Afternoon Tea

I fell in love with tea while I studied in England. Those pesky British make sure you are addicted to cream teas from the second you land. Finding a decent afternoon tea stateside isn't always the easiest though. So, I resigned myself to missing afternoon tea. Then, last time I was down in Walt Disney World, I dragged my mother to afternoon tea at the Grand Floridian and remembered what all the fuss was about. So, when it came time for my birthday, something I haven't paid much attention to the last few years, I decided to have a tea party. As well as being an excuse to read lots of fun tea cookbooks, and start a places to have tea bucket list, it also meant I could try out a recipe I'd been holding onto for years. Sally Lunn's is a famous tea shop in Bath, where I lived while in England. The shop is famous for Sally Lunn buns and it was only a few months after I got back to the States that a blog I followed posted a recipe for the famous Sally Lunn buns. However, I never really had any reason to make them. Until now.

I have lots of recipes to share from my afternoon tea but most are ones you can find in any decent tea cookbook. Jam cookies, cucumber sandwiches and a fabulous honey spice cake (which led to me have a fight with a bundt cake pan but that is neither here nor there). One thing I did learn from putting on afternoon tea is why it fell out of popularity when people stopped keeping cooks. It takes a LOT of work to put one of these together on your own. It was fun but I think next time I'll just find a nice tea shop.

My afternoon tea spread

The Sally Lunn buns are just behind the strawberries. I made clotted cream to go with them and served them with the choice of raspberry or strawberry jam. Of everything I made for the tea, the Sally Lunns were actually the easiest and baked the best in my oven. They baked up nice and golden and tasted exactly like they should have.

Sally Lunn buns with Clotted Cream

Ingredients:
4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/4 tsp. (1 package) instant yeast
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter
4 large eggs
1 cup milk

Directions:
1) In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, yeast, and salt. In small saucepan, melt butter.
2) With electric mixer, beat eggs until fluffy and pale lemon yellow, about 5 minutes. Add milk and beat until smooth, about 1 minute.
3) By hand with dough whisk or wooden spoon, add the flour mixture to the egg mixture in three additions, alternating with the melted butter and beginning and ending with the flour mixture. Cover mixture and place in refrigerator for at least 24 hours or up to three days
4) When ready to bake, remove dough from refrigerator. Stir down the dough, just a few strokes, with a wooden spoon.
5) With a 1/4 measuring cup, scoop dough into well-greased or cooking sprayed standard muffin tins.
6) Lightly butter a sheet of plastic wrap and place, buttered side down, over the buns. Let rise until puffy but likely not doubled in volume, about 1 1/2 hours. During last 15 minutes, preheat oven to 375F
7) Uncover the buns. Bake at 375 about 20-25 minutes until golden brown. Turn the buns out of the tins and cool on wire racks. Serve warm or cool completely and then store.

Clotted Cream

Ingredients:
1 cup heavy cream
2 Tbsp confectioners' sugar
1/2 cup sour cream, at room temperature

Directions:
1) In a small bowl, using an electric mixer, combine heavy cream and sugar. Whip until stiff peaks form.
2) Gently fold in sour cream and mix until very thick
3) Place in refrigerator and chill until time to serve

Freezer-Friendly Minestrone Soup

Because of my schedule lately, and a planned tea party I have coming up to celebrate my birthday, cooking has been put at the end of my list. At least until this week when I start seeing if my baking talents will hold up to making a tasty afternoon tea. So, I pulled out a batch of minestrone soup I made back in December to get me through last week.

It took me a long time to find a minestrone recipe I liked. See, I am weird and don't like beans. I find their texture gross and sadly, minestrone soup often has a lot of beans included. So, I was excited when I found this recipe on-line years ago. I also love that this recipe makes a LOT of soup - enough to freeze at least five Tupperware containers with two servings a piece in them as well as having enough left over to eat for a week after I make the original batch. I try to make it in November or December and I find I usually eat the last container around the end of March. The soup keeps well in the freezer though I find I need to add some water to each container when I first take it out of the freezer. Otherwise, the soup is almost too thick.

See, I have another dish!

Minestrone Soup

Ingredients:
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 medium onion, chopped (1/2 cup)
2 small zucchini, chopped (2 cups)
2 medium carrots, sliced (1 cup)
1 can (28 oz.) diced tomatoes, undrained
1 carton (32 oz.) chicken broth (4 cups) or 4 cups of water
4 cups tomato juice
1 cup dry red wine or water
1 Tbsp dried basil leaves
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp dried oregano leaves
1/4 tsp pepper
2 cups uncooked rotini, mostaccioli, and shell pasta mixture (I usually just use rotini straight)

Directions:
1) Spray 8-qt. nonstick Dutch oven with cooking spray; heat over medium heat. Cook garlic and onion in Dutch oven about 2 minutes, stirring occasionally, until onion is tender.
2) Stir in remaining ingredients except pasta. Heat to boiling; reduce heat. Cover and simmer 45 minutes.
3) Heat to boiling. Stir in pasta. Heat to boiling; reduce heat. Simmer uncovered 10 to 15 minutes or until pasta is tender.

Did Cinderella Eat Your Daughter When You Weren’t Looking?

From Goodreads

Sigh, I need to be careful here, I know. I don’t have a daughter of my own nor will I have one any time soon. I only have my experience as a daughter myself, along with four years of women’s studies where I read books like this by the dozens - Particularly ones that look at how fairy tale mythology operates in today’s culture. I wrote my thesis on that after all. It was even focused on Cinderella. My conclusions dealt with the idea that Cinderella is an ever-adaptable myth; whether you put her in science fiction or horror. She is also at her best when she is surrounded by strong support groups, often female, rather than isolated as she is often pictured. Even Disney’s Cinderella had her band of faithful animal friends to fall back on for a dress. So, I’d say I came to this particular examination of Cinderella and how she translates in the modern world "girlie culture" with a fairly solid background of knowledge. 

In Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, I agree with the main thesis. I cannot argue against the fact that the way culture and society inundate girls from the second they leave the womb with conflicting messages of pink, princess, sex and more pink is a problem. However, that problem goes in both directions because don’t we inundate boys with black, blue and how to be a "real" man from the start as well? I’d say gender modeling hasn’t quite gotten to the equality stage we’d like and science, as Orenstein explains, may not ever let the sexes be entirely on the same footing because, like it or not, some of it is genetic. There are some things we do seem to be hardwired to do, to be. What made me anxious reading this book was how anxious that made Orenstein. Is it a bad thing if there are a few inherent differences? Shouldn’t we celebrate those as much as we do when we make a step forward in gender equality? Wouldn’t it be slightly boring if we were all the same? 

I know, it bugs me that I was wondering that too. But Orenstein is anxious, worried, almost obsessed with the fact that she might be somehow either not raising her daughter anti-girlie or not raising her girlie enough. As I am not yet a parent, I have to ask – does everyone get this worried about this? As I thought about my own childhood, I tried to think about my parents and how they approached raising my sister and me, opposites from the day we were born. I come from a Disney family so the Disney Princesses were always there in some fashion. I had a Beauty and the Beast lunch box for years in elementary school, I saw all the movies when they came out, and we went to the parks all the time. I, however, wasn’t a kid when Disney Princesses was a brand, when parents spend fortunes to let their daughters go to the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, when it seems like a family vacation to Walt Disney World is now somehow ruined because the little princess doesn’t get to have breakfast at the Castle with Cinderella. 

Personally, I loathed wearing dresses as a kid (still do), had more guy friends than girls (that changed when I got to high school), could play tackle football with the best of them and wanted to be smart, brainy Belle when I grew up. The fact that she was a princess somehow didn’t really seem to register. She liked to read, she spoke her mind and she wasn’t afraid of the Beast. Oh, and I hated the color pink. I have made my peace with it over the years but I’d still pick blue over it any day of the week. My sister? Adores dressing up, loves pink, can ride any horse you put her on and will give you an opinion of any college basketball team in the country on demand. Now, I’d need to ask but I don’t think Mom and Dad ever fretted over whether to buy me the Barbie house versus a book nor do I think they worried when Ally discovered horses, makeup or declared her wish to become a sports broadcaster. I think they were just always present; paying attention, supporting us and letting us find our own way whether that was by decking out in pink and frills or enjoying earth tones and hiking boots. 

And that brings me to my biggest issue with this book – I don’t think Orenstein needs to be that worried. She is ever present in her daughter’s life, a little girl who seems to have a healthy curiosity, who enjoyed Disney Princesses until she graduated to Wonder Woman and who sounds, quite frankly, that she is more aware of women stereotypes than I am. This is a little girl who asks questions and who has a mother informed, interested and open enough to answer and then see what her daughter does. Culture and society are not going to change any time soon. We still see trends today that we’ve seen from the 1950s. At the same time, there are new trends, trends yet to show themselves and trends we haven’t even thought of yet. Yes, Cinderella is always going to be there, be she in Ashenputtel, Cendrillon or Cindy garb, but I think the best way to deal with her is head on and see what happens. I think we may find our daughters just might surprise us. Or, maybe I’ll go into spasms of worry the second I have a baby daughter of my own but I think having a little more faith in ourselves as caretakers and our daughters as bright, intelligent women with equally strong women ahead and behind them will be the best cure to Cinderella fever we’ll ever find.

Beef Taco Skillet

Somewhere along the way, I cut a short, easy looking recipe from a newspaper. I can't for the life of me remembers which one or where I might have been living when I did so. I've narrowed it down to either my grad school days or since I moved out here but that's the best I can do. This Beef Taco Skillet used tomato soup for its base and I am a big fan of using Campbells for a starter - a recipe always seems fool-proof to me then.

This recipe is definitely one of the easiest I've ever put together and it cooked up quickly and easily. But then, what I ended up I wasn't quite sure what to do with. The skillet gives you a concoction of beef and tortillas cooked with salsa and tomato soup. It isn't quite thick enough to be a stew and not thick enough to be a soup. It's somewhere in the middle. I wasn't exactly sure how to serve it. I think for the leftovers I'll make rice to go with the dish, but for tonight I made do with tortilla chips and sour cream.

I liked this dish but the taste of tomato soup sort of overwhelms it. I also think if I were to make this again I would add a dash of taco seasoning to give a better kick to it. As it is, this is a very mild, bordering on bland dish but filling. I had only a small helping myself and I'm stuffed. I also, unlike what the recipe called for, didn't put cheese over the entire finished product, only my portion of it. As it will be eaten over the week, I figured I would prefer adding fresh cheese to each serving rather than putting it all on at once.

Honestly, I have a better Mexican skillet recipe in a cookbook I prefer to this one so it's one that is not getting a permanent place in my recipe box but I'm glad I tried it out. For a busy night when you aren't sure what to make and you know you have a pound of hamburger in the freezer, I could see this becoming an easy, go-to dish.

Beef Taco Skillet

Ingredients:

1 lb. ground beef
1 can tomato soup
1/2 cup salsa
1/2 water
4 flour tortillas (8" round, cut into 1" pieces)
1/2 cup taco blend shredded cheese

Directions:

1) Brown beef in 10" skillet until well-browned; drain fat
2) Stir in soup, salsa, water and tortillas.
3) Heat to a boil, reduce heat to low and cook for 5 minutes
4) Stir and serve; top each serving with cheese.

Makes 4 servings

Neverland Calls

From IMDB

This may sound odd but I had to grown into liking Peter Pan. Like Alice in Wonderland for me, it was just not one I understood when I was a kid. Why wouldn't you want to grow up? Of course, it's only once you're grown up that you understand how utterly awful it is to be grown up. Peter Pan knows what's up. So, it's only over the last few years that I've really come to appreciate the Peter Pan myth. I finally read the original story, got hooked on the Peter and the Starcatchers series (which is now a play coming to Broadway that I'll miss...bother) and re-watched Hook after all these years and understood that as a kid, I didn't get half the jokes! So, how I made it until now without seeing Finding Neverland, especially when it has some of my favorite actors and actresses, is puzzling.

The film tells the story of how J.M. Barrie, on the heels of a giant flop of a play, is inspired to write one of the most beloved children's stories of all time. Barrie, played quite endearing by Johnny Depp, meets a widow and her four children in the park one day, a family which is badly in need of some imagination since the loss of their husband and father. Barrie, in an unhappy marriage, brings laughter and fun into their lives forever changing them and him. It's an unconventional relationship that society predictably condemned them for but results in a play about the possibilities of childhood and the power of the imagination.

I really enjoyed this film. The acting was wonderful from both Depp and Kate Winslet who plays the widow Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and I had forgotten how talented Freddie Highmore is. His portrayal of Peter Pan's namesake steals the film in my opinion. The kid even brought tears to my eyes and there were no animals in peril anywhere - impressive indeed! I can usually care less about humans dying in films (animals though? I am a blubbering mess).

Of course with a film like this I spend a lot of time rolling my eyes and thinking, "Sure, I bet that's exactly how that happened. Yeah right." And I did do that a little at first with this film until the first, what I suppose would be best called, magical realist scene where Barrie dances with his dog in the park which he is pretending is a bear at the time. The scene then alternates between the real scene and a magical scene where Barrie is dressed as a ringmaster of a circus who actually is dancing with a bear. These surreal scenes, sprinkled throughout the film, broke the pretend/real barrier and convinced me that keeping to the facts which inspired the film was not the primary goal of the story. Once the filmmakers got that across to me, I was willing to not wonder so much about the facts.

It is those scenes of pretend, scenes that exist only in the minds of the characters themselves, that are the most fun in the film. However, my favorite scenes of the film were those of Peter Pan's opening night. Between the audience, the actors, and the set design, it was really a wonderful sequence of the story. Watch the film for these scenes at least - the illustration of what kids know that grown-ups have forgotten was quite brilliantly presented and reminds you that Peter Pan is not simply a story for children - it has something fundamentally important to teach adults as well.

Excellent Women - So They Say

I was prepared to adore Barbara Pym's Excellent Women. It came highly recommended for Jane Austen fans. So, and I'm sorry to say that this is going to sound irrational, I was really quite mad at the book when I didn't much care for it. It made me laugh a few times but for the most part I kept reading it hoping something would eventually happen and wondering if I would even care when it did.

From Goodreads

Excellent Women is told from the point of view of Mildred Lathbury, a spinster (read a 30-something single woman - horrors!) living in post-World War II London who is very involved with her local parish. Her life is quiet and uncomplicated until a young couple moves into the apartment below hers and the vicar gets himself engaged to a new widow living in the apartment above the vicarage. Cue misunderstandings and what I think was supposed to be a sort of dignified madcap comedy of manners. Which you think should have been awesome but was...well...dull.

Now, I mentioned I was mad at this book so I've thought a lot about why since I finished it last week. On paper, the plot is gold really - it should have worked and I should have loved every word of it. I've decided a few key issues worked against it in the end.  One, the characters are just unlikable - even the likable ones. This could be the result of the first person narrative in that you don't get to know some of the key characters all that well because Mildred just doesn't know them well enough to let the reader get any insight into them. However, I think they were just not well written - they all fall flat on the page for me. Two, the ending. Full stop. I may have tossed the book across the room after I finished it (or I would have if it hadn't been a library book). I don't care how typical this sort of ending was for the time period, there is a reason Lizzy doesn't end up with Mr. Collins. And while Mildred is no Lizzy, she didn't deserve who she ended up with in my opinion.

I also think this book may have hit a little too close to home with the character of Mildred and so her ending was quite disheartening. The book spends a lot of time harping on Mildred's spinsterhood when my impression of Mildred is that she is happy as a single woman and the book's sole goal seemed to be to make her ashamed of that fact. Every once in a while, you catch Mildred out though - she doesn't want to move into the new apartment above the vicarage, she's happy where she is, on her own. Later, she is against the vicar's sister moving in with her. She's someone who has come to enjoy her solitude on many levels. She is, in essence, someone who has made a fulfilling life for herself without a man involved.

When the vicar becomes engaged, everyone in the parish is worried about how Mildred will take the news. What I loved was Mildred herself was confused - was she supposed to be upset about it in some way? Apparently, as a single woman of a certain age, the parish had always assumed that Mildred would get married to the vicar eventually. Mildred didn't get that memo and relunctantly takes on the rejected woman role because it's expected of her. It's at that moment I realized that Mildred is delightful but her silly author was determined to get her attached to someone by the end of the book because that was apparently how the book HAD to end. And man, was I mad when I read the ending Pym gave to Mildred. OK, I get it, you were bound and determined to marry the poor spinster off but you couldn't have written a better man for her? Come on, Anne Elliot got Captain Wentworth in the end people! And Mildred was definitely more Anne than Charlotte Lucas yet she got the equivalent of Mr. Collins handed to her. I have decided Midred rebelled at the last minute and returned to her life of church teas and working with impoverished gentlewomen rather than marry the drip Pym saddled her with in the end.

On an odd note, I think I would have liked, and accepted better, this story if I had watched it rather than read it. As a play or as a film with a decent screenplay and the right cast to add some life to these characters, I think this would be a lot more fun - sort of a 1940s era romantic comedy. Someone should get to work on that ASAP.

Chicken Cacciatore

So, I'm not big on New Years' resolutions but I do like to set some goals for myself that are usually reading orientated with a new year. Since I wasn't able to come up with concrete ones in reading (I have a few vague ideas but I'm still working on them), I decided maybe I should branch out and challenge myself elsewhere. The kitchen seemed an obvious place for me to go.

The running family gag is that I can't cook. I did have some unfortunate misadventures when I was younger and for awhile there it was just easier to be on kitchen duty than attempt to make a dish of some sort. Then of course I left the comfort of college dining halls and had to fend for myself. So, I learned to cook in a sense. I rarely make something that isn't edible so I always assumed that was a step in the right direction for me. The idea of cooking is so charming though that I became a recipe collector with more cooking blogs than I could keep up with. Over the years, I've learned my talent level better and said goodbye to some of the blogs that just made me hungry while producing gourmet worthy meals that I had no inclination or reason to make. However, the recipe collecting has continued until I think, it may, just be a little out of hand. I have an email folder full along with clippings, print outs and magazine articles overflowing my recipe binder and box. My problem with that is...I've made maybe a handful of the recipes I have. So, goal for the year? Make them and decide whether they are keepers or whether I'm never making them again.

I generally make my most complicated meal on Sundays; just the day of the week I have the most time to devote to chopping, cooking, baking, dishes and clean up of the kitchen. It has the bonus that anything I make tends to make me enough leftovers that I don't need to do more than reheat until Thursday - one of the bonuses to being single and recipes almost always assuming you're cooking for a family of four. So today I finally got around to starting on this goal. I've been set back a few times as grocery shopping where I currently live can be challenging to find what you need sometimes. Other times, I improvise.

My first dish of the year? Chicken Cacciatore from Bread and Putter with a few changes due to grocery availability. Overall, I loved this dish - it tasted delicious and was super easy to make. It also didn't require hours of chopping things which is always good in my book. I recommend this dish actually for the weeknight. You could get everything chopped beforehand, get it cooking in the skillet and then you have 40 minutes to get things done before it's ready which I like on a weeknight - makes me get some chores done before I settle in for a night of reading and/or TV watching.

The final product!

Recipe:

Ingredients: 1 lb. chicken (thighs or breasts I think work fine), 2 medium green bell peppers, 1 package (6 or 8 oz.) button mushrooms and 1 jar of marinara sauce

Directions:
1) Coat large, deep skillet with cooking spray
2) Chop chicken into cubes and then brown on skillet
3) Add chopped peppers and mushrooms; cook 2-3 minutes on skillet
4) Pour in marinara sauce, cover and let simmer for 40 minutes until chicken is tender

I served the dish with spaghetti but I think it would be just as good over rice.