Dinner Plans

Last Wednesday, I began preparing for my first 1945 dinner menu by doing some marketing with the first of the menus in mind. Looking ahead, I noticed there are lots of steamed puddings to look forward to. Steaming is something we pretty much reserve these days for rice, veggies, and other main dish kinds of things - but dessert? It's very vintage. I wonder why it went out of style...

So I decided this morning that it was time to invest in some steaming equipment. As best I can tell, there are four basic things you need to have on hand: a big kettle-type pot, a rack that can be set on the bottom of the pot above some boiling water, a pudding mold (recycled cans from coffee, vegetables, etc. can be used as can ceramic or other baking dishes), and some wax paper or aluminum foil for covering the mold(s) tightly. I have a new chiffon cake pan that'd be perfect for a pudding mold, but I needed to find a kettle big enough - and tall enough - to hold it!

After spending about an hour in the kitchen aisles at Target, I settled on a 12-quart aluminum tamale steamer. (Luckily, tamales and other Mexican cookery are very important locally, so there were lots of pots available that looked like they would be suitable for steaming small and medium-sized puddings.) The pot has a ledge a few inches from the bottom and comes with a steaming insert that sits right inside that ledge. And luckiest of all, when I brought it home, the chiffon cake pan slid right on in. It's going to be perfect. I'm not yet sure which night I'll put this "new" dinner on the table but there'll be a Steamed Molasses Pudding on the menu for dessert!

I'm sticking with the vintage breakfasts, too - though I'm going to take it very easy with the Griddle Cakes, French Toast, etc. I'm going back through the menus a second time now, but I'm going to try and mix things up a bit by taking advantage of some of the suggested alternatives that pop up every so often. And once the weather really warms up, I'm going to shift from the winter menus to the summer menus. I'll be posting my breakfast menus by the week in the sidebar.

Speaking of breakfast, I left the house this morning with a lemon on my grocery list (see Tuesday's menu). What a wonderful surprise to get to work and find that a coworker had brought in a big carton of lemons from the tree in his yard to share with everybody! You gotta love citrus season. Another coworker asked me if I was a "grapefruit kinda person." Heck, yeah. That should slim down the grocery list!

Bran Bread Reflections

My 1945 breakfast menu for tomorrow includes Toasted Bran Bread, so I was poking around today looking for recipes - figuring it would be just a quick bread. Well, there is a recipe in my cookbook for Date Bran Bread, but it calls for the bread to be steamed for three hours! I have never steamed anything before, but I'm giving this a try. My largest pot isn't big enough for more than one of the small loaf pans, and I don't have any used coffee cans or other metal cans hanging about, so, after doing some research online, I bought one of those aluminum foil roasters, placed water in the bottom with some stones to raise the loaf pans above the water. Covered the filled loaf pans tightly with foil and slid the whole affair inside a 350-degree oven. I have no idea if this is going to work.

This is another of those instances where the author of the cookbook seems to take for granted that her readers have some basic skills most of us no longer learn from our mothers and grandmothers. Steaming bread. Making jam from dried fruit.

It will be six weeks tomorrow since I set forth on The Great Housekeeping Experiment. Six very interesting weeks. I realized the other day that I have a much healthier-looking, better stocked fridge than I've had in years. There are grapefruits and oranges inside, together with some dried apricots and prunes in sealed containers. A couple varieties of juice - and milk and eggs that are still fresh! (That used to be a rarity.) My cupboards are better stocked than they've been in a long time: Shredded Wheat, Malt-O-Meal, rolled oats, cornmeal, Wheatena, flour, wheat bran... These were the building blocks of a '40s wintertime breakfast. If a housewife kept these items on hand, she'd be able to put a variety of breakfasts on the table.

And speaking of breakfast - these vintage menus are just as carb-heavy as I anticipated, but it's easy to adapt them to be a little friendlier to the waistline. What I've been finding - much to my surprise - is that I've come to feel a real sense of pride in making a pot of non-gummy oatmeal, lump-free cornmeal mush, and farina with just the right amount of water. I've also been getting to know my stovetop better. Just where the heat needs to be set to get the water to boil quickly, how far to lower it to keep a good simmer going. It's funny to feel so accomplished when it comes to things most of my friends wouldn't get very excited about.

Good news! I just checked my oven and the batter I left inside those loaf pans actually appears to be turning into bread!!! I'd say they're just about done. Maybe five more minutes.

Something else I've learned in the last six weeks: when I pick up the things in my bedroom and living room everyday, the job is fairly easy each time. The same goes when it comes to the breakfast dishes. Tidy begets tidy, so when my bedroom is picked up, I don't want to set something down where it doesn't belong. It's kind of nice to keep these rooms picked up by putting things back where they belong in the first place. My living room also seems a whole lot more spacious, and, boy, is it nice to come home to a dark apartment and not have to worry about stumbling over something as I'm looking for the light switch.

I've also discovered that my sleeping habits stink. In the American Home article I mentioned several days ago, the author writes that she wakes every day at 6:30 - no matter what the day of the week. This has got to be a whole lot easier on the body than my own habit of burning the midnight oil and sleeping in as late as possible, getting up at a different time nearly every day. I've got a long road to go, so this will be something I'll try and fold into my routine over time.

As I finish writing this, I'm enjoying a slice of my own Bran Bread, fresh from the oven. I can't believe I pulled this off! It's nice and moist, too. I ended up baking it for about 1 1/2 hours at 350 degrees F. I'm definitely freezing one of these loaves so I don't have to go through this again for quite some time...