bearing blog

Brooms are the new mops

Funny that I should mention mopping with such derision the other day.  Yesterday evening we mopped Hannah's kitchen and living room floors and it was fun.  The method is everything.  I swear we have to do this at my house next week.  Here's how:

Between us we have four walking kids, all boys.  We moved the furniture from the kitchen into the living room (the 4- and 5-year-old boys love moving furniture, the heavier the better) and then Hannah handed out brooms to everyone---she has about a dozen, in various sizes---and we swept. 

Then out came the bucket of soapy water and everyone dipped his or her broom and scrubbed with it.  It is much faster and more effective than mopping, and the bristles going back and forth make a fun scrubbing sound on the floor.  We were all slipping and tripping over and around each other, barefoot, we two women and the five-year-old, four-year-old, almost-three-year-old and finally the sixteen-month-old with his yellow broom eighteen inches long.  She and I did the baseboards while the kids went vroom all over the whole middle of the floor.  Their brooms were bulldozers and steam shovels; ours were percussion instruments, to the rhythm of the Tom Petty music on the stereo.

"Okay, everyone, go put your brooms in the bathtub!"  We trooped into the bathroom while Hannah came back from the linen closet with an armload of bath towels.  Everyone threw a towel onto the floor, stepped on it with both feet, and shuffled around to the music.  I am thankful the blinds were drawn!  Who knows what strange dancers we looked like from outside?  But when we were done the floor was smooth and clean. 

The kids were tired by then so we moved the furniture back ourselves.  The whole process took only twenty minutes.

Forgotten Sweet Potato Pie

I brought our dinner ingredients to Hannah's today, intending to cook them at her house and bring home at five o'clock a ready-to-eat dinner  (spinach ricotta pie from the Moosewood Cookbook ).  Because it's just as easy to make two, I made an extra pie crust in case we needed it for lunch. 

The pre-heating oven seemed a little too aromatic, and I opened it to discover a pan of already-roasted sweet potatoes.  "Oh, I forgot about those last night!" said Hannah.  "They weren't done at dinner time, so we went ahead and ate, and I haven't thought about them since."

I suggested she boil them for stock, but then it occurred to me that we could make a pie out of them.  "Something eggy, with nutmeg, like a custard pie, but savory."  Hannah remembered a recipe for a savory custard from one of her cookbooks , and together we developed from it this recipe:

Savory Sweet Potato Pie

4                  sweet potatoes, roasted until very soft
4                 eggs, beaten
1/2  c.       cream (or milk)
2 T                minced onion
1/2  tsp     salt
1/4 tsp        cayenne
1  tsp             nutmeg (or more to taste)
1/2 tsp     freshly ground black pepper (or more to taste)
1                      unbaked, unsweetened pie crust

Arrange pie crust in Pyrex pie plate.  Remove sweet potatoes from skins and mash well.  Stir in eggs, onion, cream, salt, and spices.   Taste to correct seasoning; the black pepper should be noticeable.  Pour into pie shell and bake at 375 F for 20 minutes or more until lightly browned.

We knew this one was a winner as soon as we took a bite.  The kids liked it too.   The savory, slightly spicy, slightly sweet flavor would be nice with some yogurt on the side and a very simply dressed salad.

"I cooked. You clean." part 2.

The second part in a series about the difference between cooking and other housework.

Eating in restaurants is my favorite entertainment. I love the whole process of checking coats and sitting down and examining a menu and listening to the waiter recite the daily specials. I love receiving the courses, one by one, especially if it's one of those restaurants that is famous for attractive presentation, so that each dish is a little jewel or architectural marvel. I love the whole ritual of dessert and coffee at the end. Mark knows this and never gets me any birthday or anniversary present that isn't a dinner out. Once, I kid you not, I looked at a menu and it was so lovely and ambitious that tears of appreciation welled up in my eyes.

I read a lot of restaurant reviews, too. We don't go out as often as I would, theoretically, like (in practice, with the two little ones, it is sometimes difficult, and we don't want to spend as much money as that would entail!) but I still can appreciate the experiences vicariously.

This morning, I looked at my menu plan ("pan fried steak, leftover roast squash, green veg, peppers and onions")---I wrote that Sunday when I was making the grocery list. The meal began in my imagination and I will think of it several times today before four o'clock, when I enter the kitchen to prepare it.

First I thought of the squash, butternut. I roasted it yesterday in Hannah's oven, cut side up, rubbed with a little unsalted butter. (I buy Pastureland brand butter. The cows are grass-fed.) Today, I decided, I will saute onions and carrots, simmer them in chicken stock, add the squash and puree it to make a velvety soup. (The texture of butternut squash soup is unbelievable; you would swear it was full of cream, or egg yolks or something.)

Then my mind turned to the steak. (Formerly a hormone-free, grain-fed and pastured steer that belonged to my in-laws' neighbor.) I already know I am going to pan-roast it with butter or olive oil, because the grill is buried in snow and I never get it done properly under the broiler. The question is how to sauce and flavor it. Lots of black pepper pressed into the meat? Quick reduction sauce? If so, a simple one with leftover beef stock and a little butter, or a more complex one with red wine boiled down to a syrup? I had some cream (Cedar Summit Farm brand, grass-fed cows again), but I hoarded it too long and it's gone bad, so I won't use that... Maybe I'll just add some balsamic vinegar to the peppers and onions, let them cook down to a marmalade and top the steak with that. In that case, definitely olive oil, not butter.

And so on, and so on. I haven't even looked in my refrigerator yet to find out what the "green veg" IS, but whatever it is I will probably just steam it.

Sometimes I aim the dish to please me, sometimes I aim it at one of my children (Oscar loves stewed tomatoes, for example), and sometimes I aim it at Mark. Once before we were married, in my apartment in Columbus, I made an invented dish of chicken marinated in balsamic vinegar and rosemary and sauteed, with a pan sauce made from the vinegar and some butter; he took one bite, looked amazed and told me "Dear, you are an excellent cook," and I've been trying to get that expresssion on his face again ever since. Occasionally, I think, I've almost got it.

Cooking pleases my family, it engages my imagination, it reminds me of romance, it allies me (in my mind anyway) with the people behind the swinging kitchen door of my favorite places to go. No wonder I love it. It's hard to imagine feeling that way about mopping the floor.