fiction. Besides - alas - in the real world no one values my advice enough to make me think that any degree of positioning would profit me. Some of the things I want most desperately to be in the book, I haven't figured out how to do! My best efforts to make my dietary requirements easy and untroublesome keep failing on the rocks of other people's complete lack of desire to understand. One person who has been making a huge fuss every time in the past 11 years that there's been danger of her having to feed me, without actually taking any trouble to present me with edible food, asked me recently whether I would eat ox-tail! When I get enough wisdom to teach that person the definition of "vegetarian," or to handle my reaction to her effectively, I'll have enough wisdom to make the effort of producing and marketing Life Among the Carnivores.

But that's not happening, so I'm making the idea available cheap.

The book would have "The Cook's Bill of Rights" and "The Consumer's Bill of Rights" in it; but after 11 years I can only come up with one right each: The consumer has the right to palatable, healthy food, and The cook has the right not to have her dishes greeted with a suspicious glare, a couple of pokes, and the accusatory query "What is it?" in a tone indicating near-certainty that something poisonous lurks within this travesty of a meal. That comes down to trust, really. The cook must strive to be worthy of it (not just make a fuss) and the consumer must then give it; or the fabric of society breaks down.

I envision it as containing few or no recipes, only definitions and descriptions of the basic cooking techniques that are the building blocks of meals. If you know how to boil, broil, fry, sauté, braise, roast, bake, and make a sauce, and have some basic information about the properties of foods, as well as a sense of taste, you can improvise a meal whenever you need to out of whatever you have.

There'd also be all the nutritional information we need to make good decisions for our own particular livestyles; outlines of the various methods of cooking; discussions of why and under what conditions various extremes of diet (Vegan, omitting all animal products and the traditional Arctic diet, consisting almost entirely of animal products) are healthy; advice on hosting a diverse group of people; advice on being a guest with a dietary restriction (voluntary or otherwise); and an entire chapter, or possibly a subsection, on sharing space with other people, none of whom - I promise you - will have the same standards or goals as you. The reason I always lost those interpersonal conflicts mentioned earlier is that I thought the important thing was that the work got done, while the other people I lived with were arguing from the position that the important thing was who did it.

If I ever figure out how to ensure that everyone in an argument is in the same argument, I'll be sure and tell you. It would be a crime to charge for a breakthrough that vital to the history of the human race.

Research breakfast

I don't expect anybody to care about my personal life. This blog is an unashamed public persona, edited and approved by my inner censor, and matters that don't affect Peni the Author will be omitted. Except, you know, when I get really excited about a warbler on my suet block or something. I wouldn't want to appear before you as a two-dimensional character or anything.

So trust me, I have a good reason for telling you that I had fried cornmeal mush for breakfast.

The current Work in Progress is set in frontier Texas during the twitchy dying months of the Confederacy. Texas, which was not invaded and had access to Mexican ports, never suffered the food shortages that other states did. Townspeople grew a lot of their own food in their yards, even during peacetime (twenty years later, boarders at the Ursuline Academy in San Antonio were still being fed "convent stew," consisting of whatever the nuns pulled out of the garden that day cooked up in one pot), cattle and hogs that roamed unmarked were the property of whoever could catch them, boys could shoot small game like quail at the edge of town, and if your area didn't have a gristmill - and most areas in then Western Texas did, because we had quite a bit of water power in those days - you could grind your own if you had to. Texan cattle weren't great milk producers, but then Texan adults weren't great milk consumers, and if you had a good cow and were willing to churn a surplus of butter, townspeople were used to paying through the nose for it long before inflation set in. The only consumables I can find people complaining of running short on were salt and coffee. Not sugar, surprisingly.

Anyway, the default cereal throughout the south in those days was corn. It was versatile, easy to grow everywhere - unlike wheat, barley, rye, and rice, which are fussier plants - and it stored well. You could eat it fresh, feed it dried to your livestock, extract syrup from it, and make the ground meal into tortillas, bread, or mush depending on your resources. It's the perfect breading for frying fish and okra. It contains starch, protein, and sugars. Frederick Law Olmsted and his brother, when they toured Texas in the early '50s, griped about being fed with corn byproducts at every table they visited, but they were urban Yankee tourists raised on wheat.

I've often read references to fried corn mush as a standard breakfast dish - not just in the South, either. I've long been curious how you'd go about frying mush, and I figured the best way to find out was to try. So I made some polenta, which is an Italian and therefore classy word for corn mush, and fried it for breakfast a couple of days ago and today.

It's kind of like frying mashed potatoes. Since making potato cakes by frying leftover mashed potatoes was one of my mom's standard ways of using them up, this presented me with less of a learning curve than it would some people. The trick is to get the right amoung of liquid absorbed during the initial cooking, so that as it sits - don't even try to fry fresh polenta, or mashed potatoes - it solidifies enough not to crumble apart when you slice it or make it into a patty. Unfortunately, since I'm both vegetarian and on a low-sodium diet, I had to use unsalted butter instead of bacon grease or lard. This means I'm missing several elements of flavor. I've tried it twice now, once with molasses and once with honey, and overestimated the absorbency both times, so I had a messy plate and couldn't taste much but the syrup. But I could tell that this was a classic comfort food. Carbs, fat, sugar - what more do you want went you get up at dawn to do your chores, or sit up late alone fueling yourself for a life crisis?

Don't think that I've omitted my book research here. Though I followed the recommendation of my modern cookbooks to make the polenta, I grab up old household management books when I see them reprinted (which I don't, not often enough), and I turned to them to see how different the cooking resources of the past would make the experience. The word "mush" doesn't appear in the index of Lydia Maria Child's The American Frugal Housewife (my Dover reprint is run off from the 1844 edition), and as far as I can tell she didn't discuss it under any other name either. It's not arranged for looking things up, not really. A recipe from The Capital Cookbook (the Sidney Johnston Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, 1899, excerpted in Keeping Hearth and Home in Old Texas, Carol Padgett, ed., 2001) is very similar to the modern one I used from the Moosewood Cookbook, except that whereas I used no salt at all, Mollie Katzen recommended 1/2 TSP for 1 & 1/2 cups cornmeal, and the Daughters of the Confederacy considered the correct proportions to be 1 TSP per cup. In this, if in nothing else, they agree with Yankee Fannie Farmer, whose 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cookbook declares that "Boiling water and salt should always be added to cereals, allowing one teaspoon salt to one cup of cereal, -- boiled to soften cellulose and swell starch grains, salt to give flavor." (No wonder the Confederacy had a shortage!) She also says that meal should be cooked in a double boiler, and that the proper cooking time for a cup of "Indian meal" (by which she means cornmeal) is three hours! The Daughters of the Confederacy don't give any time frame, but tell you to put it on the back of the stove over moderate heat until it's "well done." To fry it up, put it in a square container (Ms. Farmer - "a greased one pound baking-powder box," Ms. Katzen uses a greased loaf pan; I used Tupperware and didn't grease it, which I'll correct next time) overnight, cut in thin slices, fry in fat of choice.

My characters probably use bacon grease or lard, which I'll never taste now; but my Rev. Mom used to save bacon grease to cook in, so I think I can imagine it well enough. They'll certainly feel a lack of salt more than I ever would have, even before I embarked on the low sodium diet. I thought moderns used way too much salt (and we do; read the sodium content of the next few boxes and cans you open), but that's mostly accidental. Our ancestors appear to have oversalted on purpose. But perhaps they needed it. I expect my heroines routinely use up more minerals tending livestock, confronting and avoiding bandits, cooking over wood stoves, and hauling water than I do with my daily routine.

So, after all that, what role will cornmeal mush play in the finished book? I have no idea. I haven't even finished plotting it yet. They may not eat it on stage at all. This was less about the food per se than it was about getting into their heads. A good historical novel is a time machine. The flavor and texture of daily life is not contained in the big dramatic incidents that make a plot, but in the little things we do from moment to moment. Food is the fuel of our lives. We eat for physical strength, but some of us - yeah, me - eat for emotional strength, too. Who prepares the food, how do we accept it, what went into getting it, and how do we feel at the end of the meal?

The Olmsteds were not grateful for the corn pone they received on their trek across Texas. They found it monotonous, longed for the wheat bread they'd been raised on in New York, and condemned those who lived on it as too lazy and shiftless to make real bread. If their hosts had gone north and been fed wheat bread, I wonder how they would have reacted? Not a research question to pursue right now. I'm having enough trouble with the handful of counties where the story is set. If eating fried mush will bring me into their heads, even a little, then that's what I'll do.

Now the big question is - have I the fortitude to experiment with burnt okra coffee?