Buttermilk Honey Scones with Rose-Strawberry Jam

August 11, 2016 Brett

I’m finding more beauty in the crumbs, the coffee stains that ring a mug. I found an old textbook about gender and saw the pages, dog-eared and speckled in burns and blood, from a paper cut and ashes dusted aimlessly from my cigarette.

I used to read under grapevines and now I sleep twelve hours some days.

I used to speak Spanish in a timid accent and now I don’t speak it at all.

I used to bite my nails, but I stopped that a long time ago.

I read about 6 sisters who changed the world and I used to think I could, too. I told my mother I was never going to speak to her again, and now I watch the news with her, nursing coffees that grow cold and conversations that became keep memories of her mother alive and warm. She opened a box in a room she turned into a cat infirmary yesterday morning. Inside were thirty-seven napkins, hand-stitched and embroidered in yarn, lace, and scraps of satin. How delicate they were; carefully folded and not very well made. They did the job and we moved on to other topics, like how my mother isn’t very good at tennis and I’m not very good at forgiving. If my brother was having a boy or a girl. How my mother loves the smell of rosewater and hates how many ants she found in the windowsill in the kitchen.

How many years its been since I last celebrated my birthday with her.

I live for those moments, those mornings. The innocence and the redemption. The fog hands dully until about nine in the morning. It burns off, I go to work. She sits with her cats, with Milo and her Labrador retriever. She watches crime documentaries and lights candles in the heat. She went shopping the other morning and brought home some roses. Strawberries were on sale and she had never seen honeycomb before. So I made her these scones as a thank you for taking me back in. So close to home, so different than who I was. I used to read under grapevines and they’re still there. Giving second chances and strangling the chicken wire fence that surrounds the house.

Buttermilk Honey Scones with Rose-Strawberry Jam

Ingredients for the Scones

2/3 cup buttermilk
1 egg
1 TB vanilla extract
¼ cup honey
3 cup flour
½ sugar
1 TB baking powder
½ TB cornstarch
½ ts salt
8 TB butter, cubed and cold
3 TB honeycomb, cut into cubes for topping

Directions for Scones

Preheat oven to 450*F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper
Whisk together buttermilk, egg, vanilla, and honey, set aside
Sift together all dry ingredients into a mixing bowl and transfer mixture into your food processor
Add butter, pulse to combine until fat is the size of peas
With motor running, add liquid through feeding tube
Turn dough onto a floured work surface and pat into a round
Cut into 8 triangles, and pat edges to be clean
Place on baking sheet and bake for 13-18 minutes or until puffed and golden brown
Top with honeycom

Ingredients for Rose-Strawberry Jam

½ pint of strawberries, hulled and halved
1 cup sugar
Juice of 2 lemons
2 TB fruit pectin
2 TB rose water
Zest of one lemo

Directions for Rose-Strawberry Jam

In a medium-sized saucepan, combine strawberries, sugar, and juice. Heat on medium.
Stir occasionally (I like to use a wooden spoon) so that the mixture does not burn, but you want enough heat that the juices bleed from the berries and the sugar and lemon juice condense slightly
Allow to boil for a good 2 or 3 minutes
Add your fruit pectin and stir vigorously for a few seconds to combine
Resume your boil for another minute
Take off heat, stir in zest and rose water
Jam will continue to thicken as it cools, when slightly warm to the touch, you can put in your jar. This recipe makes one pint of jam and is not a proper canning technique, but a quick jam recipe
Store in fridge, use often and plentifully

In the thick of summer and routine: S'mores Popovers

July 10, 2016 Brett

“Today I woke up to my mom knocking on the door with coffee, she wanted to watch an episode of I Love Lucy with me. The door was open and the cats watched squirrels through the screen door's mesh. Milo sat on my lap and I had some toast. It's been a good day so far.”

I wrote those words to my friends yesterday, in the morning before I worked outside for five hours. I wrote those words to have others share in my experience, to bear witness to the new life I’m living. How I’m not so scared anymore, not running away. I won’t be moving for a while, but I’m sure as hell happy about my decision to be here.

New rituals. That’s how I am living now. In between the concept and the creation, there is this part of me that remains languid, relaxed in this new routine. Wake up, drink coffee, kiss my mother good morning. Check emails, feed the outside cats, feed Milo, and take it a little slow. Get frustrated, take a nap, bake a cake. I go down on my lunch breaks to see my mother again. We talk about my sister’s pregnancy, we talk about how I would beg her to draw stick figures for me when I was little. We don’t ever talk about her mother, her childhood, when she lost her job, but the gaps in conversation do all the talking for us both.

I mowed the lawn for two hours, long expansive lines that waver on the small inclines of the backyard. We cut down trees yesterday, piled them up and set them on fire. The pit my friends and I would roast marshmallows around is now a burn pile for old trash, dead wood, sick grapevines, and junk mail my dad wants rid of. Melted bottles and pale, pale ash.

My parents moved on, took over the things that were once ours, made it their own. The house wasn’t kept how I left it when I moved out seven years ago. My old bedroom now houses a cat that is too old and sick from surgery. The quilt my great-aunt made me hangs like a tapestry in the stairway. And the pool we received from donations when my brother had cancer now has a wrap-around deck. Unfinished, only half painted, the wood a little rough and the towels snag.

This is my routine now, to be complacent with where I am. How I live. What I am doing. I’m raised in the meeting point of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and the Appalachian Mountains. I smelled the apple trees’ smoke on my clothes and there was soot underneath my nails. And I didn’t know why my eyes were watering so bad, but I didn’t bother to wipe them right away.

S'Mores Popovers

While you do not need a specialty pan for these, they do make for a nice presentation and a more consistent baking. With a popover pan, this recipe yields 9. With a muffin pan, it yields 12-15.

Ingredients

1 ¼ cup AP flour
½ cup graham flour (I love Bob's Red Mill's for this recipe)
½ teaspoon salt
3 TB brown sugar, dark
2 TB molasses, dark
1 TB clover honey
1 TB pure vanilla extract
4 eggs, room temperature
1 ½ cup whole milk, room temperature
3 TB unsalted butter, melted
½ cup store-bought marshmallow fluff
½ cup milk chocolate chips
1 graham cracker, processed to dust for toppin

Directions

Sift flours, salt, and brown sugar in a small bowl
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together molasses, honey, vanilla, eggs, milk, and butter until yolks are broken and liquids are a pale yellow
Whisking slowly, add flour mixture to wet
Whisk rapidly until bubbles begin to form
Let rest at room temperature for 30 minutes
Preheat oven to 450*F, prepare popover pan (or muffin tin) with cooking spray
When resting is complete, spoon mixture into pans ¾ of the way full
Top with a spoonful of marshmallow fluff and a few chocolate chips
Bake for 20 minutes at 450*F
Reduce heat to 350*F and bake for an additional 15-17 minutes (do not open the door, but check through your window to see tall sides that are golden brown)
Remove from oven, cut a slit into the popovers immediately to allow steam to escape
Turn popovers out of pan, sprinkle with a little graham cracker crumb and a few more chips and serve warm

Have all that graham flour leftover? Try making these graham crackers and milk waffles

And have you nominated Fig+Bleu for the #Savblogawards? If not, would you please?

She was the victim, the martyr, the saint. And she loves bread pudding.

December 8, 2015 Brett

My mother moved out at 15, lived in an apartment by herself. Paid bills, went to school. She had my brother at 18. She married my dad at 25. She worked as a maid in an old woman’s house. She smoked cigarettes with long maroon-painted nails. She worked at a gas station after school. She got decent grades. She used to fold the laundry to pass the time. She didn’t have a TV until she was 20.

She was brought up differently than me, so she taught me all she learned while she was on her own. How to fold the towels. How to make the bed. How to clip coupons and buy in bulk. To never waste. How important work was. How things can be taken away. How fucking hard life is sometimes. How lucky I was. She taught me how to few on buttons and how to cut notches into my brother’s old belts so they could fit my waist. She taught me to never go to bed angry, but we all broke that rule. She taught me that any cut heals better with a kiss, any pain alleviated with her kiss.

Maybe that’s the reason I kissed so many boys when it all hurt so much to grow up.

I’ve always admired my mother. The way she was able to be so many different people in her life. There’s no word for a daughter who loses her mother—something in the periphery of widow and orphan. How she went from waif to housewife, from mother to enemy. How she went from working in warehouse freezers outside of Louisville, Kentucky to dipping chocolate truffles with an arthritic shoulder outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. How the nightgowns she wore used to brush the sand off the kitchen floor when we lived in Florida for a year. How I can still smell her hairspray and makeup when she would kiss me before she went to work at five in the morning—a mixture of rubbing alcohol and rose petals. She was the victim, the martyr, the saint. She was the Madonna of the Graveyard Shift. Now she sits and crochets blankets for her cats to sleep on in the addition she built for them on her farmhouse. Now my parents eat at chain restaurants at holidays because I’m not around much these days.

But when I was around, I wasn't always that great. I used to think she deserved her lot in life. I used to tell her that to her face. One time I told her she was my best friend and the worst kind of mother. Another time I told her I'd rather die than spend another year in her house. But now I can't think of anything else I want in life but to sit down at a sticky formica table with her at a buffet she swears makes the best bread pudding, just off a turnpike exit, just east of Pittsburgh.

And when the rain comes down in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it pours for days at a time. It floods the creek, it floods the basement. The only silence you hear on those days is the stop and go of rainfall driving through the underpass. And I think my mother likes the rain that loud, that cold, that deafening. I think she likes it to drown out the empty house. I think she likes it to distract herself. And I don’t blame her, I do the same thing, too.

Apple Chai Bread Pudding

A warm, sticky comfort dessert that is elevated with apples, chai spices (inspired by A Brown Table's masala chai), and bread made with sweet potato puree. It'll keep you warm. Make bread a day or two ahead and cut up to stale.

Ingredients for the sweet potato bread (adapted from Local Milk's "No Time Bread":

2 medium-sized sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed
3 tablespoon coconut oil, melted
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1/3 cup brown sugar, packed
1 1/2 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 teaspoon of black pepper
1/2 teaspoon of salt
8 teaspoons active dry yeast
2 tablespoons sugar
3 cup water
2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon molasses or maple syrup
7 1/2 cups AP flour

Directions for the sweet potato bread:

Preheat oven to 350*F and prepare a half sheet pan with aluminum foil
Place sweet potatoes in a medium bowl
In a small measuring cup, whisk coconut oil, syrup, brown sugar, olive oil, pepper, and salt
Pour mixture over sweet potatoes and stir with a wooden spoon to coat
Pour onto prepared pan and spread out
Roast for 50 minutes or until browned, tender, and a little caramelized
(Can eat here as its own side dish or proceed on)
Let cool and puree in a food processor
While cooling, in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, add yeast, sugar, and water and allow to stand until foamy
Add salt, vinegar, and molasses/syrup, then turn mixer on low.
Begin to add flour, one cup at a time. When you have mixed in three cups of flour, add the sweet potato puree
Add remaining flour and switch to a dough hook
Mix with dough hook for 8 minutes or until dough is elastic and pulling away from the sides of the bowl
Dump onto a floured work surface and knead a couple times. Place in an oiled bowl, turning once, and lay a damp cloth on top of dough. Now, place a dry cloth on top of the damp cloth. Microwave for 25 seconds. Let rest for five minutes
Repeat process, but allow dough to rest for 15 minutes
While dough is resting, oil a dutch oven slightly and preheat oven to 450*F
When dough is finished resting, shape into a round and place in dough oven
Bake for 30 minutes, covered, then an additional 12 minutes uncovered, or until golden brown and crisp
Allow to cool and cube.
If using for bread pudding, do this a couple days ahead to stale.

Ingredients for Bread Pudding:

One loaf of sweet potato bread (above), cubed and stale
3 cup whole milk (or cream if you're extra bad)
2-inch piece of ginger, peeled and sliced
12 green cardamom pods, crushed
1 cinnamon stick
10-15 peppercorns, crushed
10-12 whole cloves, crushed
4 tablespoons loose leaf black tea (I used a pecan blend my mom made me)
1 1/2 teaspoon allspice
6 egg yolks
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon orange zest
2 tablespoon orange juice
2 tablespoon vanilla
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
2 apples, cored and chopped

Directions for Bread Pudding:

Place bread cubes in a large mixing bowl
In a small sauce pan, begin heating milk on medium heat
While milk is heating, place all spices (excluding the cinnamon stick and ginger) into a mortar and grind, breaking up cloves, pods, and peppercorns
Place spices, ginger, tea, and cinnamon stick into milk and allow to simmer for 8-12 minutes, keep the heat low but allow for small bubbles to appear on the edge of the milk
Turn heat off and cover. Allow to cool fully with the infused spices
While mixture is cooling, separate eggs (reserve whites) and add sugar, whisking to combine until a pale yellow. Add zest, orange juice, salt, and vanilla
Also prepare apples and preheat oven to
When milk mixture is cool, pour through a fine mesh strainer into yolk and sugar and whisk together
Add apples to bread in mixing pour and pour milk-yolk mixture over top. Allow to sit for a few minutes to absorb liquid
Butter your dish heavily and pour contents of mixing bowl into dish
Bake for 30-45 minutes, checking for doneness at the 30 minute mark, until sides are slightly crisp and center is gooey
Eat within two days (especially warm!)

Mama

May 10, 2015 Brett

I used to chew my mother's hair to fall asleep. I was in love with it, the texture soft and the smell of her sweat perfumed the pillow. I used to be obsessed with my mother, and then went three years without talking to her. She was every metaphor you could think of and so much more. She was blood over cast iron bones. She was olive-skinned and tanned with baby oil. She never wrinkled, she cries at the thought of mousetraps and says life is unfair sometimes. She takes long pauses and tries to get me off the phone. She says I love you in her own way, in small ways. She's bought me a housewarming present for all the apartments I've rented to get away from her. She forgot my eight birthday once. She had a migraine. I called her selfish. She had tumors removed from her neck that Spring.

My mother's name is Nancy and she is my soulmate. I love her more than anything in the world. I'm obsessed with her, with the idea of her. I have her broad bones and lack of people skills. I have her distrust for good ever coming around, surprised that life can be fortunate once in a while. She has arthritis in her collarbone, she worked as a janitor once. She finds symbolism in every bird that stops for a rest on the windowsill. She never took us to church growing up. She never says her own mother's name, she never talks about her own mother. It's a small, secret word that's only spoken once a year. The tetragrammaton by the high priestess Nancy, spoken once when we threw flower petals on her grave.

My mother is not a good woman; but she's not a bad woman either. She lives her life in the two-story farm house the best way she knows how. She's had a tough life, a life with not a lot to offer. Born in Indiana, a runaway at 15. She worked odd jobs, was held up at a video store once. Lit her nails on fire once. Lit her hair on fire once. Had three children. Wore jean shorts to her wedding. She doesn't like music much, she says it gives her a headache. She can sing real sweetly under her breath when she's getting ready. I first heard her say fuck when I was six.

My mother is the best woman I know. My mother still holds my hand when we cross the street. My mother held me for eight minutes before I moved to California and kept repeating in my chest, "Don't go don't go, don't go.". When I left for Italy, she said she didn't care if I ever came home. Her brother died in Afghanistan three weeks after I landed in Europe and I was the first person she called. I slept on a pew that night, the only quiet room in the convent I was staying at. I fell asleep with the phone in my hand, my mother didn't hang up.

My mother is an orphan now. My mother has me and eleven cats. My mother has a permanent tan and laugh lines where you can see life wasn't all that bad for her. My mother raised me the best way she knew how: "be honest, don't hurt anyone, and don't fuck it up". My mother told the truth and lied to us when she had to. Like how she was married to someone before my father. Like how she held me back when I could have skipped third grade. Like how she tells my brother she loves her children equally. Like how she says she's happy.

I found my mother crying once out by the grapevines that strangle themselves on our chickenwire fence. I hated seeing her that weak and I told her it made me sick. I was nineteen and I don't forgive myself. I walked inside and drove away. I left her crying in the backyard. She had seen a baby bird fall to its death and got upset by it. My mother, the patron saint of loss. Her son, too selfish to ever let her be vulnerable, even for two seconds, when she was alone and surrounded by dandelions and skipping stones at the creek bed.

I call my mother every day now. She took some time off from working to enjoy summer and the last surviving dog from my childhood. She take her coffee with cream and wants to paint the kitchen a soft yellow. Before we hang up, I ask her if she loves me. She always answers the same, "You're the only good thing I've done in my life. Of course I love you."