Old-fashioned cooking

As has become my habit on Saturdays, I did some cooking today. Sometimes I don’t want to buckle down to desk work on the weekend, and cooking makes me happy. I doubt, however, that my cooking made Christian happy. He is the most patient son-in-law, but I really thought this morning he would say, “Please, Juju. No more cooking. It’s too much work for me.”

The problem is that my  kitchen is not set up for baking, so I need a steady stream of equipment and supplies from the house to make brownies. Last night I told him what  I needed—a large icebox dish (no, that is not an old-fashioned term!) and an 8-inch square baking pan. This morning I added a request for the hand mixer. Then, with brownies almost ready to go in the oven, I sent out a desperate plea for baking powder. Christian and Jacob escaped to the Baylor game in Waco.

The brownies have a back story. My neighbor and good friend, Mary Dulle, is a member of the Facebook New York Times Cooking Community, as am I. The other day she posted that she had made the brownies she remembered from her childhood, and they were dry. She needed help but confessed she had substituted whole wheat flour for white and added flaxseed. No brainer! No wonder they weren’t right. Online I advised her to just go back to the original recipe. Over wine a couple of nights later, she was resistant (putting it mildly) to that idea. Okay, I could go with the flour change but not the flaxseed. I decided there was nothing for it, but I would have to make the original recipe. I may save her one brownie. Watch for the recipe in Thursday's "Gourmet on a Hot Plate" blog.

Easy and good, except that I suspect the pan is a 9-inch square, which means the batter was in a thinner layer, which means it could be dry. I will try after supper tonight. In a strange irony, Christian and Jacob (the latter somewhat reluctantly) went to a nutrition class this morning while I was making good, old-fashioned brownies with white sugar, white flour, and real butter. Christian said he didn’t feel he had to be healthy all the time—an occasional lapse is okay.

My other project was potato salad, just because I’ve had a yearning for it. I used the County Line (an Austin bbq joint) recipe, which is all over online. I seriously considered substituting green onions for white but simply, out of respect for Jacob, cut back on the amount and diced it fine.

Tomorrow night for Sunday supper Christian will grill lamb burgers, and we’ll have potato salad and maybe wilted lettuce. A posting on the Cooking Community page reminded me that I love wilted lettuce. Will do some tonight for my supper—that and potato salad will be dinner, though the potato salad will be better tomorrow.

And I’ve got a good book to top off the evening--The Chillbury Ladies Choir, set in England during WWII. Reminds me of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.