Pfefferneuse Pfun

I have a strong Pennsylvania Dutch heritage (of which I'm quite proud) and collect cookbooks from that culture. One of the best is the Mennonite Community Cookbook, which has two recipes for Pfefferneuse cookies, a traditional Christmastime favorite. I cranked out a batch today - a perfect occupation for a cloudy, windy and frigid near-winter afternoon. I'd never made Pfefferneuse from this recipe before, and I doctored it a little to add some additional spices and a bit of fresh ground black pepper. I like them a tad heavy on the cardamom with that subtle but snappy little undertone of pepper. It gives these cookies a very special je ne sais quoi - people find them intriguing because they can taste that little peppery note but not enough to actually tell that it's pepper. They are pretty hard when you first bake them, but they soften up a bit, eventually. Snappy! And perfect with a cup of hot cocoa.

Cooking with what's there

Admittedly, I'm not much of a cook. It's not that I can't, or don't enjoy it, I just don't do it very often. I'm sure this is at least partly because I have the extreme good fortune to be married to a man who a) loves to cook and b) is very good at it. It's something I really want to do more of, though, honestly.. One thing that I find particularly compelling about cooking is the creative aspect of putting food together, and even though I'm not terribly experienced in foodcrafting, I've been known on many occasions to toss a dish together strictly by winging it. Having the ingenuity (and the moxie) to open your cabinets and cook from what you have on hand is a great skill to cultivate in a frugal, simple kitchen.

A case in point: our Thanksgiving Dinner Part Deux last weekend... A scant thirty minutes before sitting down, we realized we hadn't planned enough food and were rustling around in the cabinets and fridge trying to decide what we could throw together. A few mostly-empty bags of frozen veggies, some eggs, the last of the cheese and the remaining herbs later, voila! We had a quiche-ish kind of casserole. I've done this lots of other times before, cranking out red sauces for pasta, curries, and unusual-but-usually-tasty bean dishes improvised with a handful of oddments from the larder.

Today, I was in the spontaneous mood to bake some cookies without many specific cookie kind of ingredients on hand, so I pulled out the Fannie Farmer Baking Book - a great "basics" cookbook chock full of tried-and-true, time tested traditional recipes. Our copy is food stained, dog-eared, and the binding is cracked with pages falling out (probably from stuffing it full of cards, printouts, and scraps of paper with recipes scribbled on them). Serendipitously, it flopped open to a page with a recipe for Maple Syrup cookies, which required only about five ingredients, all of which I had laying around. So... I whipped 'em up. They turned out well - a chewy, sweet bar kind of cookie, not terribly maple-y, but maybe I only say that because I'm a maple freak and can't get enough of the flavor. I'll definitely be making these again. (By the way, the yield for this recipe is for "sixty 1 1/2 inch squares." Who on earth would only want a 1 1/2 inch square? Not I! So in recipes like this I always end up with about 10 cookies. I can't decide whether that's bad or not.)

Now if I can just figure out what to do with some canned tuna, coconut milk, the last dusting from the bottom of a few spice jars and some powdered sugar...

Turkey Free

Were we not still knee deep in the suspended-animation state of a new baby, I would have posted this before Thanksgiving, but as we're fresh off of a Turkey Day dinner redux this past weekend, I thought I'd go ahead and share some thoughts on the holiday table.

Over the last few years, my husband and I have attended a few of the annual Turkey Free Thanksgiving dinners sponsored by our local chapter of EarthSave. For those of you who don't know, EarthSave International is an organization founded by John Robbins (author of "Diet For A New America" and "The Food Revolution") to promote a shift toward a more plant-based diet. Robbins, one-time scion of the Baskin Robbins ice cream empire, walked away from his dairy heritage in search of greater personal and environmental health. Now a vegan, he writes and lectures about the value, necessity, and ethics of a sustainable lifestyle. I've met John Robbins and heard him speak, and can attest to power of the man's quiet passion and his gift for inspiring others to walk the walk alongside him. The Turkey Free dinners are a great opportunity for communion and community with fellow travelers on the meatless (and nearly) express - imagine a table 30 feet long groaning with the ultimate vegan potluck... everything from more traditional Thanksgiving offerings like yams and cranberries to Thai noodles, barbecued seitan, and Creole gumbo. Add to this a featured speaker and a raft of great door prizes and it's an evening well spent, indeed. And the fact that they are so well attended, even in a relatively non-progressive locale, is incredibly heartening.

Nursing and diaper changing kept us away this year, and I really missed it. I'm not a vegan, myself - not even a vegetarian anymore - but I find that the event really resonates and serves to reinvigorate my committment to a more meatless future for the world. I was a vegetarian for over 12 years (and a vegan for part of that time). The reasons I no longer am are complex (and a subject, maybe, for another post) but I still eschew meat for the majority of my meals and try to make more sustainable choices when possible for the meat I do eat.

There's something about the holiday season that makes these sorts of choices seem more poignant - perhaps it's the spirit of goodwill that infuses everything this time of year, the sense we have that hope is afoot and that we can, in some small way, be part of that hopeful spirit. With my daughter, now, I'm thinking that it might be nice to have a turkey-free table in our own home at Thanksgiving as a way of marking a committment to a global reduction in meat consumption, both from an ecological standpoint and as a way to reduce the suffering of feedlot animals. I want to go a bit further than just having a free-range, organic turkey as we do now - perhaps even go vegan for the meal. I don't want meat to ever be a big part of my daughter's diet (or our household table), but I also feel the need to really call attention to it in this way. It's amazing how having my daughter clarifies, focuses and intensifies all these things that I think and feel and believe. I am amazed, and yes, thankful.