Happy 4th of July Table decorated by Ricki 2022

 

Ricki's house in San Francisco's Richmond district

            Here's the festive balloon decoration that greeted us at Ricki's front door on The 4th of July

                                     And here's another of her fabulous holiday table settings

More fun details from the table with an admirer standing by

 All the guests brought steak to grill and I made this macaroni salad with dill, capers, celery and lemon to go alongside Ricki's coleslaw and grilled veggies. Dessert was gelato with strawberries & blueberries!

The typical July fog came in to obscure the fireworks, so we happily celebrated indoors with more wine 

My Swedish Piggy Bank and a few Surprises

 

      Here's the Swedish handmālat (hand painted)  Piggy Bank my mother gave me many years ago. Unfortunately I can't remember the specific occasion or year of her gift but I'd love to find out. Often she would give a duplicate present to my sister, but in this case she didn't, so I'll never know.

I mentioned my mother's Swedish ancestry a few Christmases ago when I wrote about decorating her four-sided Swedish TREE with mini ornaments she had accumulated.

She loved her set of 6 hand painted Norwegian bowls

She collected all sorts of Scandinavian objects, baked Scandinavian treats and was thoroughly Swedish in appearance, temperament and traditions. So imagine our surprise when my sister started digging around on the internet and discovered that her mother was actually from an island in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Germany called Rügen, and that it's part of Germany, NOT Sweden! The area had been a dominion under the Swedish crown until 1815 but was eventually annexed to Germany.  Her father Karl was from Stockholm, so no surprises there. His family name was Silvfer which he changed to Silver when he came to the US.

Here are some facts my sister unearthed about our mother's mother: She was born on June 3rd 1875 and christened  Gustava Fredrika Wilhelmina Kabeller. Her birthplace was Putbus, Rügen, Germany and a passenger list card certifies  that she arrived in Baltimore, MD in 1893, which would make her 18 years old! 

Pictured above are the rose gold earrings she was wearing when she came to America. She immediately took them off since pierced ears would mark her as an immigrant from the old country.  Fortunately she kept them and passed them on to my mother. Quickly she enrolled in night school to learn English in order to shed her Scandinavian roots and learned to speak fluently without a trace of an accent.

She married Karl Nicolaus Silver and inherited his two children from a previous marriage.  We don't know when our grandmother came to Milwaukee, but we do know that my mother Isabelle was born there in 1906. Like my mother, her brother Ted and youngest brother Bill lived in Milwaukee all their lives. I remember Ted living with my grandmother until she died in 1957; only then did he feel free to marry. I was only 12 when she died but I remember her quite well. 

Though we were disappointed that she was German rather than Swedish, I see that her birthplace is  beautiful and a popular tourist destination. The French travel blog Memoirepleine describes it below:

"Rügen Island is a small paradise of white sandy beaches and turquoise water near the Baltic Sea, in northeast Germany. Mixing old-fashioned seaside resorts atmosphere and Scandinavian influences, Rügen is the perfect getaway for a weekend or more." HERE is the link for a full travelog. 

Rügen's spectacular coastline 

Villas south of the pier on Rügen as photographed by Élodie in her blog Memoirepleine

Sassnitz Harbor on Rügen.   It would be fun to visit her birthplace

In lieu of a photograph of my grandmother, I offer a nostalgic rendition of my mother Isabelle, age 10, with her brother Ted and little brother Bill near their home in Milwaukee.

LOMI vs. MY GREEN BIN

Here's the new Lomi Kitchen Composter

Finally another blog on composting, but instead of my green bin I'm featuring a new, high-tech kitchen composter. An impressive Canadian company called Pela, known for their bio-degradable phone cases, has recently introduced a countertop machine that actually "minimizes food waste at the press of a button." Pela's goal is to create a waste-free future, so for a start they've created this futuristic, high-tech version of a green bin with many fewer steps.  You simply fill it with food scraps, press the button and in a few hours you've turned your leftovers into nutrient-rich dirt. If you don't have your own compost pile and garden, or you live in a place that doesn't have a city-wide recycling program, this sounds like a great solution (all you need is $499.) 

Here's my green bin 10 years ago . It still stands in the same place on my kitchen counter

Though Lomi's  kitchen composter is awesome, I'm not planning on retiring my green bin any time soon.  I praised it ten years ago when I started this blog  and I'm still as enamored as ever. In the first "Me and My Green Bin" post on May 7th 2012, I described "MONDAY MORNING"---  the time when Berkeley recycle trucks pick up green waste in our neighborhood. 

               Exactly10 years later I still collect veggie and meat scraps in my green bin...

...then dump them into the large curbside receptacle provided by the city, which gets  COLLECTED early Monday morning. The previous link describes what happens to the contents of the bins after they are collected.

There are also other solutions: Every week or so my sister takes her food scraps from the freezer in her apartment in Manhattan to her home in CT where she composts it for her garden. Strangely enough, New York City does not have city wide curbside pickups. Instead they have bins near some community gardens and green markets where locals can take their compostable items. I took the photo below in 2015 when I visited the 92nd street greenmarket near my sister's apartment. 

92nd Street Greenmarket vegetation collection

More recently, the city has instituted voluntary green waste collection in selected neighborhoods and the NYC Dept. of Sanitation has issued brown bins like the one below. Despite these minor improvements, my sister Lucia continues to schlep her kitchen scraps to the country for her garden compost pile.

New York CIty's handsome brown bins

With Lomi, the transformation from food waste to compost happens in your kitchen; and it happens lickety split.  Pela has a great Website  with all the details and their weekly newsletter contains fascinating information about their zero waste philosophy.  Lomi News is so useful that I've started saving the emails in a file on my desktop for future reference. Why delete info on topics like the garbage problem or 15 steps to a zero-waste kitchen or can you cook with compost?

I admit I'm impressed with Lomi, but not enough to abandon my green bin and all the low-tech steps that involves. Never fear, "Me and My Green Bin" will continue!

Early Days at Sur La Table and a Souvenir from Ladakh

The rock that Deb brought me after her trip in 2000

My friend Deborah worked with me at the new Berkeley Sur La Table when it opened in 1996. Sur La Table was founded by Shirley Collins in 1972 and had a single retail location in Seattle's Pike Place Market until Seattle power COUPLE Renee and Carl Behnke bought it in 1995. We heard rumors that Ms. Collins had overextended the store's budget by buying too many pieces of French Copper and was forced to sell. In any case, the new owners wanted to expand and decided to open a second store in the developing 4th Street area of Berkeley. All the French copper cookware found its way to the Berkeley store, adding to its allure. I was hired to curate the extensive cookbook collection and Deb came along shortly after we opened. It was an exciting time to be working on booming 4th Street and in the energized Sur La Table spinoff. The company was later sold to an international corporation based in Bahrain and is no longer the fun store we opened. 

Four years years after the Berkeley store opened, Deb decided to travel to Ladakh, the mountainous region in Indian-administered Kashmir which borders on China. It's known as "little Tibet" and is home to thousands of Tibetan Buddhist refugees. I thought the trip was a crazy idea, but I did enjoy following her altitude training and itinerary, which had her arriving and departing from New Delhi.

Tibetan characters on a small rock that I keep on my dresser

 After she left  there were of course no emails, no instagram posts or cellphone photo exchanges, and we didn't hear about the trip until she got home. I remember Deb looking fit, thin and tan when she returned to work, and she had many stories to relate in her inimitable fashion. One included the story behind the souvenir she so kindly brought back for me:

    She had picked up several rocks in New Delhi en route to her trek in Ladakh and then when she arrived she told me,  "she paid a Tibetan monk personally to engrave the mantra 'keep moving' on one side and the date, 8/5/00, on the other."  Since the  Buddhist monk spoke no english, we were never sure of the exact translation. 

I have kept this prized possession on my dresser as she advised and have glanced at it now and then.  The other day I picked it up and was shocked to see that 22 years had passed. Then I wondered what that scrawled blue message actually said; I had always thought it was in Hindi. Luckily Sherab, a close friend of my sister's in CT, got his PhD in Sanskrit at Berkeley, lived on the subcontinent for many years and is fluent in a number of its languages. I sent him a picture of the rock and waited for his reply.

Sherab came up with all the information we could possibly want!  First, he confirmed the language as Tibetan.  He said that Tibetans are famous for writing on rocks. All over Tibet one sees prayer stones and other messages scrawled on rocks, so these small souvenirs made sense.

Now for the translation: Sherab pointed out that Tibetans were not likely to say "keep moving" and without even consulting his dictionary he pieced together a poetic rendition true to the Tibetan spirit and a fitting memento of my friend's trip to Ladakh.

                                        From the path, a beautiful way

A Seder Table fit for any Spring Celebration

 

My sister in law Ricki invited 8 friends to a Seder on Friday evening. Here's a detail with Haggadah from her always spectacular Passover table.

                                                                        

                                                             Or could it be an Easter table?

                      As usual she seamlessly blended the two Spring holidays in one riotous setting

  Before we left for San Francisco on April 15th, she texted me a preview of the table that awaited us, so I knew beforehand that this was another masterpiece

The last time we all met for this annual event was in 2019, before the pandemic forced us to cancel the next two. I recorded the details of that lovely party HERE.  You can observe the very different table  below set with French china and decorated with centerpieces of pastel roses and pink lilies

One of the blooming centerpieces on the 2019 Seder. table

  This year she mixed Italian plates from Deruta with Provencal Pierre Deux napkins, charming paper placemats with lemons and dyed egg 'place cards' with names written on each one. 

  The centerpieces consisted of vases of hyacinths, daffodils and hydrangeas among other spring flowers

Here's Ricki's seat marked by a dyed aqua egg in front of the traditional Seder Plate. The bowl on the right is filled with her dynamite charoset along with symbolic maror (horseradish),  a bitter herb (parsley,)  and a lamb shank .

                                                                 THE MENU

Our Seder meal was traditional but simplified to suit the guests' preferences. Our preference is to indulge in Ricki's awesome Matzo Ball Soup and her tasty apple and cinnamon Charoset spooned onto matzoh, and not have to save room for a main course that always follows. She makes her broth ahead of time with one chicken for every 2 people. This ratio results in a rich, tasty broth with plenty of chicken to add to the soup along with her masterful matzo balls. She learned the technique for light flavorful balls in her mother's kitchen in Walnut Creek.

Matzo ball soup isn't very photogenic, but boy is it good. This year we all ate our fill and then enjoyed side dishes that the hostess had assigned.

Sande prepared perfectly simmered asparagus that she bought at the Marin Farmers Market, from Fiddler's Green  situated in Yolo County.

I brought my first noodle kugel, since that's what she requested. Some years ago a guest ordered one from Zabar's, the well known Jewish Deli in New York, but kugels are simple to put together so I made one from a recipe in Bon Appetit. It turned out really well,  better than Zabar's, so  I plan to make another one next year.

Lots of good red and white wine spurred bursts of hilarity during the often solemn reading of the Haggadah.  We broke for dinner halfway through and thoroughly enjoyed our Passover meal. Then we finished the reading and drank more wine with Ricki's homemade Almond Macaroons and my  Lemon Bars.  We finally parted at midnight, looking forward, as always, to next years celebration at Ricki's.

When Life Gives You Lemons, Make.... LEMON BARS

                          This is the year we finally got lemons on our lemon tree- lots of lemons

Small new lemon tree at top right

     Dean planted it in front of our house 5 years ago to replace a gnarled old tree that he despised.

For 3 years we had no lemons. Then last year one lone lemon appeared and was promptly stolen 

This year I can pick lemons to my hearts content and finally make the lemon bars I have been craving with my own lemons. My lemons are Eurekas, which I prefer to the sweeter Meyer lemons (a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange). I adore the puckery, citrus taste and  bright yellow hue of a Eureka. Above, two freshly picked lemons rest on a ceramic plate - a precious souvenir from a trip to Puglia

The lemon bar suggestion actually came from my brother Tom when we were talking bars right before Thanksgiving. This was long before we had any blossoms on our lemon tree. My brother lives not far from NYC in the small town of Allendale, NJ and we communicate sporadically by phone. His wife's daughter Chryssa had just baked a pan of pumpkin blondies with chocolate and pecans for him and he was raving about them. The recipe was featured in the New York Times Food Section and he insisted that I make them for Thanksgiving. He added that I should then try Lanis's lemon bars. I didn't get around to making the blondies for awhile, but when I did I was impressed. They are unbelievably scrumptious!

Pumpkin blondies with chocolate and pecans are a fall favorite

Lanis, my brother's wife, was a prolific gardener, a talented painter and an outstanding baker. She excelled at whatever she did. Tragically, she was felled by a fatal stroke while speaking at her Bergen County garden club a year and a half ago. She was a healthy, active 76 year old, so her sudden death was a shock to everyone. 

In the aftermath of her death, Lanis's daughters Chryssa and Mary put together an ingenious booklet of their mother's recipes. They included facsimiles of the spattered, yellowing recipe cards with Lanis's  notes and had it bound into a delightful package which they distributed to family and friends. I was lucky enough to receive a copy. Here is the touching preface to the book:

"Mom had many talents, one of which was her incredible knack for baking mouthwatering desserts, cakes, cookies and breakfast treats. Many of our memories center around these baked goods and will forever bring a  smile to our faces. We hope that you enjoy this compilation of favorite recipes which have been well loved and written all over by Mom... Love Chryssa and Mary"

A page with an an old recipe card handwritten by Lanis

The recipe in Lanis's  book seemed like a good place to try my hand at lemon bars. Unexpectedly, I had trouble right from the start. The crust ingredients didn't come together in the food processor so the mixture was too floury and not crumbly enough. It still wouldn't amalgamate  properly when I pressed it into the pan, plus the 9" pan was too big for the small amount of shortbread crumbs, creating a crust that was too fragile.  I proceeded nonetheless and baked it at 325 as noted. After 20 minutes the layer wasn't browned so I turned up the oven and baked it 10 minutes more. Meanwhile I made the excellent lemon topping, but when I poured it over the hot pastry, the result was a filling that wasn't substantial enough for my taste. An 8" pan would have done the trick. Unfortunately, on the whole, I was disappointed with the recipe.

So began my deep dive into the land of lemon bars. Searching for the perfect bar, I found as many variations as bakers who make them. The lemon topping variables consist of the amount of lemon juice to sugar, the number of eggs, the size of the pan and the (small) amount of flour or even cornstarch added. I discovered that the more recent the recipe, the more tart the filling.

The press-in crust, which makes up an important half of the bar, seems to always consist of flour, butter and sugar but differs in the method of mixing the ingredients. Lanis et al. cut cold butter into flour with a food processor, Ina Garten used a mixer, and David Lebovitz melted butter and mixed it in by hand. The pan could be metal or ceramic and varied in dimensions from 9 x 9  to  8 x 8 to 9 x 13. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that the baking temperature varies from 300 to 350 degrees.

                    Lemon bars with an under baked shortbread crust from Sally's Baking Addiction blog

                                                                s                                                                     

                                    Ina Garten's typically delicious Lemon Bars on the Food Network

                         An example of squares with a pale, thin crust, from The Preppy Kitchen Blog

           Finally I struck gold with a recipe by David Lebovitz, using a whole lemon ground in a food processor

David's bars sport a rich dark buttery crust, made by blending flour with melted butter, which is easily pressed into an 8 " pan, and baked at 350. His are the best lemon bars yet, avoiding both flabby, pale crusts and the thin, anemic filling that I dislike in other recipes. The whole ground lemon gives the filling a powerful zing. Here is his ingredient list, meant to be baked in an 8" pan. For full directions check out his blog post here: David's Whole Lemon Bars

Crust

• 1 cup (140g) flour
• 1/4 cup (50g) sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 8 tablespoons (115g) melted unsalted butter
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Lemon Topping

• 1 lemon, organic or unsprayed
• 1 cup (200g) sugar
• 3 tablespoons (45ml) freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 3 large eggs, room temperature
• 4 teaspoons corn starch
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 3 tablespoons (45g) melted unsalted butter
• Optional: powdered sugar, for serving

               

My rendition of whole lemon bars ready to be taken out of the oven

But whether they're thick or thin, tart or sweet, I echo what Pat Prager, the prize winning baker, said in J. Ryan Stradal's delightful novel Kitchens of the Great Midwest: "Who Doesn't like bars?"

Kenan Cookies or (Super Scrumptious Oatmeal Gems)

White out conditions in Connecticut during winter storm Kenan

The weekend of January 29th I was fixated on the blizzard that was battering the East Coast, concerned that my sister was safe in her country house in rural Colebrook CT, where she spends weekends. Through texts she reported that she had been out shoveling twice already and making only slight headway; she told me that the roads aren't plowed until the storm has cleared. To keep warm and busy she decided to make oatmeal cookies, but couldn't find the excellent recipe I had sent her months ago. This required more messages back and forth.

Clear skies and plowed streets in Colebrook, Connecticut      

By Monday, when the skies were blue and the roads were plowed, she volunteered to write a guest post about her experience during the winter storm named Kenan.  Here's another of Lucia's guest posts from the East Coast:

                                                             〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰

"When the wind is whipping around and the temperature is frigid, there is nothing nicer than a warm kitchen. Turning on the oven makes my kitchen toasty, but in order to justify it, baking is requisite! That was the story of last Saturday with Winter Storm Kenan in full force on the east coast.

I baked what Taya and I have renamed Super Scrumptious Oatmeal Gems, from a note scribbled on the original and highly annotated, handwritten recipe card. We both love authentic recipes handed down with love."

Here's the original handwritten card. The recipe is printed at end of post

"In my Kenan version, the cookies became a kind of compost confection: I added chopped dates that were languishing in the back of the pantry; they were a little dry, so I soaked them in the last of the Christmas brandy, chopped and added them. The recipe calls for coconut, but I'm not a fan, so chopped nuts, dates, and the end of a box of raisins substituted.

The warm oven belongs to my vintage Chambers stove, Model C, circa 1948  (pictured below). Designed and built for a much more cost-conscious time, its heavy frame holds Rockwool insulation and retains heat after it is turned off. One of its claims to fame was that it continued to cook food even after the gas was extinguished. The extra-heavy iron oven floor ensures even distribution of radiant heat. Baked goods turn out superb!"

Chambers Stove  c. 1948 in my Connecticut kitchen

          Here's the recipe for super scrumptious Oatmeal Gems

• 1 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 3/4 cup (125 grams) light brown sugar, packed
• 1 cup sugar (scant)
• 2 large eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
• 3/4 cup raisins 
• 1/2 cup coconut (optional)
• 1 cup walnuts, chopped ( or more to taste)

Set oven to 350 degrees

In a large bowl, cream together the butter, brown and white sugars, eggs and vanilla until smooth. In a separate bowl, whisk the flour, bakings soda, baking powder and salt. Stir the dry ingredients into the butter/sugar mixture. Stir in the oats, walnuts and coconut, if using.

Drop by large teaspoons onto a nonstick baking sheet and bake 10 to 15 minutes. Do not brown too much. Place on racks and store when cool.

Here's a tin of freshly baked oatmeal gems