I'm Heading Home Soon and I'm Bringing These Potato Chip Cookies With Me

December 15, 2015 Brett

The weather is changing rapidly in California and I don’t think I am who I was last week. Maybe a little more bitter. I know I’m not sleeping well. Under flannel sheets, I keep dreaming of the creek behind my house and the small tombstones made out of river rock. I’d etch the name of rabbits that never seemed to make it past the first winter.

I go home in a week. Home. Only one place that exists out of many that I have lived—five states before kindergarten. Two countries, two continents. A world of places I’ve laid my head. From boys’ laps to vinyl mattresses in a monastery outside of Rome. Home is where I left my parents last summer on a Greyhound headed to Philadelphia. Home is where I slammed a door so hard it broke the last remaining picture of my grandmother. Home is where my parents sleep. Home is where the fire place sits below the TV and it got too hot once that it warped the VHS’s that still are stacked in a pile on the mantle. I’ll go back to that place. I’ll stop regretting all this moving one day.

It gets dark here early, too. Something I didn’t think would happen on the West Coast. I’ve aged a lot in three years. I stopped biting my nails and there’s hair on my chest now. I took a shower with my glasses on the other day. I never can tell if I’m blind or just being stupid. Either way, California isn’t my home and the darker it gets, the earlier it is, the less I have to see of the cracked speedbumps and sky that I’m told goes on forever.

I’m waiting this week out. I’m writing Christmas cards. Thank-you notes. I called my dad and then lost service. I called my mom and we laughed for five minutes about nothing. I’m waiting this week out, waiting to go home. I take a red eye headed east. I bought a blanket to keep me warm on the plane. I wear jeans everywhere I go. I’m waiting for the day someone will tell me I don’t have to try so hard. I’m waiting for the day I can find a post-it note on my steering wheel, with my mom saying I love you in her cursive writing. Little loops around the L, big pauses between the verb and the object. I’m waiting for this week to end, so I can go home to the house that sometimes smells like cookies burning and all I hear is the word “cocoon”.

Potato Chip Shortbread Cookies

Make these cookies, they’ll taste like home. Salty and sweet, crumby and crumbly. A great start to your holiday. Makes 9-12 medium sized (3”) cookies

Ingredients:

11 TB unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 ¼ cup AP flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 oz potato chips, crushed to a powder in a food processor
3 oz dark chocolate
3 oz milk chocolate
1 TB coconut oi

Directions:
1.  In the bowl of an electric mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, mix together butter, sugar, and vanilla until combined
2.  Sift into bowl flour and salt, gradually add to butter mixture, mixing on low to combine
3.  Add potato chip crumbs and mix for about a minute until full incorporated
4.  Roll out onto a floured surface and pat into a disk
5.  Wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes to rest
6.  While dough is resting, preheat oven to 350*F and prepare a baking sheet with parchment paper
7.  Roll out dough to about 1/2 inch thickness with a floured rolling pin
8.  Cut into rounds and place on sheet. Repeat for remaining dough
9.  Bake for 20-25 minutes, until golden and edges are slightly browned
10.  Allow to cool
11.  While cookies are cooling, heat a small amount of water in a saucepan to simmer. Place a glass heatproof bowl on top of saucepan and add chocolate and coconut oil. Stir occasionally and keep heat low enough that the water does not touch the bottom of the bowl. Keep stirring until fully melted.
12.  Dip shortbread cookies into chocolate and allow to cool completely on a wire rack with a piece of parchment underneath
13.  Sprinkle with a little more salt, sugar, or potato chip crumbs and enjoy

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!)

The Leftovers: Mashed Potato Handpies

November 25, 2015 Brett

I’m giving thanks tomorrow, a gesture I have to remind myself to do daily. It’s not in my nature to be kind, to be considerate. It’s something I have to strive for. To hold my hands together to say prayers takes effort. It isn’t something that’s natural to me, how traits like how arrogance and greed are. They aren’t inborn in me like self-preservation. I’m looking forward to this exercise, this ritual, this practice in gratitude again.

Last year I hosted Thanksgiving and this year I will not be. I will be a guest, a stranger in a strange house. Maybe I’ll sleep on an air mattress or a couch, maybe I will fall asleep drunk each night with friends. Maybe I’ll get a tattoo on Saturday and maybe the turkey will burn; but one thing that is so soulfully constant, so unapologetically American is that we will cook too much food and get sick of it. We will make the leftovers into sandwiches by Saturday. Last year, I scrambled mashed potatoes in with eggs. One year, my mother made vegetable soup with the sweet potato casserole and poured it all down the drain when she tried it. And try as I might to continue on with tradition as an expat on the West Coast, I appreciate the constants. I appreciate a full table and the reinventions of meals to trick our exhausted stomachs. I appreciate the gathering. I appreciate the effort I put into saying, “Thank you.”

I’ll appreciate this desert holiday, how the world will stay silent. Where the highways crops up on sand dunes and Waffle Houses. How we can roll the windows down and scream what’s playing on the radio. How the world looks so giant in the rearview mirror, but the table is always a little too small for all of the extra food.

Mashed Potato Handpies

These handpies are borne from getting sick of the same old leftovers each year. I made mine with mashed potatoes, as a play on my beloved pierogies, but feel free to fill these with turkey, stuffing, or even go a sweet route with cranberry sauce and some creme fraiche. The crust is made with cheddar, rosemary, and sourcream; so you really can't go wrong with whatever ends up in it.

Ingredients:

3-4 cups AP flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon rosemary
1/4 cup shredded cheddar cheese
8 tablespoons butter, cold and cubed
1/3 cup + 2 tablespoons shortening, very cold
1/3 cup fatty sour cream, very cold (drain in a paper towel or cheese cloth if excessively watered)
3-5 tablespoons ice water
4 cups mashed potatoes
1 egg, beaten with a little water

Directions:

In the bowl of a food processor, add 3 cups flour, salt, rosemary, and cheese. Pulse 4 times to blend fully.
Add butter and shortening to dry ingredients and pulse 4-5 times or until the fats are pea-sized
With motor running, pour sour cream in. Wait a second or two and then begin adding ice water.
Do three tablespoons and see how the dough is. If sticky, add more flour. If dry, add a little more water
Turn out onto a floured work surface and knead just once or twice to cover a bit with more flour and shape into a disc
Divide in half and wrap both halves in plastic wrap and refrigerate for thirty minutes
While refrigerating, preheat the oven to 350*F and line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Beat an egg with water and use as a sealant and wash.
When dough is done resting, roll one disc out to about 1/4 inch thickness and cut into rounds with either a biscuit cutter or the edge of a glass (about 3-4 inches in diameter). Place round onto parchment paper and spoon mashed potato filling into the center. Dab a pastry brush into the egg wash and run along the circumference of the round. Cut another round out and place on top, pressing sides and crimp with a fork. Cut a small cross on top of the handpie for ventilation.
Repeat step 8 for remaining dough.
Space on baking sheets and brush each egg with remaining egg wash and sprinkle with a little salt.
Bake for 30-35 minutes or until golden brown
Allow to cool slightly before eating, as the potatoes will be hot
Maybe dip in gravy and enjoy!

Roasted Sweet Potato Rolls for Thanksgiving

November 23, 2015 Brett

In two days, I’ll drive out to the desert to give thanks. Coyotes might howl into the basin that night, but I’ll call my mom around noon her time to say I love you. It’s all so familiar and so different now, how three years have changed me since I came to the California. People say the coast is forgiving of your past; but for me, it’s the only thing I’m clinging onto anymore, the one thing I refuse to give up. I did my own sort of pilgrimage and found myself on the border between two worlds, between two selves. The shorelines blur between me and the Pacific and I’m still dipping in to see which one is colder.

I’m clinging to my past. My mother in sweat pants. We’d eat at three. My dad would keep the television on in the background. It could drown out the silence at the table some years. There are five of us in my family; we hardly have anything in common. My mom would wear her sweatpants until the dinner was done, she’d change into jeans and we would pray for the first and last time that whole year. My sister liked lasagna, so we had lasagna one year. My mother kept the pumpkin rolls moist in damp paper towels and one Thanksgiving I ate nothing but mashed potatoes and bread. I wasn’t grateful for anything then, I lived with the idea that it was deserving of everything handed to me. Food sat stacked on the buffet that usually held report cards and old balls of yarn. It was a mess of a drawer in a mess of a house, because my parents worked three jobs between them. We were kids then and I thought the world owed me more than canned green beans and the TV in the background.

We’d be done in half an hour. I’d sleep the rest of the day. One Thanksgiving I saw a cherry glow and fade with the metronome of my sister’s breath. She used to sneak out and smoke by the porch swing. It gets dark early in November.

It was the only thing I saw for miles.

And this year, as I have for the last three years, I will be spending 3,000 miles away from my family. Three thousand mile markers that pass in green and white blurs down the turnpike exits between pastoral town names like Donegal and Somerset. So much separates me from the person I used to be. A teen that rolled his eyes when his mother would cry at the dinner table. I never offered a hand to hold. She’d work ten hours on the turkey and I would say I wasn’t hungry. She’d work ten hours at her job and then I would say she was never around. She’d sleep for five hours and be up in the morning to drink her coffee and say goodbye before going back to the warehouse to work. And I never once offered to clear the dishes, to organize the buffet, to tell her I love her or lend her a hand. I’m three thousand miles from that person now. I’ll be celebrating in a desert this week who I have become; but the person I was in my past lives still glows like an old ember in my mind. It’ll be the only thing I see for miles before bed.

But I am thankful I know who I am now. I am thankful I can see how much she loved me. I am thankful the last time I was home for Thanksgiving that my mom and I shared the last of the sweet potato casserole from a Tupperware dish and ate it cold with forks while watching It’s a Wonderful Life. I am thankful I have those memories now, to hold onto when it feels so cold in the desert these days.

Roasted Sweet Potato Rolls

This is the first of two Thanksgiving recipes that I worked on this week. I wanted to share this one with you first, as it can take some time. I have broken the recipe up into two parts: the roasted sweet potatoes (which can be made into their own dish if you'd like), and then the rolls. These are, perhaps,the softest rolls I have ever made and can be made smaller than the picture. A true Indiana boy at heart, I made them in cast iron with a lot of butter and brown sugar. Makes 12 giant rolls or 18 medium-sized rolls.

Ingredients for the Roasted Sweet Potatoes:

2 medium-sized sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed
3 tablespoon coconut oil, melted
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1/2 tablespoon olive oil
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon salt

Directions for the Roasted Sweet Potatoes:

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, 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

Ingredients for Roasted Sweet Potato Rolls:

2 cups water, warm to the touch
5 teaspoons yeast
1/2 cup dark brown sugar + 2 TB brown sugar, packed
1 1/2 teaspoon salt (pref smoked salt here)
1 cup sweet potato puree (above)
1 egg
4 tablespoon butter, 2 TB softened
4 1/2-6 cup AP flour + more for kneading and topping

Directions for Roasted Sweet Potato Rolls:

In the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, add water, 1/2 cup brown sugar, salt, and yeast. Let sit for five minutes until foamy
Add egg, puree, and 2 tablespoons of softened butter. Turn mixer on low to mix all ingredients together
Keeping the mixer on, begin adding flour, one cup at a time. Keep adding flour until dough begins to stick away from sides of bowl (if you add too much flour and dough becomes "sandy", add a small amount of water or milk to reconstitute)
Turn out onto a floured work surface and knead for 3-5 minutes until springy
Place in a well-oiled bowl, turning once. Cover with a towel and let sit for an hour in a warm, dry place until doubled in size.
Turn back out onto floured surface and punch down slightly. Cut into 12 or 18 equal pieces and place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper (or in cast iron skillets that are heavily buttered)
Cover with a towel and allow to rise for 20 minutes
While rising, preheat oven to 350*F
When done rising, place pan or skillet in oven and sprinkle with remaining brown sugar and break remaining 2 TB butter off and sprinkle over dough
Bake for 25-32 minutes or until golden brown on top.
Enjoy. Best first day, but can be stored in a container for up to three days.

Does the farm house creak in memory of me?

November 18, 2015 Brett

Chocolate Pumpkin Bundt Cake with Spiced Orange Icing

My mother called me this morning to talk on her drive. She told me how the leaves are all dead now, how it was a hassle to rake them when it was inevitable they'd be covered in snow in a month. How she spilled her iced tea on her favorite scarf, so she wrapped an old t-shirt around her neck on the way home to keep warm. She said her body was like her home in Pennsylvania, filled with too many memories and creaking with each step.

I think they plan on moving soon; I think she’s telling me in her own way. I think they’ll sell the house I grew up in soon. She’s got arthritis in her collarbone, it hurts to hold the hand rail some days to get up the steps. My mother is barely fifty, but she’s full of memories and a lifetime of hard work makes her creak with every step. I won’t grieve the loss just yet, but I keep thinking about what she said this morning and the pause in conversation that was filled with my million questions of her future and my past, so intrinsically tied to that old farm house.

I’m surprised it’s still standing, the way the water floods the basement in the spring. It’s sits at a base of a hill called Friendship and water ran through our front door one April. I’m surprised it’s still standing, it seems like a thousand years went by since I’ve been home. Has the pool water turned that murky shade of green? Has the grapevine strangled the chickenwire fence that covers half the yard? How many bottles washed up from the creekbed? How many cigarette butts are still hidden underneath a rock I used to smoke next to in the backyard?

How many years did I say I’d run away and never look back?

Home is every dandelion and birthday candle I blew out with one heavy sigh. It’s hard to see it straight-on, but it’s in the periphery of my comparisons. Pittsburgh and Italy, San Diego and Texas—I’ve been building homes from cardboard boxes, never getting the details of that old house in Pennsylvania replicated until it felt right.

How the rosebush blushed in the spring and by summer was shaking with aphids. How the floorboard creaked until it became a Hail Mary you’d say before you snuck out at night. How we never locked the door and kept the windows open until January. How the snow melted once and we found the skeleton of a chicken that must have escaped the coop. How my mother left bologna on the porch swing for stray cats to eat and they found a couple of baby skunks one morning too. How it all seemed to clear to me that I wasn’t a part of that world the last time I was there; how it all felt too pure and corruptible.

And I still keep my mother at a 3,000 mile distance for this same reason. She’s quiet until the snow melts. She blushes until you get too close. She creaks and says her prayers at night. She’s so pure in her own way, but there’s chickenwire on her soul and she won’t stay that way for long. I keep my distance, so I won’t grieve the loss just yet.

Chocolate Pumpkin Bundt Cake with Spiced Orange Icing

A cake you make when you need to feel a sense of home, whether that home is 3,000 miles away or from 7 years ago. Makes one bundt cake.

Ingredients for Cake:

2 1/2 cup AP flour
2 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 tablespoon of cinnamon
1 1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 3/4 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar, dark
1/3 cup + 2 tablespoon olive oil
6 tablespoon butter, extremely soft
1/2 cup pumpkin puree
1 large egg
2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 tablespoon white vinegar
1 tablespoon orange zest
2 cups milk

Directions for Cake:

Heavily butter, grease, and flour a bundt pan and preheat oven to 350*F
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, sift together flour, soda, salt, cinnamon, cocoa powder, and sugars. Repeat.
In a separate bowl or measuring cup, whisk all remaining ingredients until well blended and egg yolk is broken up.
Create a well in the dry ingredients and add a small amount of the wet ingredients (about 1/2 a cup) into the dry ingredients, turn mixer on low
Continue to pour remaining wet ingredients in slowly, turning mixer off a couple times to scrape bottom with a rubber spatula
When it is all mixed together, turn stand mixer on medium-high and blend for one and a half minutes
Give one last mix with the rubber spatula and pour into the prepared pan
Bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes, checking at the fifty minute mark for a cake where a toothpick inserted comes out clean
Allow to cool before taking out of pan and icing.

Ingredients for Spiced Orange Icing:

1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup butter
1/2 tablespoon light corn syrup
1/4 cup whole milk
2 tablespoon orange juice
1/2 tablespoon orange zest
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon allspice
Pinch of black pepper
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
4-5 cups confectioner's sugar
Pinch of salt

Directions for Icing:

Sift together confectioner's sugar and all spices in a separate bowl and set to the side
In a small sauce pan, heat sugar, butter and corn syrup on medium-high, stirring occasionally to avoid burning
Allow butter to melt completely into mixture and cook for a minute or two until sides start bubbling slightly
Add milk and orange juice, stirring once. Allow to cook for an additional minute
Take off burner and allow to cool completely
Pour into the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with a whisk attachment
When cool to the touch, begin beating on medium-high and adding confectioner's sugar one cup at a time, allowing for each cup to be mixed in fully before adding the next
Continue to do this until you yield your desired consistency with the icing (may use more or less of the confectioner's sugar). Icing should be pale and spotted with orange and spices
Spread desired amount over cooled bundt cake
Fully iced cake can be stored for up to four days in fridge