Sesame Crunch Bars

When I first started getting interested in cooking, I was mostly interested in health foods, not “retro” recipes, and one of my favorite books of that time is called Uprisings: The Whole Grain Bakers’ Book. I’ve got the “revised edition” of 1990, which was published by the Cooperative Whole Grain Educational Association. This fun book features recipes from eighteen cooperative bakeries across the nation—many, alas, which are now closed.




Some apparently are still in operation, such as Blue Heron Bakery in Olympia, Washington, and Open Harvest Bakery in Lincoln, Nebraska. Hooray for them! And one of my favorites, though not represented in the book, is Small Planet Bakery in Tucson, Arizona (their “vegie bread” is the best!) Most of these kinds of bakeries were started in the 1970s.

Although the book is out of print, a former member of the Uprisings collective in Berkeley has been digitizing portions of it and posting them online, at uprisingsbakersbook.org. For more information, click here.




I encourage you to get a print version of the book, because it’s very fun—all the recipes were written out by hand by members of the collectives and cooperatives supplying the recipes, with lots of cute drawings, too. There is also a lot of good introductory stuff about baking in general, and baking with a variety of whole grains, in particular. Plus, there’s a helpful index to recipes by major ingredients, and recipes separated by dietary characteristics (such as “no eggs or dairy,” “no wheat,” and “low- or no-fat”). This book is a treasure.

The recipes make delicious food you can feel good about eating, and if you have warm memories of eating or working at health food coops, you’ll particularly adore recipes such as Carob Chip Cookies (with tahini and tamari, yes, tamari); Carrot Celery Bread, “Peanut Minus” cookies (“eggless, dairyless, wheatless, but NOT peanut-less!”), 7-Grain Currant Muffins, Ozark Barley Bread, Banana Rice Cupcakes (wheat-free), and the best damn whole-wheat pizza crust you ever had (it’s spiffed up with oregano, cayenne, and basil—yum, yum!).

The recipe I’m sharing with you today is from the section contributed by Uprisings Baking Collective, formerly in Berkeley, California. You can read about that collective online here.

These sesame crunch bars are sweet, but not overly so. They keep well. They’re a terrific snack or light breakfast. They’re a perfect hiking snack! You can alter the flavorings a bit with other nuts, dried fruit, and so on.

Note that in the recipe below, transcribed from the book (page 224), I’m offering some comments and ideas for substitutions (which are in brackets).




Sesame Crunch Bars

Makes about 30 2-inch squares. Use an 8 x 14 inch pan, or similar.
[I use two 9 x 13 inch pans and spread dough to about 1/2 inch high, which yields 48 bars, each about 2 1/2 x 2 inches.]

• 5/8 cup peanut butter
• 1 1/4 cups honey
• 2 tsp. vanilla
• 1 1/4 cups oats [rolled is what I use, as in Quaker]
• 1 1/4 cups cashews [I don’t care much for cashews, so I use raisins or chopped dried apricots]
• 1 cup wheat germ [I was getting low, so I substituted some crushed breakfast cereal flakes]
• 6 1/4 cups sesame seeds [rather hard to find; I finally scored these at an international/ethnic grocery; by the way, sesames can get rancid quickly, so when buying, check for freshness, and refrigerate or freeze them when you get home]
• 5/8 cup sunflower seeds [raw]

Cream together peanut butter, honey, and vanilla [it helps if you heat the honey and peanut butter; heating softens it up and makes it easier to stir]. Add the rest of the ingredients [in a big bowl!] and mix well with your hands—it works best and saves on dishes [if you heated the goo part, you can stir it with a spoon]. With wet hands or rolling pin, flatten mixture to uniform thickness on oiled pan. Dough will be stiff—be patient. Bake at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes [my oven runs hot and my bars are thinner, so I go for about half this time; watch it; if it gets too toasty and tan, it will be hard; and if you use raisins, don’t let them scorch]. Let cool [then cut into bars and store in a closed container, separated with waxed paper].

Missing the Early Spring

A few weeks ago, in a fit of desire to have something fresh and green on my plate, I planted a bunch of lettuce and radishes in our front planters, which receive plenty of full sun. Not so great for the plants in midsummer, but this time of year, it seems like a personal greenhouse.

And our daffodils are already starting to bloom!

Indoors, I also planted different types of chili peppers from some seeds from last year. I don’t have great expectations about them, but what the hey—nothing ventured, nothing gained. But sure enough, they’re starting to come up.

And my parsley seeds are germinating, too. It’s all so . . . optimistic, and springlike.

But I honestly don’t feel like spring. Since Thursday, my mood has ranged from deeply worried, to preoccupied, to grief-stricken, to numb. Mostly I’m just numb, with shock: Earl, one of our cats, died Friday night (or possibly Saturday morning). He died alone in an oxygen chamber at the vet’s. Damn.

It came on suddenly—Thursday morning I found him on the landing, midway between the front doors and the second floor, breathing hard—I could see the sides of his body struggling to bring in air. And he wouldn’t stand up and walk anywhere.

I took him to the vet’s right away, where throughout the day they treated him and tried to run tests on him. (Earl has always hated to be constrained in any way, so naturally he would start to struggle, and they were afraid to get him too worked up. They never got a blood sample from him, though they did get some X-rays.)

Ohhhhh, I don’t want to tell this story; I don’t want to relive all this painful stuff. By Friday afternoon, when we visited him at the vet’s, he was in the oxygen chamber, mouth-breathing, struggling, with a 50 percent chance of making it through the night, if this undiagnosable fluid-in-the-lungs thing could just . . . run its course, the various drugs they’d given him clear his lungs out, and he could get better . . . But he didn’t, and he was gone by the morning.

In retrospect, we realized that he had developed an occasional dry cough (we just figured we needed to dust more often), and in the past few days had seemed quieter than usual (but it had been exceptionally gray and rainy, so we all were feeling pretty quiet). Those were the signs, and we didn’t see them. It was probably heart disease.

Earl had some pretty annoying habits, but he was lively, good-natured, and extraordinarily friendly (even with kids; even with other cats). He was astonishingly intelligent and headstrong. He was nimble and lithe, muscular and quick. We used to joke that one of his grandparents must have been a squirrel, or a weasel, or some other kind of “chittery animal.” It seemed he did most everything abruptly—so I guess his death was pretty much in character.

We have two other cats, and that the four of us are here together is a comfort, I think, to all of us. But the house is so very still without him: When he slept, he slept hard, but when he was awake, he was busy. He always ran downstairs to greet us when we opened the door. He woke us up in the mornings. He visited our guests (and walked on them). He pestered us for all kinds of things and trotted ahead to show us the way, always alert and inquisitive—a very active soul, our precious gray Early.

The other two cats are more, well, catlike: They eat and nap; they walk quietly. This weekend, Sue and I spent our shocked, numbed hours hiking, driving out in the country, walking around downtown, reading, and watching movies together on the Internet. Trying to let this new reality sink in. The flowers may be blooming, but it’s definitely still winter in our house, in our hearts.

This is gonna take some getting used to.

_______________________________________


Look, I usually don’t like to share my truly personal matters on the Internet (you’ll notice I’m not posting a picture of Earl, even though he was a strikingly handsome Russian blue), but then my blogging had been sparse, anyway, due to lots of work. And now it’s seeming difficult to write posts for this new reason, that I’m just not feeling very “enthusiastic.” I’m sure you understand.

Prune Bread (Retro Recipe)

Here’s one of the two great recipes for prune bread that appear in my esteemed 1949 Good Housekeeping Cook Book. I share it with you because prunes are opulently opossumable, and this bread is delicious!

It uses the proven combination of orange and prunes. As an example of how well the two flavors go together, I see that at least one company sells prunes (“dried plums”) that come pre-infused with orange essence.

A few notes on the recipe below:

1. This time, I didn’t chop up the prunes very much. But I think the idea is to chop them much more finely, so the fruit is incorporated more evenly throughout the bread (sort of like zucchini bread, or banana bread). But I wanted the chunks to be more visible, so I only cut them coarsely with a knife. (The down side to big chunks? It makes your knife sticky when you slice it!)

2. I suggest using less baking powder/soda/salt. It really doesn’t need that much. I think you can halve all three ingredients and come out fine. But here, I’m presenting the recipe just as it appears in the book.

3. In the same book (same page, even) is another gem: Oatmeal Prune Bread! And if you Google “prune bread” you can find lots more fun chocolaty, banana-y, citrusy, appley, nutty variations!

Hooray for prunes!




Prune Bread

1 cup dried, uncooked prunes
3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
4 teasp. baking powder
1/2 teasp. baking soda
1 1/2 teasp. salt
2 tablesp. granulated sugar
1/4 cup shortening
2 tablesp. grated orange rind
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup bottled milk or 1/2 cup evaporated milk and 1/2 cup water

Heat oven to 350˚ F. Rinse prunes, drain, dry. If very dry, boil 5 min. in water to cover; drain. Put pitted prunes through food chopper, using medium blade. Sift flour with next 4 ingredients. Cut in shortening with pastry blender until like coarse corn meal. Stir in prunes and rind. Combine eggs and milk; add to dry ingredients; mix well. Pour into greased 10˝ × 3˝ loaf pan. Bake in moderate oven of 350 F. 1 hr., or until done. Makes 1 loaf.

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From The Good Housekeeping Cook Book, with a preface by Katharine Fisher (New York: Rinehart, 1949), p. 446.

Prunes

. . . And other dried fruits. Why, oh why, do people in our country disdain them? For centuries, humans have prized them for their deliciousness, versatility, practicality, economy, simplicity, elegance. Not to mention their nutrients, which scientists are still learning about!

They store incredibly well and don’t need refrigeration. They’re right there on the shelf in your pantry, ready for you to need a quick dessert, or something to put in your muffins.




You can cook them or eat them like candy, just as they are. You can put them into sweet dishes, or you can use them in savory recipes such as curries, salads, meat dishes, stuffing, stews.

Go to the California Dried Plums official website, and read about all this stuff. They’ve got recipes and lots more. Good lord, the nutrients! Antioxidants, phytochemicals, potassium, the good kinds of sugars, vitamins, and lots more. And dietary fiber.

Actually, it’s a combination of the fiber and certain phytochemicals that make prunes so “gentle and effective.” Americans have become embarrassingly puerile about prunes, laughing about constipation and the elderly. This idiocy has prompted the California plum growers to change their marketing so that now, they’re selling “dried plums.” But Americans are aging, and constipation isn’t funny when you have it. And what a tasty, natural alternative to synthetic, pharmaceutical laxatives from the drugstore!

Eating any dried fruits, of course you have to be grown-up about it. Edward Brown put it this way in his wonderful introduction to vegetarian food, Tassajara Cooking: “One thing to remember when eating dried fruit is that it’s easy to overdo it. Often people who wouldn’t consider eating ten plums sit down and eat ten prunes, or they eat two, three, or four stewed dried pears when they wouldn’t eat more than one fresh pear. Dried fruit can have a pretty strong effect.”




In other words, don’t blame the food for your overindulgence in it. (Would you drink a whole jar of habanero salsa and then blame the salsa for the aftermath?) Also remember that fiber is the friend of anyone trying to lose weight. Fiber makes you feel full. Slim-Fast is basically a fiber drink!

After the indulgence of the holidays, I’m wanting culinary simplicity. And the prune is a perfect Opulent Opossum subject: humble, pure, overlooked, fabulous. A breakfast with stewed prunes plus low-fat yogurt or cottage cheese is just the ticket these days. And one place to go for prune-recipe inspiration is old cookbooks that predate America’s childish equation of prunes with poo-poo. It’s time to start associating them with health and feeling great!

Nature’s Kool-Aid

If this were Vermont, we’d be saying, “It’s sugarin’ time!” We’ve been having those fluctuating temperatures—freezing nights, warm and sunny days—that make the trees start pumping sap.

Sap is like natural Kool-Aid for critters. Maples, of course, but other trees, too. Including our black walnut. The first thing we saw was a wet spot on the bark, about chest-high.




Closer inspection revealed a horizontal row of about fifteen small round holes, each about two inches from the next. Most were dripping sap.




If you taste it, it’s pretty much like water. This is sweet?




But you’re not the one drilling the holes, and neither are you the one to be attracted to it.

It was not a mystery to us what bird had drilled the holes. But it had been years since I’d actually seen a yellow-bellied sapsucker (Sphyrapicus varius).

This year, we saw him! (Look carefully!)




I’d forgotten how well sapsuckers blend in with their background, which is almost inevitably the patch of bark that they have darkened by the moisture caused by the dripping. It’s pretty neat how they blend in. And they’re fast workers!




Yellow-bellied sapsuckers do this: They tap holes into trees from which sap drips. They drink the sweet fluid, using their brushlike tongues. Which is pretty much like drinking Kool-Aid, nutritionally speaking.

But wait! They get some protein out of the deal, too! The sap is also a lure for ants. Even at this time of year, ants, on warm days, send out scouts to make sure that potential food sources aren’t going unexploited.

And because ants are everywhere, they certainly find the patch of sugary water seeping down the bark, and immediately send out workers to drink it and carry it back to the nest.




Thus, with the ants milling around the sap wells, the sapsucker has the opportunity to grab ants that are bloated with sap. Or, I’ll bet Mr. Sapsucker can simply grab ants and smear them around in the tree-juice, like sopping biscuits and gravy. (Don’t you think?) Anyway, that’s protein and sugar! Dee-liss-yuss!

While the party is swinging, others come to enjoy the punchbowl, too. Other woodpeckers, I understand, are attracted to the sugar water and (no doubt) to the baited ants as well. I’ve read that sapsuckers vigorously guard their sap wells, but ours leaves for hours at a time. Look at this!




It was pretty cute to see this little fella clinging to the side of the tree, upside-down, right-side-up, and sideways.

Are we afraid of damage to the tree? Nah. Sapsuckers have zapped our walnut before, and they’ve riddled our big yew tree, too (and gave it worse).




It’s not like in those pictures where the holes are so close you can’t see the bark anymore. I think this bird has several trees that it’s tapping. And the walnut, for instance, has thick ridges of bark that prevent the sapsucker from drilling holes one after the other, so that protects the tree from being completely girdled.




And anyway, sapsuckers are highly migratory, and this fellow is probably just passing through, on his way north to claim his breeding territory. Somewhere up in Canada, in a few months, he’ll be banging on a hollow tree or on somebody’s gutter, and working to make Kool-Aid-loving progeny.

Non-Bavarian, Non-Westphalian, Non-Tyrolean . . .

Personality test: It’s two o’clock in the morning, downtown, and you’re wanting to cross the street, but there’s a “Don’t Walk” sign warning you not to. There is absolutely no traffic in sight. What do you do?

Well, if you’re Germanic, you wait for the sign to say “Walk.” But if, let’s say, you’re French, you simply cross.

I told you that I don’t really get tired of our pretty Christmas things—the glass ornaments, the fruit baskets, the birds and such—but I do admit that the traditional Germanic stuff gets to feeling kinda old. Backward-looking. Hymns and carols, and all their chordal logic set down hundreds of years ago by Johann Sebastian Bach, sound just right all through Advent, but once we pass into the new year, I’m ready to shake it up.

And I’m not talking about raucous music here, like rock. That’s loud, but it is not really new. It doesn’t generally shake up the foundations set forth by the basic hymn and its I-IV-V-I progressions. I mean, those are the “power chords” on a guitar. And Twisted Sister readily admits to lifting the music of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” for its heavy metal hit, “We’re Not Gonna to Take It.”

So for the past month I’ve been enjoying twentieth-century French music. The last century was a tremendously experimental and creative time, and from what I’ve observed, I doubt that the twenty-first century has the total intellectual power to approach it. And French music has a deftness and delicacy that is missing from those heavy hymns.

I’ve been enjoying my Pandora these last few weeks: My “Francis Poulenc station.” Try it; go to Pandora.com and type in “Francis Poulenc,” and just let it spin interesting and amazing music to you. In addition to Poulenc, it will add similar composers. Early Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Virgil Thomson, Gabriel Fauré, and so on.

This music is not unmelodic, though it takes you down unfamiliar paths, and it’s strongly rhythmic, but the chords can blow you away. If you know anything about music, polychords are one of Poulenc’s trademarks—two different chords being played simultaneously. Listening, you might lose track of the key, whether it’s major or minor or what, if it weren’t for the melody line.

Even though this music is rather “old” by today’s standards, the compositions still sound fresh and challenging to my ear. And they sound very French, as opposed to Germanic. They suggest new perspectives and possibilities, and that, my friends, is just right for a new year.

A New Year—2012

Apologies for my absence! My guess, however, is that you, too, have been busy playing “catch-up” with all the activities that got sidelined during the holidays. I’ll bet you haven’t had any more time for reading blogs than I’ve had for writing them.

Anyway, I don’t have much to report. I guess I could tell you about our holiday travels and the icy roads in Indiana, or I could describe the weather we’ve been having (up till yesterday, unseasonably warm; now it’s frigid with snow on the ground) . . . but that stuff’s old news, or boring, or both.

Still, I ought to report to you about something—if only to post a first entry for 2012!

Okay, here’s one thing: I realized this year, as we were taking down our Christmas decorations, that even though I often feel tired of seeing all that holiday stuff, I can’t help but enjoy seeing, and handling, all those pretty things again.




In other words, I never really get tired of them.

However, my body has about had it with the food. Honestly, I didn’t overdo it this year at all, but I did get off my oat bran muffins! At this point, we’re eating really lightly, and it feels great!

The “fun” oranges are back in season—blood oranges, Cara Caras, good grapefruits, and so on—and I’m having a blast with them. Schnucks had a bunch of temple oranges on sale. These, apparently, are a tangerine-orange hybrid. They’re excellent for making juice!




And my frugivory is continuing in other ways: We’ve been eating prunes! Prunes, I tell you! I need to do a post about them—they are an Opulent Opossum food, if ever there was one. Undersung, maligned, and forgotten, yet exquisitely delicious and good for you. What’s not to like? They need a cheerleader.

So, my 2012 is off to a slow start, blogging-wise, but stay tuned. I’ve got a lot of posts rumbling around in my head, and we’re going to do a lot of interesting things this year. I hope you’ll come along for the ride!