From Wikipedia:  There are many theories as to how the dish ropa vieja was named. One of the more popular ones is a story about a man whose family was coming to his home for dinner. Being very poor, the man could not buy them enough food when they came. To remedy his situation, he went to his closet, gathered some old clothes (ropa vieja en español) and imbued them with his love. When he cooked the clothes, his love for his family turned them into a wonderful beef stew.
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All my adult life I dreamed of having the perfect kitchen–a gleaming Viking stove, a proper stone surface to make pastry, a Kitchen-Aid mixer, a chef’s sink in addition to the apron front farmhouse sink–and for a while I had it.  When we moved to Anchorage my husband designed and built me my dream kitchen.  But circumstances were such that I was working full time and writing full time and there was no time to make the fabulous meals I’d planned for decades and decades.  He did learn to cook, though!  When we sold the house and moved I felt sad at all I’d missed in that wonderful space and figured I’d never have it again.  Oh, poor me.

Now we are in Santa Fe in a little house I love.  The kitchen is galley-style, features a plain old electric stove and tile counters in a space one-tenth of the size of the other kitchen.  Yet I find myself cooking more than ever.  I spend my day working on my new novel, following my characters on their hikes, picture-taking, the wedding receptions they host on their tiny ranch with secondhand horses, goats, chickens and rescued dogs.  When I stop working for the day, I head into the kitchen to see what’s there to work with.

The Calphalon pots became too heavy for my arthritis, so I gave them to a student who likes to cook.  I bought a set of Revere ware on eBay, which were the first pots and pans I cooked with when I got married, and every time I touch one it’s like seeing an old friend.  The gunmetal gray Kitchen Aid mixer takes up a whole corner of the counter top gathering dust.  I use the handheld mixer I bought at Sears a jillion years ago, my cast iron fry pan never leaves the stove top, and my McCoy mixing bowls that are so old they’re now collector pieces see use every day.

Returning to those early tools, my cooking has gotten simpler.  If I can serve a one-dish meal–stew, pasta salad, soup–I do it.  Do we grow wiser as we age or do our palates simplify?  Maybe we finally realize that there’s only so much energy to go around and we must decide if we want to spend it on making our own crackers or enjoying conversation instead?  Yes, I used to make my own crackers.  Chilled a fragile dough of unsalted butter, cheese and flour, and sat on the floor by the oven and peered through the glass until they were perfectly done.  For the first twenty years of my marriage I did not buy frozen food or commercial jam or bread.  I made it all.   And on holidays or for parties, I’d cook for days and still have energy left to enjoy what was going on.

Now I have a few dishes I cook well and they are my go-to menus when I have guests.  I watched my Italian grandmother make gnocchi and risotto and pizza and couldn’t duplicate her work because it wasn’t work to her, it was a lifestyle.  I maintain fidelity to my writing and bless her heart every time I cook a frozen pizza.  Eventually I decided that it was better to have a couple really great dishes than try to make a dozen.

Ropa vieja–its translation is literally “old clothes”–is the one my family and friends always request.  It’s a lot of prep work, but after that all you do is simmer it all day, stir it once in a while, and then you eat it, savoring the blend of flavors that only mature from slow cooking.   On a cold night, it warms you to the core.  On a hot day, the spices seem perfectly suited to icy limeade and conversation in the shade.  When I make ropa vieja, I always make a ton because that way everyone can take home a serving, because the next day you want more just from the memory.

In other recipes there are variations using yucca and plantains, but I don’t like those tastes so I make it simpler.  Some recipes will say to use cheap cuts of meat, and you can, but make it with better cuts and it really shows.  All the measures below are approximate.  It will serve 6-8 the way it’s written.

1lb pork tenderloin
1-2 lbs tri tip steak or any other cut
olive oil
1-2 onions, sliced in rings
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
one whole sack of those baby carrots
4-6 green chiles (roasted, skinned and diced)
1-2 red bell peppers (roasted, skinned and diced)
2-4 T vegetable broth–I like Better Than Bullion Organic Vegetable Paste*
4 C water
1 bunch cilantro
1-2 cans black beans, drained and rinsed

*Once you try this kind of broth paste, you won’t go back to the hard little cubes.  It’s great, organic, and it comes in several flavors.  If you need a cup of broth to get to feeling better, this is the stuff.

Cut the meats into stew-sized chunks.  Salt and pepper liberally and then brown in olive oil.  Once meat is brown all over, remove it and set aside.  In the juices and oil caramelize the onion and cook the chopped garlic until it releases its scent.

Roast the bell pepper and chiles and remove the skins.  Dice and set aside.  Put the carrots in with the onions and the bell pepper.  Add the meat back in and cover with water.  Add in the bullion.  Place the chiles in when it’s simmering nicely.  Cook for hours, simmering slowly, stirring and tasting.  Eventually the meat will start to shred and most of the liquid will evaporate.  Taste it as you go.  The recipe is forgiving, so you can add water, take away water, add chiles to make it hotter, remove them if it’s too hot.

Just before you serve, add a can or two of black beans that have been rinsed and drained.  Chop a whole bunch of cilantro and put that in just before you plate it, so the cilantro stays pungent.  If you want a shiny glaze to the juices, a pat or two of butter just before serving will make things shimmer.

Sometimes I serve it on top of garlic mashed potatoes or white rice, or even thick slices of sourdough bread.  It would make incredible burritos, but I prefer it in a bowl, where you can see each ingredient fall off your fork.  The Bisquick biscuit recipe made with cream instead of skimmed milk makes the perfect biscuit to accompany this stew.

Jo-Ann Mapson is the author of nine novels, most recently The Owl & Moon Cafe.  She lives in Santa Fe with her artist husband, Stewart Allison and their five dogs, Verbena, Cricket, Henry, Piper and Rufus, where she is at work on a new novel.  She teaches in the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage.  Her website has cobwebs it is so out of date, but you can visit it anyway at www.joannmapson.com.  Her favorite meal is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with an Oreo and milk chaser.

It might be as basic as your mother’s spaghetti sauce or as special as Aunt Helen’s Christmas cookies. Maybe it’s the cake you always have on birthdays, or the pumpkin chiffon pie that says Thanksgiving to you.

The dish that means so much to you may have been in your family for generations or it may be a relatively recent arrival. You may be surprised to learn just where it came from, and when it arrived on the scene.  And the one person who makes it may or may not have it written down.

Get it in writing.

If there’s a dish that’s special for you, whether it’s a holiday treat or an everyday one, get the recipe and learn how to make it. Now.

Talk to the person who makes it. If the recipe isn’t written down anywhere, arrange to stand by while she or he makes it. As you watch, write down the ingredients, the method, the oven temp, the pan size, everything you observe. Then make it. If it doesn’t turn out well, talk to her and try to figure out what went wrong. Then make it again.

If you don’t, these treasured dishes will be lost. The one person who knows how to make the birthday cake or the sauce or the pumpkin pie will, sadly, not live forever. And one day, after she’s gone, you’ll realize that a birthday is coming up, and you don’t know how to make the cake. Thanksgiving will dawn, and you’ll have one less dish to be thankful for. You’ll hunger for spaghetti with mom’s sauce, but you’ll never be able to taste it again.

True, even with the recipe, it may not taste exactly the same when you make it. But it will be close. And it will make you feel closer to the one who’s gone.

You’ll make the birthday cake and laugh about the year you decided on a different one, regretted it, and never made the same mistake again. Or, on one future Thanksgiving, as everyone is saying how good the pumpkin pie is, you’ll remind them of the year your aunt dropped it, and it splattered all over the floor. And how relieved everyone was to see her take another one out of the refrigerator.

So call the person who makes that special dish and ask her to teach you how to make it yourself. She’ll be pleased and flattered and, in addition to getting the recipe, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you’re keeping tradition alive. As a bonus, you may hear a wonderful or a surprising story about how the recipe wound up in the family repertoire.

Don’t wait until next year or the next birthday or holiday, do it now. When you’ve made the dish, and you’re happy with the result, go to your computer and key in the recipe. Print it out on plain white paper. Or on colored paper with fancy borders and decorations.  Make several copies and give one to everyone who loves it and to a few people who’ve never had it, but who you know will love it.

Here is one I’d like to give to you.

Quiche Quinzio

This is a typical Italian spinach pie, but years ago my father had the happy idea of adding some cooked sausage to it. That took it from ordinary to extraordinary. We named it Quiche Quinzio for the alliteration, although it’s not a classic quiche. It is one of our family’s favorite dishes. I hope you enjoy it.

Unbaked pie crust- homemade or store-bought
One or two links of sweet Italian sausage
One ten-ounce package of frozen, chopped spinach
One large egg
One pound ricotta (whole milk)
Half teaspoon nutmeg (freshly grated is best)
Half cup freshly grated Parmagiano
Teaspoon of salt
Butter

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Remove sausage from casing, crumble up, and fry slowly until cooked but not crisp. Let cool.

Meanwhile cook the spinach for a minute or two, then drain, squeezing to get as much moisture out as possible. Let it cool.

Whisk egg, then mix in the ricotta, nutmeg, salt and all but a couple of tablespoons of the Parmagiano together in a bowl. Add the cooled, drained spinach. Mix well.

Spread the crumbled sausage in the bottom of the unbaked pie crust. Spread the ricotta and spinach mixture over it. Sprinkle with the remaining Parmagiano. Then top with a few slivers of butter.

Bake at 350 for about forty minutes. The crust should be lightly browned, and the filling should puff up a bit. Let cool for a few minutes, cut and serve.

Jeri Quinzio is a writer who specializes in food history. Her new book – Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making is just out from the University of California Press.
Her blog is – http://jeriquinzio.typepad.com.

Death stands next to me in the kitchen watching me make cookies.

He gets way too close, his murky odor distracting me as I measure portions of raisins and oats.  Death’s shadow and I have been keeping company a lot these days.  I think he especially wants beautiful Sara because her heart’s so good. A bad-mannered suitor, he grabbed her breast and slid into her spine, not realizing what kind of backbone he was dealing with. That woman’s faith has gotten her through fifty-some-odd years of more than you want to know. We know she needs a miracle, and she’s gotten sidetracked from what she does best, which is full-time ministering to people as a pastor.  I think when she comes through this, she’ll fill her kitchen with people seeking the warmth of her great spirit.

I add a teaspoon of ginger and listen to a public radio interview with a Unitarian minister who has esophageal cancer. He got himself so right with God and Death that for a long moment that man forgot his family was in this, too. Then he got a year’s reprieve. When Death came knocking a second time, “My family and I had already had the dress rehearsal,” said the minister. Bet his wife and kids didn’t look at it that way.

I hear people say, “I’m not scared of dying.”  Maybe all the people who love them are scared. So think of that next time you get all philosophical about leaving this earth. We still want you.

Death still hangs around as the flour and rising agents fall gently out of the sifter. At least one of us is disturbed to see something wiggling. I scoop out the little wormy things and give Death a few treats.

“That’s all you’re getting from me today, buddy,” I say, as I cream the healthy substitute butter with the natural substitute sweetener that’s supposed to help keep me on earth longer.
Some of the cookies are for a rabbi with a sweet tooth. “Who will say kaddish for me,” asked the bachelor Rabbi in a sermon twenty years ago, when he could still tap dance. Possibly everyone he has ever met, I think, as people come up to him whenever we go out. From birth to death, he has been a part of every life cycle event. Now, at 82, brilliant and sparky despite crippling spinal stenosis and Parkinson’s, he taps sitting down, his feet clicking to Gershwin and the Beatles.

I’m making these cookies in my writer friend David’s kitchen. “So what happens when Jews die?” he asks. His lymphoma has him walking the tightrope between Christian Science and modern science. So far, he’s finding his balance.
“No heaven and hell. We’re about the here and now, though reincarnation would be great. I can’t get everything accomplished in one lifetime,” I tell him as I plop cookie dough onto the next baking sheet.
When I bend over to open the oven door, Death pokes me as rudely as a wet nosed dog.
He leans close, rotten breath whispering, “Make room for me.”

I slide the second batch into the oven. Then, fed up, I shove Death in, too, and quickly close the door. No matter how much sugar you add, death stinks, but for the time being, the comforting scent of oatmeal cookies completely fills the kitchen.
I divide up the sweets for Sara, David, and the Rabbi.

Beth Surdut is a visual storyteller–a designer, colorist, and writer whose paintings and wearable art are collected internationally. Her recent move to New Mexico has inspired two new series-Art From the Kitchen and Listening to Raven.  Santa Feans can participate with her in Bubbe Meises and Cuentas de Abuela, a story telling workshop .

Like all writers, I want very much for people to buy my books.  I mean, that’s the whole point, isn’t it?  But also like most writers, I don’t want to be the one doing the selling.  At a bookstore signing or book festival, the understood purpose is to sell books, which puts writers in the uncomfortable position of marketing our own work, something most of us don’t do well.

When you participate in a book group, on the other hand, you skip the commerce and get straight to the art.  Instead of having to make like a snake-oil salesman touting your wares, you get to be with readers that have already bought the book and in most cases, read it.  The stage is already set for the kind of really interesting discussions that can only happen when everyone is–so to speak–on the same page.

The other thing I love about book clubs is they tend to eat well–the big advantage of participating in person rather than over the phone or on-line.  Most of them are as adventurous about food as they are about books, and they love trying recipes that are either specifically mentioned in the book or at least evocative of the story.  So in the spirit of book groups everywhere, I offer this recipe from The Laws of Harmony:

Sunny’s Blue Ribbon Blackberry Brownies

¾ cup blackberry purée*
4.5 oz unsweetened chocolate (preferably Scharffenberger)
½ cup (1 stick) butter
3 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla
½ tsp salt
1 cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar
⅔ cup flour
½ cup toasted chopped hazelnuts(optional)
1 ¼ cups ganâche*

*For blackberry purée:

2 (10-oz) packages frozen, unsweetened blackberries, thawed
2 Tbsp sugar

This can be made the day before and refrigerated.
Place berries and sugar in food processor or food mill and purée until smooth.  Press mixture through a sieve with a spatula and set aside.  You’ll probably end up with more than a cup of seedless purée, but you can either save the overflow for another use or just drink it straight.

For brownies:

Preheat oven to 325°F.  Grease a 9×9-inch glass baking pan (if you’re using a metal pan, you can set the oven at 350°F) and line with parchment, letting it overhang on two sides.  Then grease the parchment.  (I know this is asking a lot, but later when you can just lift those gooey little puppies right out of the pan, you’ll be glad you went to the trouble.)

Melt chocolate with butter in the top of a double boiler or the microwave.  (If you use the microwave, be sure to stir every 30 seconds or so to avoid burning the chocolate.)  When mixture is smooth and warm, not hot, stir in vanilla and set aside.

In an electric mixer with a whisk attachment, beat eggs with salt until foamy.  Add white and brown sugars and beat at high speed about five minutes or mixture has doubled in volume.  Carefully fold in the chocolate in three additions.  Combine until smooth, but try not to deflate the eggs too much.  Fold in ½ cup of blackberry purée, then sift flour over batter and combine until smooth.  Fold in nuts, if using.  Pour into prepared pan and bake on middle rack of oven 25-35 minutes.  Do NOT overbake.  Center should still be on the gooey side.

Remove from oven and let cool completely on wire rack.  The top will settle a bit.  This is a good thing.

For the ganâche:

This can be made the day before and refrigerated or several weeks ahead and frozen.
2 cups heavy cream
1 lb. bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped (preferably Scharffenberger)

Heat cream in saucepan or microwave to just below the boiling point.  Pour it over the chopped chocolate and let sit for about 5 minutes, then gently stir until smooth.  (This makes four cups, and you only need 1¼ cups for this recipe.  The rest can be frozen to use as a glaze for cookies or cake, a wonderful fudgy sauce for ice cream, or see above for use of excess blackberry purée.)

Measure 1¼ cups ganâche, rewarm it gently and stir in the remaining ¼ cup blackberry purée.  You can add a drop or two of LorAnn blackberry flavor* if you’re prone to excess, but be sure to taste the ganâche first.

When the brownies are completely cool, lift them out of the pan, using the overhanging parchment paper.  Set on a rack over a cutting board or cookie sheet and pour the warmed blackberry ganâche over them, smoothing with an offset spatula.  Refrigerate till set, then cut into squares with a knife rinsed in hot water after each cut.

These are lovely at room temperature by themselves or with a scoop of ice cream, but I love them cold out of the refrigerator with a glass of milk.

*LorAnn flavorings are available at www.lorannoils.com.  They’re very intense, so use sparingly.

Dad’s 84th birthday party was going nicely. I’d invited a bunch of his old friends for the afternoon celebration, and the house rang with convivial laughter the way it had in the days when Mom was hostess. Instead of birthday cake, I made his favorite, mince pie, and Dad managed to blow out its four candles, not easy for a man on an oxygen concentrator. Then it was time to serve up the aforementioned mince, a crumb-topped strawberry rhubarb pie from a local farm stand, and a cheesecake, courtesy of Trader Joe’s.

I stood in the dining room with Ellie and Margaret, steadfast friends of my parents since the 1950s. “I wish Mom were here,” I said, staring at the three as-yet untouched desserts. “I never did learn how to serve pie.”

Ellie gave me a little squeeze, no doubt remembering her recent visit with Mom in the memory unit across town. “Sweetie, compared to your mom, none of us learned how.”

Before Alzheimer’s, cakes, pastries and candies were my mother’s specialties. Not so long ago, she would have been serving three picture perfect desserts she’d made from scratch. What’s more, every portion, from first to last, would have been worthy of a photograph.

I’m not sure where she learned the art of serving dessert. I never bothered to ask. Perhaps it was at her high school job at a soda fountain, or during her Chico State college days when she worked for room and board in the home of a well-to-do family. In those years, she volunteered on committees, joined a sorority and later a bridge club–all places where desserts were dished with style.

As a child, I believed the talent for serving pie was something you had to be born with, like a photographic memory or perfect pitch. I used to think she took dessert duty at every family function because no one else, not my aunts or even my revered grandmother, had been blessed with the gift.

Later, as I careened through adolescence, I dismissed my mother’s abilities entirely. Pie and cake cutting, if I thought about them at all, were skills I would undoubtedly master the moment I acquired the opportunity to practice them. If Mom could do it, how hard could it be? After surviving some messy, embarrassing trials as a newlywed, I declared dessert wrangling off limits.

It’s ironic that much of what Mom did manage to teach me, skills like using laundry bluing, darning socks, or spreading liquid floor wax with a lamb’s wool applicator, have gone the way of the buggy whip. I don’t know why I didn’t learn to imitate the gentle sawing motion she employed for angel food, the trial cuts she made over a sheet cake as she calculated the number of servings, her tricks for keeping a cheesecake blade clean. Maybe because when it came to dessert, I thought she’d always be around to serve it.
As I slopped Dad’s piece of mince onto a paper plate, I compared my effort against the memory of one of Mom’s perfect wedges, showcased on bone china, garnished with hard sauce, a sterling dessert fork tucked beside it. At least Ellie and Margaret were close by, laughing along with me, looking the other way when I used my fingers, and, unlike Mom if she’d been there, refusing to let me give up.

“Your mom was in a class apart,” Margaret said before she took loaded plates to the living room. “You’re just going to have to settle for being one of us.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said, remembering to divide the rhubarb pie in half before making the rest of the cuts. That made things a little easier, and I let myself imagine all the times Mom must have gotten pie filling on her fingers and frosting on her sleeve. There had to have been dropped forks, burned crusts and fallen cakes, even before dementia began cutting its ragged slices. In the next room, I heard approving murmurs as folks dug into their desserts. Without thinking too hard, I slipped my knife through the creamy center of the cheesecake like I’d been doing it all my life.

My dear friend Susan Bono is a freelance editor and writing coach who lives in Petaluma, CA with her husband, youngest son, ancient cat, and three chickens (see photo.) She edits and publishes Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative and its online counterpart, www.tiny-lights.com, instead of cleaning out her cupboards, drawers and closets, which are now, alas, all full.

You can find more of her wonderful essays in the archives of the St. Petersburg Times
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/07/11/Floridian/Sips_at_youth_s_fount.shtml
and the Northern California Bohemian.
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/02.01.01/anniversary-0105.html

Maybe I’m weird, but I love winter.

And I particularly love winter here in Santa Fe where the smell of piñon smoke drifts through the streets at night and the air is clear and crackling cold.  On sunny days the sky’s deep, piercing blue almost hurts my eyes.  Every few weeks, soft gray clouds steal down from the north and sift powdery snow over the pueblos.

At night when I take the dog out before bed, I’m glad that our dirt road has no street lights–only the yellow lamplight from the house or moonlight or a glittering net of stars illuminates the wind-sculpted snow.  Good weather for writers and cooks.

For many years, New Year’s Day was my cutoff point.  After the excitement of the holidays, the remaining few months of winter were something to be simply endured until spring.  Now I treasure these short days of January and February–silent days of snow, the early darkness, the warmth of the kiva fireplace, and the kinds of food that winter brings–soups and stews and roasted chickens, hearty pastas, crusty pans of enchiladas, a simmering pot of beans, homemade bread, oatmeal cookies, baked apples with heavy cream.  Rough red wine and spiced cider, hot chocolate, strong coffee.

It’s the kind of weather when I love to make Avgolemono…which I can never pronounce correctly, so I just call it chicken soup with rice, egg and lemon.  I’d probably had it before, but I never paid any attention to it until I was living in Long Beach, CA in the nineties and I read about it in Ruth Reichl’s column in the Los Angeles Times.  At the time she was the paper’s food editor, and she described making Avgolemono when she came home late from work and didn’t feel like getting all gourmet.  I’ve since discovered it’s also the perfect antidote for a cold or a hangover or just the blues.  Good any time of year, but especially in winter.

8 cups chicken stock, preferably homemade
1 cup rice or orzo
3 eggs
juice of 3 lemons, (I sometimes add more lemon juice, as I love the pucker.)
freshly ground black pepper.

Bring chicken broth to a boil, add rice or orzo and simmer until tender (20 minutes, give or take).  Meanwhile beat eggs well, then add lemon juice while continuing to beat. Temper eggs with 2 cups of the broth, adding in a constant, slow stream while beating so the eggs don’t curdle.  Add egg mixture back to remaining broth and serve. When reheating, do not re-boil; just heat slowly until very warm.

The astringent lemon, eggy richness, salty chicken broth, and starchy rice, make this a whole that is definitely more than the sum of its parts.

I’ve been on the fence about it.  I have to admit that I find many blogs vaguely annoying.  Not to mention that blogging is time consuming.  On the other hand, there are some that I really enjoy.  And the idea of a space on my site where I can communicate with readers and other writers and friends is definitely appealing.

I guess I’ve been feeling sort of like the twenty-three-year-old guy who says…I like you, really  I do.  It’s just…I’m not comfortable making a commitment.

But then I had this inspired idea for a virtual Kitchen Table.  Because that’s something I love…just sitting around the kitchen table with friends, having coffee or a glass of wine and talking about stuff.  And when I say stuff, I mean anything…well, within the bounds of good taste, of course. 

It doesn’t have to be about books or writing…although those are certainly two of my favorite topics.  We can talk food, music, art, movies, travel, love, friendship, families…the possibilities are, as they say, endless.  Since I have so many interesting friends (you know who you are) I’ll try to persuade them to guest host the Kitchen Table now and again.

So pull up a chair, pour yourself a cup of coffee and say what’s on your mind.  Welcome to the Kitchen Table.