The Dinner Files

I’ve been meaning to bake bran muffins. Not of course, because I like bran muffins but because I’ve been wanting to write about them.

That is the life of a food writer — or at least this food writer – in a nutshell.

I wanted to bake bran muffins so I could write about strip clubs. Canadian strip clubs; or, to be fair and accurate, a Canadian strip club. So after procrastinating on the bran muffins for weeks because, honestly, no one in this house really likes muffins all that much, if at all, I figured I’d bake rhubarb coffee cake that everyone in this house wanted to eat and just tell you the bran muffin story.

I suppose you could bake the batter in muffin format and have a rhubarb-moistened crumb-laden muffin (cue Betty White joke here), but for the recipe to really segue into the story, the rhubarb cake would need to somehow morph into a bran muffin, which it just isn’t going to do in my hands, so I’ll need you to forgive and indulge me.

If it weren’t for the fact that I was carried down a mountain, the most interesting thing about my last trip to Canada would have been the fact that I went to a strip club. With my cousin. And a couple of French dudes (yes, they were total dudes). And a former member of the U.S. ski team. And an amazingly tall lady from Boston.

So I went to the strip club in a small town in the middle of nowhere British Columbia. Seriously. It was half way between Vancouver and Calgary. Check out a map. Go ahead, I’ll wait. See? Middle of nowhere.

The former U.S. ski team member and the amazingly tall lady from Boston were most persuasive. Just one beer, they said. It’s too early, they cajoled. You can’t even ski tomorrow, they pointed out. Don’t you want to drown your sorrows, they asked.

So I hobbled around the corner on my bum knee, watched with awe and amazement as my cousin talked the doorman out of making us pay the cover charge (he’s a charmer, my cousin), took the beer the amazingly tall lady from Boston handed me, and looked around.

There were videos of snow-mobile jumps and tricks projected on walls and a small square stage in the corner, but no dancing and most certainly no stripping. It seemed like a regular bar, and I’m going to guess that the male-female ratio of patrons was 60-40.

After about 10 minutes someone took the mic and announced that I-couldn’t-make-out-the-name was going to take the stage. Then a glittery-bikini-clad young lady emerged from the door behind the bar and made her way through the crowd to the stage. She started her sexy dance, up and down and around the pole, taking off her bikini top at some point along the way, and the mood in the room… well, the best way to describe it is like she was the wild neighborhood girl who’d gotten drunk at the block party and started taking her clothes off and no one quite knew what to do so they pretended it wasn’t happening and tried not to stare and kept watching the snow-mobile video playing on the opposite wall. Seriously. It was all so very Canadian, in ways admirable and troubling.

Of course, for all I know she was the nice neighborhood girl and the crowd was slightly embarrassed. What I know for sure is that no one was tipping her, which seemed really out of the purpose and principle of a strip club as far as a dancer would be concerned, so my cousin took up a collection and brought it up to her.

It was all very much not what it’s like in the movies, that’s for sure.

Since I was in said small British Columbia town for several days with nothing to do but nurse my injured knee, I made some friends at the hotel and at the public pool and at the corner café. I asked about the strip club, if the vibe was always like that, if anything about the place seemed odd.

No, people said as they looked at me like I was the crazy one, it’s always like that.

In the course of my investigations I then learned this fascinating fact: the club was fined last year. They are a bar without license to serve food and it seems the strippers baked bran muffins which they held between their legs and sold onstage, so the place was fined. For serving food.

Yes, you heard me right. Not cupcakes, not even sugar-topped blueberry muffins. The strippers baked bran muffins and sold them during their show.

The strippers held a bake sale.

I can’t help but think they would have fared better if they’d baked up a heavily crumbed rhubarb coffee cake, but that’s just me.

I never would have come up with this recipe if 1) some lovely walnut folks hadn’t sent me five pounds of fresh walnuts in the mail and 2) I hadn’t just gotten back from Quebec City.

I had walnuts to use and maple on the brain.

Walnut cake

While not health food, there isn’t much refined nonsense in this cake. It is part very moist nut torta and part cake-like date sticky pudding. Top is with whatever you want – ice cream, whipped cream, or, if you serve the cake warm, hard sauce or even maple hard sauce (see below). It would be a lovely change from all that Thanksgiving pie, you know?

1 1/2 cups walnuts

1 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

12 pitted fresh dates

1 egg

3/4 cup pure maple syrup

1/2 cup walnut oil

1 tablespoon cider vinegar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325. Spray a 10-inch cake pan (spring form is nice here) with oil, line the bottom with parchment paper, and spray the paper with oil.  You can also rub the pan/paper with oil if you don’t like the spray stuff.

Spread walnuts in a single layer on a baking sheet. Roast in the oven until just starting to color, about 10 minutes but watch them carefully and take them out early rather than risk burning them. Seriously, walnuts will burn while you take a moment to blink your eyes. Let walnuts cool before going to the next step.

In a food processor, pulse the flour, walnuts, baking soda, and salt until walnuts are fairly well pulverized. Transfer to a large bowl.

Pulse dates, egg, maple syrup, walnut oil, vinegar, and vanilla in the food processor until dates are chopped. Whirl until the mixture is puréed. Pour into flour mixture and stir to just combine. Pour batter into prepared pan and bake until a knife inserted in the center comes out almost clean – a few bits clinging to it are fine.

Let cake sit at least 10 minutes before you take it out of the pan. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Maple hard sauce

Cream 1/2 cup butter and 1 1/4 cup powdered sugar until light and fluffy. Add 1/4 cup maple syrup and 2 – 3 tablespoons whiskey or brandy. The addition of the liquid will make the lovely fluffiness you’ve made fall apart and separate and look a bit nasty. Keep beating it, it will all come together again, more or less. You can leave the maple syrup out for plain hard sauce (add another 1/4 cup sugar), or the whiskey/brandy out for just some maple-tinged yumminess that would also be good on a warm cake or, really, pretty much anything.

I made a buttermilk cake last summer that I loved – I posted the recipe over at Local Foods. It seemed like the kind of thing that would work well with whole wheat pastry flour instead of the all purpose flour in the recipe. It is, it did.

Whole wheat buttermilk cake

This whips up in a snap – quick enough for a weeknight. Serve the original or the slightly heartier version below with some of those sweet and juicy strawberries that are all over the place these days. Or, if you’re like me, have a piece with a cup of black coffee and call it breakfast.

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/4 tsp. salt

1/2 cup brown sugar (light or dark – either works here)

1/4 cup butter at room temperature

1 egg

1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

1/2 cup buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 400. Butter a 8×8 cake pan.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.

Beat the brown sugar and butter together until they lighten up and get a bit fluffy. Scrape down the bowl and beat in the egg and vanilla just until well combined. Stir in buttermilk.

Add dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir just to combine. Pour batter into the prepared pan, spread the batter in the pan evenly. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center come out clean, about 30 minutes.

Please excuse my absence lately. It was quite a week last week and I’m still recovering. Between house guests and a big family to-do and the school carnival, I hardly know which way is up. On Sunday the house guests and the family to-do and the school carnival all came together in a whirling, swirling, perfectly sunny day of sno-cones, lollipops, and cake walks.

There were many Watsons on hand to help populate and energize the school carnival, and I will be forever grateful to my cousin and uncle who pitched in to help run the Lollipop Game. It’s been two days and my barking slogans are still running through my head: one ticket gets you two tries, everyone’s a winner at the lollipop game, worst case scenario is you end up with two lollipops, the lollipop game- where everyone’s a winner, there’s no skill involved – anyone can play the lollipop game. The thing about the Lollipop Game is you get to see which kids will become gamblers. Some kids pay their ticket, pick their lollipops and, if they get a dot on the bottom of one, happily pick another lollipop and then move on to another “game.” But the Lollipop Game really gets under some kids skins. They come back again and again, trying to game the board, hoping to decipher where the precious dotted lollipops are, working to figure out my strategy in arranging the board. (For the record, my strategy was complete and total randomness. I had a mix of dotted and plain lollipops and would mix them together and stick them in the board.) We started out with one lollipop out of five having a dot, but it was so fun when the kids got a dotted lollipop that my cousin started moving the ratio towards the 1 to 3 area, so kids were walking away with six or seven lollipops at a time.

My own family did very well at the Cake Walk. The very first winner was my Aunt Nancy. The second winner? Ernest. That’s the cake he chose above. The parents who bring the cakes know that the kids cannot resist a candy-laden cake and decorate accordingly. I called the parents who made this one out on their use of old Valentine’s Day candy – I was super impressed at the chutzpah required to do that.

I’m now thinking of heading up the carnival committee next fall. Please, dear readers, either talk me out of it or give me suggestions for fun and cheap games/events for a lively and profitable school carnival. What – besides the ever-popular Cake Walk – are your favorite carnival games?

Have you figured out that I love leftovers? I love having food already cooked and ready to eat. I love that many dishes taste better after a little time to themselves (stew being a classic example). I love that some dishes transform into whole new creatures as leftovers (you know how enchiladas sort of morph into a real casserole after sitting around for a day?). And I love that others offer themselves up to be turned into completely new creations, but with so much less fuss than the original dish. Leftovers? To me they are convenience food at its finest.

So what’s with the yummy looking cake, you ask? It’s a winter squash spice cake made with leftover roasted squash. I used my new secret baking weapon: whole wheat pastry flour. It’s not as heavy and dry as whole wheat flour, but it has some whole grains unlike all-purpose flour. I find I can substitute it 1-to-1 for all-purpose flour in most recipes – certainly any for homey cakes or cookies like this.

The hungry boy wanted noodles for dinner. Since I had no brilliant idea for dinner anyway, noodles it was. I tossed them up with some leftover dino kale with chiles and garlic from the other night. I put plenty of parmesan on Ernie’s and doused mine with the last of the leftover garlic yogurt sauce from the dumplings last week. Just yogurt, garlic, salt. How can it be so delicious? And yet it is. Even more so, some may say, from the extra garlicky-ness it exudes from having sat around for a week. Garlicky enough to be deliciously tempting but also garlicky enough to make a person think twice about drowning her pasta with a solid 1/2 cup of it if she had any chance of getting lucky.

Alas, my dashing husband is traveling. So I slept with cold feet and garlicky breath. Really garlicky. Garlicky enough to sort of bother me. I could hardly wait to wake up and quell the stench with coffee.