Thanksgiving Solution: Vegan Guests

"Domestic Mortal," you cry, "Vegetarians and vegans are coming to my Thanksgiving dinner and I don't know what to do!" Never fear, kind reader, for I have a solution.

This is a stuffed pumpkin, and it solves the problem of what to serve for a big dinner like Thanksgiving when you have herbivores on your guest list. It's real food, not some sort of processed stuff molded into a meat shape, and it gives you something to carve and present, just as you would with a turkey. It's also just easy and yummy, so you could serve it for any kind of dinner, and the ingredients are extremely flexible, so you could make a meat version if you wanted.

1. Cut around the stem of a pie or sugar pumpkin (don't try to use a Jack-o-lantern pumpkin), and remove the top. Scoop out the seeds, put them in a bowl of water, and separate them from the pulp with your fingers.

Put the seeds on a foil-lined baking sheet, mix with olive oil and salt (or your seasoning of choice) and bake while you're mixing the filling. I set the oven at 375 degrees and baked until golden brown. This took about 20 minutes for me, but times may vary, so keep an eye out.

The filling is a mixture of a bunch of things. I had a pouch of cooked grains from Trader Joe's that wanted to use up, but you could use any kind of cooked rice or grain, or even veggie-friendly stuffing. I looked in the fridge and found some cooked cauliflower and carrots, so I chopped those up and threw them in. I have a lot of dried fruits and nuts on hand all the time, so I added some dried cranberries, chopped dates, and chopped pecans. Half a chopped apple added body and sweetness. Spoon the filling into the pumpkin, and pat it down but don't squash it.

Other ingredient ideas:
cooked wild rice
caramelized onions
chopped pear
fresh herbs
cooked and chopped greens
cubed bread
nuts
whatever looks good!

Put the "cap" back on and bake at 400 degrees for about an hour, or at a lower temperature for longer if you're baking something else at the same time (like the turkey). It's fully cooked when you can slip a knife into the pumpkin. Take it out and tent it with foil to keep it warm until you're ready to serve, and then use a large sharp knife to slice into wedges from top to bottom.

Those seeds we toasted would be a great crunchy topping for the stuffed pumpkin slice, or you could put them out in a bowl before dinner so the herbivores can have a suitable snack while others are grazing on cheese or whatever.

Yum! Done!

Stains!

This morning was not good. I overslept, so I got to work late and hung up my coat next to everyone else's. Now, you have to understand that I really LOVE this coat and I spent way too much money on it because I fell in love with it, so I treat it like it's a darling pet. I should have put it in a desk drawer to protect it, but I didn't want it to get wrinkled. When I walked past the coat rack just minutes later, my coat had big spots of something black (ink?) all over the front of it. I frantically dabbed it with water, which did nothing, and then tried to used someone's stain stick on it, which also did nothing. Terror! I immediately ran off to the dry cleaner and left my coat there, meaning I had to walk back in near-freezing weather.

I was scared all day that the stain wouldn't come out, but when I went to pick up my coat in the afternoon they had been able to get out about 95% of the stain and they charged $6, which is a deal compared to the cost of the coat. Still, when I got home I got to thinking that I should brush up on ways to remove stains without having to pay a dry cleaner.

By far, the best resource I've found on the subject is a printer-friendly booklet prepared by the Iowa State University Extension, and it is also presented in a different format by the Ohio State University Information Extension. This is really an exhaustive exploration of the fine art of stain removal, and it gives great instructions, but I think I actually learned the most valuable tips from its section on what NOT to do. For instance:

* As much as I want to believe that white vinegar is the cure for every household problem under the sun, vinegar can damage certain delicate fabrics. Test it in an inconspicuous area before you try to use it as a stain remover.

* Don't use dish detergent to try to remove stains in your clothes! It's too harsh.

* Bar soap can actually make a stain permanent instead of helping to remove it.

I'll leave you with one additional tip, this time for carpeting. I figured this out several years ago because I had a pet who was obsessed with finding people's drinks and flipping them over. When you have a lot of liquid like that, grab three or four paper towel sheets in a stack and just press down lightly on the wet spot. Don't rub! Just press. Use the dry areas of the towels until the whole wad is saturated, and then change that out for a fresh handful of sheets. Keep doing this until you can't get out any more moisture. If you got to it quickly and the liquid wasn't too dark, you may have gotten the whole stain out already. I was often able to do this with tea. If you spilled a dark liquid like red wine or if you spilled something sticky, you should then follow the instructions at the links above for cleaning that specific type of stain.

Thursday Theatre - Kevin Pollak's Chat Show

I've been really into long-form interviews for the past few months, and now I can't go back to the regular old TV ones, which seem really stale. Talk shows and even shows built around discussing issues with guests are almost always so wooden and short these days that they're useless for actually finding out anything about a person's background.

Kevin Pollak's Chat Show is kind of a stripped-down Charlie Rose with snark, a little bad language, and charmingly low production values. It reminds me of early MTV mixed with some Johnny Carson and a dash of Bob Hope. Stand-up comedian and actor Kevin Pollak (The Usual Suspects, A Few Good Men) uses his show-biz contacts to bring in all kinds of people for really long, funny, touching, and wonderful talks. You can start up an episode and wander in and out of the conversation as you go about your domestic business, or you can sit down and watch it straight through while doing a little sewing or ironing, maybe. It comes in both video and podcast format, and you can get episodes on the website for free or on iTunes and Amazon for a few bucks.

Pretty much all of the interviews are really interesting and good, but I particularly recommend the episodes with the hilarious Hank Azaria (of The Simpsons fame), the lovely and entrepreneurial Felicia Day (The Guild), and the surprising Rob Riggle (The Daily Show).

Office Potluck - Pumpkin Tea Sandwiches

When I was a kid, I thought it would be so great to finish school and become an adult, because adults don't have homework. Once I became an adult and got a job, I realized that this wasn't true at all. Adults do have homework for their jobs, and one of the big assignments is making things for office potlucks. In school and at work, everyone has a good idea of who will throw together some junk the morning it's due (potato battery, mini-mart donuts), who will labor for many hours in order to outdo everybody else (life-size covered wagon, handmade chocolates), and who will do something crazy (interpretive dance about Abe Lincoln, barbecue sauce on yellow cake). Let's try to navigate these dangerous waters and make something delicious and attractive.

Pro Tip: Get on the sign-up sheet early so you can pick what you want to make instead of racking your brain trying to think of something that wasn't already taken.

My office is having an event tomorrow morning, and we're supposed to bring things with a Halloween or Autumn theme.

My mind went to pumpkins, because I love anything with pumpkin in it, so I signed up to bring pumpkin bread. I later decided to jazz it up a bit and turn it into little tea sandwiches with cranberry filling, because cranberries also signify Autumn to me. I didn't want to spend forever on it because the event is in the middle of the week, so the whole thing is pretty easy and you could use different flavors for your bread and/or filling to suit your taste.


Pumpkin Tea Sandwiches

1. Make or buy a loaf of pumpkin bread. This may be surprising, but the one time I use a mix is for pumpkin bread. Making it from scratch is nice, so go ahead and do so if you'd like to and you have the time, but I find the texture isn't as good for slicing into little sandwiches. It's up to you.

2. If you baked the bread yourself, start early and make sure that you let it cool all the way before you slice it, because otherwise you will have a disaster. Breads need that cooling time to develop their interior texture, or "crumb."

3. While your bread is cooling, make your filling. All you have to do is combine cranberry jelly/jam/sauce and cream cheese or strained yogurt. I bought good quality cranberry sauce that had little fruit pieces and mixed it with strained Greek yogurt. I used about a cup of each, but taste it and see what seems like a good mixture to you. It will be easier to mix them if you let the ingredients come to room temperature first.

4. Slice up your bread. I cut off the sides and then the top, leaving a brick shape. Cut it in half length-wise, set each half on its side, and slice it to the size you want your sandwiches to be. (Hint: Make them thinner than you'd think.) I cut each half into thirds and each third into four slices, but later made the sandwiches more petite by cutting them in half.

5. Spread filling on half the slices and then top with the remaining slices. If you end up with an uneven number of slices, you can sometimes carve a few out of the top you cut off. I used kind of a lot of filling because it's just non-fat yogurt and jam, but it's up to you.

6. Pack up the sandwiches for transport. I like to save the more durable take-out containers from restaurants for things like this. I just put my sandwiches in those and I'll carry them to work in a bag tomorrow morning.

7. The best part is that you get to eat scrapwiches when you're done!

The Domestic Arts - 5 Key Subjects

This blog is just getting on its feet, and I've been thinking a lot about how to best explain the Domestic Arts as I see the subject. I've narrowed it down to five categories, with the home serving as the hub. I thought it would be fitting to present the concept in e-sampler format.

I am going to approach this project by focusing on five major areas, which will probably tend to overlap somewhat:

Home - Your physical shelter, maintenance, cleaning, and the concept of "home"

Food - Nutrition, recipes, cooking, food science, healthy eating

People - Hospitality, sharing things from your home with others, manners

Money - Personal finance, budgeting, frugality

Fabric - Clothes, decorating, sewing, knitting, laundry

Recipe: Emily Dickinson's Coconut Cake

Earlier today I was nosing around NPR's website, as is my wont, and I clicked on what promised to be a very interesting story: "A Coconut Cake from Emily Dickinson: Reclusive Poet, Passionate Baker". After all, I like coconut cake and old-timey things, and I recall thinking Emily Dickinson was an interesting lady when we studied her poetry in high school. The article turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, though, since the author altered the cake recipe until it was entirely unrecognizable in order to rid it of gluten, dairy, "fast sugar," and apparently authenticity as well.

Fortunately, one commenter provided a link to the real thing, complete with an image of the recipe in Emily's handwriting. The article was lovely, but lacked pictures or instructions. Emily's recipe, like many old recipes, was essentially just a list of ingredients. Even cookbooks wouldn't have had the full instructions back then; they just assumed you knew how to do it or you could figure it out on your own. I thought I'd give this recipe a try to see what the cake tasted like, and I've broken down the process step by step for the modern reader.

Ingredients:
1 cup coconut
2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon [baking] soda mixed with 1 teaspoon cream of tartar*

* Substitution: baking powder

1. Put out all of your ingredients so they can come to room temperature (yes, it makes a difference). While that's happening, grease and flour the pan you'd like to use. I used an 8" x 8" Pyrex baking dish and sprayed it with Wilton Bake Easy, because I hate greasing and flouring things and I enjoy that product. Set your oven for 325 F.

2. Put your butter and your sugar in a big mixing bowl and start to cream them together. People often think this involves melting the butter, but it doesn't. Just smash the sugar and butter together until they're all nice and smooth.

3. Add your eggs and beat those in (stir vigorously) until well combined.


4. In a separate mixing bowl, stir together your flour (sift it if you want a fluffier cake) and leavening agent of choice. Baking powder wasn't marketed on a mass scale until the late 19th century, so in Emily Dickinson's day, baking powder wasn't an option. Her recipe has you combine baking soda and cream of tartar, which is essentially baking powder. You can do that if you want to be authentic, or you can honor legendary horror film star and foodie Vincent Price by using his grandfather's invention, modern double-acting baking powder (scant 2 teaspoons of it). I sure did.

5. Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture and stir. The batter will be THICK. Add the milk and really stir everything to make sure it's smooth, with absolutely no lumps. Now add the coconut and stir to combine.

6. Scrape the batter into your prepared baking vessel, and try to even it out as best you can (again, it's THICK). Put it in the oven and immediately turn up the temperature to 350 F. The blast of heat will help it to rise. Bake it for about an hour, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove and let cool before slicing.

7. Optional step: You could put frosting or a topping of some kind on the cake after it's cooled (turn it upside down first if you do), but I seriously hate frosting so I usually just tap some powdered sugar on top and call it a day.

The cake is very light in flavor, not greasy at all, with a texture definitely suitable for dipping in sherry (as Emily is said to have done). I will definitely make this one again. Yum!

Thursday Theatre - Bill Cunningham New York

I enjoy both fashion and quirkiness, and so for today's Thursday Theatre I'm going to recommend a film called Bill Cunningham New York. I'm a big fan of The New York Times' style section, and although I always marvel over the wonderful pictures in its "On the Street" column, I must admit that I didn't know anything about the photographer.

I won't try to summarize the whole film or Bill Cunningham's life, but I will say that he's a delight. He's so taken with the artistic side of fashion, and he gets as much enjoyment out of photographing a random person's visually engaging t-shirt as he does from attending the couture shows in Paris. He's quite a character, and the film is full of his gorgeous work. He turned 80 years old during the filming of the documentary, and he still has more energy than I've ever had in my life.

If you have a Netflix subscription (still a great value in my opinion, despite recent craziness), you can stream the movie or get the DVD. If not, you can buy it on iTunes for $9.99. It also pops up in artsy-type theaters occasionally, so check the film's website for that.

Refashion: Turning a dress into a skirt

One way to save money on clothes while getting the thrill of completing a project is to take a good look at what you already have, but never wear. We all have those things in the backs of our closets that we feel guilty about buying and then ignoring, so let's do something about it.

In this case, I bought this jersey dress because I liked the fabric, but the bodice never really fit correctly. The V-neck always seemed too low, and I would be pulling at it all day. Also, I like to wear mostly neutrals with one punch of color, and this dress is all punch! Since I liked the fabric but hated the top, I thought I'd do an easy remodel.




Total cost: $1.24
Total time: About 2 hours. I did almost all the sewing by hand, but if you used a machine it would be faster.

First, I used small scissors to snip off the bodice at the seam line above the black waistband. Then, I found some elastic which was about the width I wanted the new waistband to be ($1.24 a yard at Jo-Ann Fabrics). I bought a yard of elastic, measured around my waist where I wanted the skirt to sit, and then cut the elastic about two inches smaller than that measurement, so that it would stretch to fit. I recommend trying this out by putting tick marks on the elastic with a pen, and then safety pinning it and seeing how it fits. Make sure to leave at least 1/2" extra for the seam allowance.

I then overlapped the raw edges of the elastic and zig-zag stitched them together using my sewing machine. You could do this by hand if you went over it several times to make sure it was secure. I like to give my skirts a nipped-in waist, so I actually sewed two pieces of elastic together and angled the seams so the top of the waist would be smaller than the bottom. If you use thin elastic this isn't necessary, and of course it depends on your build and preference.

All I had to do then was fold the black waistband fabric over the top of the elastic circle and sew it down on the inside of the skirt with the raw edge turned under. In my case, the waistband was very wide, so that made it really easy. If you were doing this to a dress without a waistband, you could just fold over the top of the skirt and sew it down on the inside so that you created a little channel for it to sit. You could also make a casing and then sew the casing to the skirt. I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible, though, so I went with the fold and sew method.

So here we are with the finished product. My dress form is really modest, so I put a black turtleneck on it to prevent scandalous exposure of felt decolletage. This is also an example of what I meant when I said I like to wear neutrals with a punch of color. It's toned down a bit and I can change out the tops I wear with it to get more use out of the skirt.

Introducing Thursday Theatre

When I clean, cook, sew, or do most any domestic task, I really like to have something happening in the background. My taste ranges from the driest documentaries to the most mainstream hits, and I've taken in quite a lot of information and culture while puttering around the house. I once learned all about the Cuban Missile Crisis while hemming a skirt, I sometimes work on my French listening comprehension while I clean, and I recently hung out with Hunter S. Thompson while making some marinated lamb over coconut rice.

This sort of thing is good for developing what my amazing high school English teacher used to call "cultural literacy" and it helps the work go more quickly. A lot of people tell me that they don't do various DIY projects because they get bored or distracted by something more interesting, so this is sort of an incentive to stick with it. You don't "have to" clean the bathroom; you "get to" listen to a new podcast!

Because various kinds of media and entertainment play such a big role in the way I practice the domestic arts, I want to share things I really like with you. I'll try to choose things that are either free or cheap, because being smart with money is part of domestic science! On Thursdays, I'm going to post little blurbs about things I think are great, and I hope you'll check them out and like them too!

Welcome to Domestic Mortal

"I wish I knew how to do things like that!"

I hear this all the time from people who marvel at a pretty dessert I've brought to an event or a handmade dress I've worn somewhere, and it always makes me feel a little bad that people aren't learning how to do things on their own anymore. Baking or sewing, to them, might as well be powers of flight or invisibility. These are just skills, though, and somewhere along the line they got lost. In wealthier societies, large-scale manufacturing of cheap goods, increasing affluence, changes in cultural attitudes, and other factors have produced several generations of people who largely have no idea how to do things themselves.

Traditionally, children would have learned a lot of these things from their parents, but many of us grew up in households where these skills were not known or taught. At one time, "Home Economics" or "Domestic Science" was an important field, and students could take those classes to learn real, practical skills. My grandmother used to talk about how much she loved Home Economics class, because she could go home and recreate for her family the supper she'd learned to cook in class that day. By the time I took "Home Ec" in school, however, the level of knowledge was assumed to be so low that my class spent several weeks just learning how to use measuring cups and spoons. I was bored out of my mind, because I was already cooking whole meals at home, knitting, sewing, etc. My class's big projects were making a batch of horrible muffins and sewing two seams to make a bag. Life skills were not exactly being instilled in us.

These days, the DIY movement is starting to change things. Whether it's the economy, a desire for self-sufficiency, dissatisfaction with commercially available goods, or something else altogether is hard to say. What is clear, however, is that there are a lot of people who lack the fundamental skills to cook, repair things, and otherwise manage their household affairs. Without fundamental skills, many people get frustrated and quit, thinking that doing these things is either beyond their abilities or flat-out impossible. This outlook is reinforced by terms like "Domestic Goddess," a label I hate because it discourages people from trying by implying that "mere mortals" cannot cook healthy dinners or make useful items. Because I am good at things like sewing, cooking, and so on, I want to help by sharing my knowledge, and so I am starting this "Domestic Mortal" project.

The Internet provides almost limitless access to information on every subject, and the domestic arts are no different. However, Domestic Science has gone largely dormant. This is good for me, since the copyright of every useful text has expired, but is difficult for someone who just wants to know how to get the most out of each dollar and how to slice an onion without taking off a finger. I want to revive this field, and in doing so provide a great online resource. I'm just getting started, so please follow along with me as I attempt to accomplish my goals!