Summertime is a-Popping at Elvy’s

I wish I had a photo I could use of how beautiful these are. I took some. I’d made a lovely spinach salad, and chive/parmesan popovers, but somehow I saved my photos as videos (don’t ask me how), and I can’t paste them anywhere.

Still, when you see how easy these are, and try any of the variations I’ve included, you will find people asking, “Will you make those great popovers again?” a lot.

These can be baked in regular muffin pans, or custard cups on a cookie sheet, or, if you’re like me, you’ll invest in a popover pan, which I took a photo of, and cannot show you.

Here’s the basic recipe:

• 1 stick  (1/2 cup) of butter (real butter – do not substitute) 
• 4 egg
•  1 ¼ cup milk (whole, skim, anywhere in-between) 
• 1 ¼ cup regular, all-purpose flou
•  1 tsp. salt

Begin early in the day. The success of popovers is due to two factors: temperature (room temp) and consistency (heavy whipping cream like you get in a carton, not yet whipped).

Make sure your batter sits out at least four hours, or all the ingredients are room temperature by the time you’re a half hour from dinner being ready (or brunch, I’ve made them then too). Often I’ll make the batter the night before. Put everything in a pitcher and refrigerate overnight, then pull it out and let it sit all day.

How to make the batter:

• Melt ¼ cup of your real butter (that’s one- half of one stick). 
• Preheat oven to 400° 
• In a food processor, or with a mixer, or whisk, beat eggs, add milk, then flour and salt until there are no lumps. You don’t have to overkill this, just until smooth. 
• Add melted butter and mix in. 

That’s it. That’s the whole shebang. If for ANY reason the batter isn’t the consistency of heavy cream, add milk by tablespoons until it is.
Take the last half, of your half stick of butter (get that?), and divide it between your muffin tins, cups, or whatever you are using. Just throw it in the bottom of each cup, and feel free to get more butter if you don’t end up with a good size pat in each. Put the pan, sheet, whatever, in your hot oven for five minutes. The butter should be sizzling when you take it out.

Pour your batter into the center of each cup until ¾ full, the melted butter will go up around the batter, do not go over ¾ full or there will be a mess in your oven. You can fill them ½ full if you want. Throw away any unused batter.

Pop popovers (yes, I wrote that on purpose) into oven, and bake. DO NOT OPEN OVEN!!!!

Eyeball your results THROUGH THE OVEN WINDOW. The popovers will POP, and turn a nice golden brown in about 20 to 30 minutes, depending on how much batter is in each cup, how large the cups are, etc., etc.  Just keep an eye on it. They are done when they look done.

In theory, if you want, when they are popped and golden, you could pull out the pan, cut a slit in the side of each popover, turn off oven, and put them back in the oven for five minutes to let them crisp up, and keep their shape. (If only it was that easy for me to keep mine...recipes like this make it a challenge.)

This is theoretical as I have never done it, mainly because everyone is already drooling (including me), and we can’t wait that long.  Besides, we like them popped-over, which means they sort-of collapse on themselves.

 Sometimes popovers are tricky to get out of their pans. Don’t worry, run a knife around the edges, and POP them out. (Another on-purpose way to use the term ‘pop.' Aren’t you impressed?)

Serve hot, with another stick of real butter on the table. You won’t believe how good they are.

And, as promised, variations to this recipe:

Variation #1

Add ½ cup finely grated (I took a photo of this too, but you know what happened) parmesan reggiano and ¼ cup of fresh, or dried chives. NOTE: when adding cheese, and especially dried herbs, make batter early and give batter time to set. Check and make sure consistency is not too thick, add more milk if needed, a little cold milk at this point won’t ruin anything.

Variation #2

Add ½ cup finely grated, extra sharp cheddar, ¼ cup parsley, a quarter teaspoon of Franks hot sauce (you won’t taste it, it boosts cheddar’s flavor) and a teaspoon, or so, of onion powder.  Read NOTE above.

These are the only two I’ve come up with so far, so experiment! Have fun! If making popovers for a brunch, serve with butter and strawberry jam. As my daughter’s two-year-old twins would say, Yum!

____________

Elvy Howard shares more of her love of cooking in her debut novel, Love on a Half Shell.  It is available in print and e-book at Amazon, Barnes&Noble.com, and other online retailers . 

Love on a Half Shell
Three parts love, two parts grit...the perfect recipe to save a family.

Stress Eating by Elvy Howard

As a few people who know me, know, I’ve been feeling a little stressed lately, due to the, ahem, publishment  (I know, publishment is not even a word) of my book, Love on a Half Shell (I’m supposed to insert a link here to the Amazon page where you can get it. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=elvy+howard. Evidently it’s impossible to not promote yourself enough.)

Feeling the stress of this reality, of having worked most of my life towards this goal, only to find out I am completely freaked out that it is actually happening, has prompted my latest urge to Stress Eat.

I have strategy to not weigh three hundred pounds, and one component of it is, thou shalt not imbibe high-fructose corn syrup of any kind. So, if I’m gonna eat anything like cookies or cake, I gotta make it. 

Another strategy in my plan, if I’m ever so stressed that I actually take the time and effort it takes to make some kind of goody, I’ll also have the time to be smart about it, and Oatmeal Raisin Cookies (with optional walnuts) is the smart answer. The reason? They are delicious and even I, in a state of being able to eat the entire house, can’t eat more than six of these. Because they fill you up. And you poop good too, a second benefit to counter-act symptoms of highly stressed individuals. 

 So I’m giving this gift to you, anyone else who gets stressed out there. Enjoy!

De-Stressing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

-1 cup all-purpose flour

-1 tsp baking soda (not powder)

-1 tsp salt

-two sticks butter (I use salted), softened

-two cups packed dark brown sugar

-one egg

-one tablespoon vanilla

-two teaspoons vanilla/nut/butter flavoring

-two tablespoon of Cinnamon and one tablespoon of nutmeg

-three and a half cups rolled (not instant) oats (I love the organic brand I get in the bins at Good Foods Grocery)

-one cup of organic raisins and an optional cup of chopped walnuts for people lucky enough to be married to someone who LIKES walnuts.

In your mixer, beat the butter for at least three minutes. Add all the sugar and beat it for at least three more. Mix in the egg, the flavorings and slowly pour in the flour/baking soda/salt/spice mixture.

When all mixed, put in the oatmeal, raisins and optional walnuts. You may need your hands to accomplish this.

Pre-heat oven to 375. Use parchment paper on cookie sheets or on baking pans. Parchment paper is the bomb and if you’ve never used it, you owe me five dollars for telling you about it. Or, you could go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=elvy+howard and buy my book instead.

I use the little ice-cream scoop I bought just for this purpose. But you can use your hands to make walnut sized balls you place on the parchment sheet I already got you to buy, and then flatten them out some with the palm of your hand, and bake. 

Here comes the cool part. If you like chewy oatmeal cookies, bake them for around ten minutes until they are very light brown. 

If, like me, you like them crisp, cook them for around fifteen minutes, or until very brown, let them cool for ten minutes on the parchment and then put them on a rack to finish cooling.

You can’t eat over six, I promise. 

____________________

Elvy Howard's debut novel, Love on a Half Shell, is available in print and e-book at Amazon, Barnes&Noble.com, and coming soon to other online retailers . 

Love on a Half Shell
Three parts love, two parts grit...the perfect recipe to save a family.

Pecan Crescent Cookies and Precious Memories

All it took was a plunge of my hands into the mixture of butter, sugar, eggs, and pecans, and I was instantly standing in my grandmother’s big old colonial kitchen, 400-something miles and 40-something years from the here and now. I could see everything: her silver-and-white kitchen table that sat smack in the center of the room, the breakfast nook to the right where I used to hang out with my friends and play canasta, and ahead, the sink with the window overlooking the driveway. She stood next to me, wearing a house dress, as they called them in those days (Grandma never wore pants), one of her pretty flower-patterned aprons tied around her waist, and pointed to her pinkie finger to show me the proper size to form the dough for her pecan crescent cookies.

My mind hopped then to rolling out pie crust into a “baby” pie dish while Grandma, again standing next to me, guided me, her hands with their gnarled knuckles over mine as I battled the giant rolling pin. I still have that baby pie dish. I use it at least once a week to heat vegetables, but I hadn’t thought about making those tiny apple pies in a long, long time.

How could that one sensory experience – the feeling of that dough squishing between my fingers – trigger all those memories, instantly, when I couldn’t remember whether I’d taken my vitamins ten minutes earlier? All I can figure is that emotional experiences, good and bad, must be coded in our brains differently than what goes on the rest of the time.  There must be a chemical reaction to certain experiences that causes the brain to transport those sensations, those memories, to a special section, like a warehouse. I picture a big walled-off section of my brain with a flashing neon sign:  Leah’s Special Memories.

I wonder if the warehouse is organized, if the memories are sorted and categorized, liked I'd be tempted to do. A “machine” as complex as the brain would have to have some sort of system, wouldn’t it? I wonder then, is it organized by year (e.g., birth to age 4), or by good and bad, or maybe love and hate? Are these memories literally stored by group, or scattered randomly through the warehouse but “tagged” for easy access? Or maybe, in the case of bad memories, they’re tagged to stay hidden.

The human brain fascinates me. Not only does it serve as the body’s “computer chip,” collecting and sending probably a gazillion messages and instructions throughout our bodies, simultaneously, every second – Heart: pump, pump, pump! Lungs: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale! – but it’s the receptacle for our consciousness…our souls.

I’ve been blogging for the past several months about the mind, how it reacts to different things (like a full moon, like sleep states), but of all the games our minds play on us, this function where it connects a sensory element to a memory is, to me, the most powerful. I don’t know how the brain does it, but I think any organic system that can so easily transport itself to a place and time from the past, that can reconnect us with loved ones, at least on a sensory level, is magic. I can’t help but give thanks for the universe that is our brains, and while I’m at it, thanks to my grandma for teaching me how to bake pecan crescent cookies.

So, in honor of my grandma, I’m taking a page out of Elvy Howard’s blog and sharing that recipe.

My grandma's pecan crescent cookies, in my "baby" pie dish.

Pecan Crescent Cookies

(Makes about 3 dozen, depending on the width of your finger.)

Ingredients

• 2 cups shortening (Grandma used 1 cup of Crisco, 1 cup of butter. I don’t even know if you can buy Crisco these days. I use butter or margarine.)
• 2/3 cup white granulated sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3-1/3 cups flour
• 1-1/3 cups finely chopped pecans (If the pieces are too large, it’s harder to form the crescent shape.)

Thoroughly mix all ingredients – and don’t be afraid to dig your hands in and get messy. Everything should be well blended.

Separate the dough in half and form into two “logs.” Wrap the logs in waxed paper or plastic wrap and chill in the refrigerator at least a couple hours (I leave overnight).

To form cookies, cut slices of the chilled dough and roll in your hands until about the size of your pinkie. Bend into a slight crescent shape.

Place cookies about 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 ° about 15 minutes, or until the edges are golden brown.  (The bigger the cookies, the longer it takes. J)

Set the cookies (still on the sheet) aside to cool for a few minutes. Until they set, they fall apart easily.

Combine sugar and cinnamon in a bowl, mix thoroughly. I start with about a quarter to a third of a cup of sugar and add cinnamon to taste. If you run out, you can always make more.

While the cookies are still warm, but after they have firmed up a little (about 5 minutes or so), roll each cookie in the sugar/cinnamon mixture (careful handling still required!), then place on some waxed paper (or paper towel) in single layer to finish cooling.

These are probably one of the few cookies I’ve ever made that taste better after they’ve cooled, so you might want to wait before sampling. And while you’re enjoying that first cooled cookie, I hope you can bring to mind one of your own treasured memories.

Wishing all a joyous holiday season – Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Winter Solstice and Kwanzaa blessings!

Leah

Leah writes stories of romance and suspense, and the enduring power of love. Her latest story, Christmas Dance, explores the mysteries of love, marriage and parenthood.

Visit Leah at www.leahstjames.com. 

How Much do I Love October? Let Me Count the Ways...

When I think of October, I don't think of Halloween and scary things. At least, not at first. The month of October holds an entirely different meaning for me.

First, and most important, one of my kids was born in October, so I always think in amazement how much time has passed, remember that child as a baby, think about what I was doing before I went into labor and look forward to the awesome party I'll throw and gifts I'll buy.

That should be reason enough to love the month of October, but it's only the top of my list.

I love October because its the start of Fall, my favorite season. It's a beautiful environment, the changing colors of the foliage a glorious backdrop to the sunny, crisp and cool weather. Perfect for rocking calf-high books with jeans and a classic cardigan.


October is also a great time in the world of entertainment. By the first week of October, most of the new shows on TV have premiered and I've added some gems to my repertoire. "Oscar bait" movies start showing up in theaters; smartly-written compelling dramas that my hubby and I thoroughly enjoy. And every good Fictionista knows what the start of award show season means:  Red Carpet fashions!! :-)

And let's not forget about the food. Ever walk past a house in October only to stop in your tracks at the tempting smells of homemade pumpkin and apple pies? The mouth-watering aromas of cinnamon and nutmeg drawing you to their source like fingers of smoke in an old Looney Tunes cartoon? Pumpkin bread, muffins, donuts, apple fritters, in addition to the scrumptious offerings of gourmet coffees, pumpkin lattes and salted caramel mochas. My lips and hips clearly have different feelings about my favorite season. :-)

Some people think of spring as a time of renewal, growth and progress, but I'd much rather "fall back" {see what I did there} into October.

What do you look forward to in October?

Tracey Livesay
True Love in black & white
www.traceylivesay.com
Mimosas at Midnight
Twitter: @tlivesay
Facebook: TraceyLivesayAuthor