Eleanor's Sangria

It's almost Cinco de Mayo, and while that means very little here in Scotland, I still miss the days of bottomless salsa and endless sangria that always came along with Cinco back in the US. Growing up in Florida will definitely teach you how to appreciate a cold drink on a hot summer day, and let's be real, in Florida, those hot summer days are all year round.

I, however, have always been slightly indifferent to restaurant-purchased sangria. I mean, let's be real: it's usually all apples, which don't impart any flavour (or juice) onto the wine, and it's usually watered down and too sweet from melted ice or, heaven forbid, 7Up that's been added to cut it. Every summer since Judson and I met, though, I've been making black and white sangria for his birthday in July. It's a melange of two recipes I found, and it's basically white wine, white peaches, black cherries, a wee bit of sugar, lemon juice, and triple sec. It's incredibly good on a day at the pool in Georgia, where the peaches are so soft you can spread them on toast. But it's a pain to make. The peaches have to be de-stoned, peeled, and chunked, and the cherries have to be individually pitted and halved, which means that ultra-simple recipe takes at least an hour or two of prep on the night before you want to drink it. This recipe is much simpler, more traditional, and just as beautiful.

Eleanor's recipe for sangria is so stained with red wine it's barely legible (there's a note next to 'brandy' that I can't read, but it ends with 'very quiet,' and I can't fathom what THAT could possibly be about), and she recommends making it with her own '3 ½ tablespoon wooden spoon,' which might take the cake as the single most useless piece of cooking advice to which I have ever borne witness. Furthermore, I'm thinking the recipe might have been written down after imbibing a few glasses of the sangria, because it's more or less useless in terms of quantities, timing, and order. I did my best to follow the directions, and while I know I got all of the ingredients right, the quantities were anyone's guess. Judson thought my batch was a bit too sweet, I thought it could have been a bit stronger, and the friend we shared it with, who had only had the terrible kind of sangria you drink in college, thought it was wonderful because it wasn't made with bottom-shelf rum. I've tweaked the below notes in accordance with our tastes, but final results will depend on the type of wine you use, the length of time you allow the fruit to soak, and how sweet you like your sangria.

But really: you should make this. It's Monday, you're probably enjoying one of the first weeks of good weather your locale has had in months, you need to practice before actual Cinco de Mayo rolls around, it's Star Wars Day!, you have a pile of fruit that you intended to put in last week's breakfast smoothes/banana bread and then forgot about, and come on, don't make me make up any more reasons for you.

Best part: if you're celebrating Cinco de Mayo on Tuesday, you don't even need to worry about making this the night before-- I made it on Friday as soon as I got home from work, and when we drank it about an hour later, it was already perfect.

 

 

The verdict:

5 spoons out of five. It's a perfect summery drink to pair with tacos, nachos, or just to enjoy by itself while you enjoy the fact that the sun doesn't set until well after 9pm this time of year. Enjoy!

The recipe:

Eleanor's Sangria

THE DIRECTIONS:

Pour sugar into the bottom of a large bowl.
Add fruit and press into the sugar firmly.
For each piece of fruit, you probably only used about half of the fruit, so squeeze the juice from the other half on top of the fruit.
Pour brandy on top of fruit, sprinkle with a dash of cinnamon, and let stand at room temperature for as long as you can, ideally at least an hour.
Pour about a cup of wine over fruit mixture and stir briskly to dissolve the remaining sugar.
Add the rest of the wine, stir, and serve in glasses filled with 'small ice.'

Serves 1 person if you're ready to party, 3 if you're feeling more chill.

the ingredients:

4 slices of unpeeled orange
4 slices of unpeeled lemon
4 slices of unpeeled apple
Optional: 2 slices of unpeeled grapefruit, one sliced, unpeeled clementine
¼ c sugar, or to taste
1/3 c brandy
1 bottle hearty burgundy
Cinnamon
Ice to serve
A wooden spoon to stir, if you're into following the letter of the law.

Magic Bars

You know how occasionally you come across a recipe where every single ingredient is delicious, totally on its own? This is one of those recipes. No baking soda or raw eggs here. No flour or water or boring leavening agents. Just pure decadence, from start to finish.* It's one of those recipes that would be hard to pass up when you read it... but since it came from the inside of a box of butter, I'm not really sure how Eleanor found it to begin with.

Growing up, I remember friends making these for potluck dinners and to bring to parties, and we always called them Seven Layer Bars, but we must have been terrible at counting, because these only have 6 ingredients. So good are these bars that I used up my precious stash of chocolate chips in order to make them. As an aside, you can't get chocolate chips in Scotland-- at least not the kind needed for baking. So every time I go to the States, I pick up a couple bags and stash them in the back of the pantry for emergency use only. Judson doesn't understand the concept of an emergency baking stash, so I'm appealing to you for compassion on this. I've tried cooking with a bar of chocolate hacked to pieces, and although it sometimes works, mostly it makes your baked goods look kind of muddy from the tiny shavings of chocolate it leaves behind, instead of clean and studded with pockets of melty chocolate.**

These are the perfect party snack, and practically foolproof. Eleanor's copy was dogeared and worn, but absent any of the notations that most of her go-to recipes have, so trust me when I say: neither she nor I have found any way to improve upon this perfection. It's truly embarrassing how good these are-- the type of thing that you could bring to a party and, despite dirtying only one pan and spending less than 30 minutes on the entire dish, start to finish, they'll be polished off within an hour, even as the plate of petit fours languishes next to it.

Nobody is gonna want to admit how delicious these are, but no one could ever say no to one of them. Oh, and if you live stateside and have the option of shredded or flaked coconut instead of desiccated, so much the better for the texture. These are the best friend of the person who no one trusts to make a decent baked good-- easy, delicious, and so decadent you'll have to cut them into small pieces, which just means more to go around.

Take it from me and Eleanor: make these tonight, take them to work tomorrow, and then count the hours til you get called into the boss's office for a promotion

*Admittedly, part of the reason for this is that the recipe relies on a crust made of pre-made cookies, but nevertheless, I stand by my argument.

**If you're looking for things to mail us, chocolate chips are way at the top of the list, along with maple syrup, Tabasco sauce, hot pepper vinegar, and most flavours of Jell-o, which, embarrassingly, I need for a lot of upcoming recipes from the box. (Oh, also something called canned grapes, which I can't even fathom, really.)

The verdict: 4 spoons out of five, if you make them with the amount of chocolate I recommend below. I knocked off a spoon because nothing this easy should really get 5 spoons, it's just awkward.

The recipe:

Magic Bars

the ingredients:

½ c butter
1 ½ c Rich Tea crumbs (UK) or graham cracker crumbs (US)
14 oz condensed milk
10 oz semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 1/3 c flaked or shredded coconut, or 1 c desiccated coconut
1 c chopped nuts (I used pecans and hazelnuts)

THE DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 176C/350F.
Melt butter by placing it in a 13x9 baking dish in the oven.
Sprinkle crumbs over butter evenly, pressing down to ensure good contact.
Pour condensed milk over crumbs as evenly as possible.
Top with chocolate chips, coconut, and nuts, pressing down firmly.
Bake 20-25 minutes until lightly browned and nuts are toasted.
Cool and cut into bars. Store at room temperature, or cold for a chewier treat.

Yields 18-24 bars.

Salmon Terrine

I've been going through old family photos recently, in an effort to get things sorted and organised once and for all. So I've been looking through Eleanor's old pictures, both her loose ones and the scrapbooks she kept as teenager and a young woman. Truly, these are full of gems-- photos of her where she apologises for the 'smirk' she's wearing, photos of my grandfather Wilbur doing silly poses in stupid outfits with his friends, and weird, unexplained photos like this unexplained Polaroid of a bear dancing in a cage.

And as I go through the photos, I've been thinking, in the selfish way that I always do, about what her life was like when she was my age. By the time she was my age (almost 30, ye gods), she had been married for seven years (twice as long as I have), was living in New York City (I think), and was going places like Miami, St. Augustine, and Niagara Falls with her husband and their friends. The year would have been 1949-50, and because Eleanor didn't have children until relatively late for the era, she spent a decade married to my grandpa and existing as a couple, not a family. I love that about their story. Whatever their reasons, they spent such a long time getting to know each other, getting to exist in their own world, and experiencing cool things as a couple before they had children.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing the matter with having children, but I love that Eleanor and Wilbur had time as a couple first. I like to imagine them cooking dinner for their friends, the way Judson and I do (they must have done, based on the number of recipes that the box holds from before my mom and her brother were born), going to cocktail parties (documented through pictures), and saving up to go on vacation anywhere they wanted (the same way we do today). I like to think of her as a 29-year-old woman, with a job and a husband and an amazing group of friends, because there is something that's equally comforting and jarring about thinking of someone you only know in the context of 'elderly' as a young person. 30 suddenly doesn't seem so old when I think about all that Eleanor accomplished after that milestone. It's so odd to think of her as a 20-something, because I've built up this image of Eleanor in my head as a confident, unflappably active person. She was someone who did things, not someone that let things happen to her, and it's hard to imagine that brash confidence translating into her 20s.

Maybe it didn't. I found a recipe in the box for something called Salmon Loaf, a terrible name I thoroughly debated keeping from you, and it's hands down the cleanest recipe card I've found in the box so far. It's clear this was a recipe that was never made, and as I started to ponder why she would have held onto the recipe for half of her life without ever having made it, I asked myself what would me do the same thing... and I could only think of one answer. Someone gave her that recipe, and Eleanor, out of politeness, was too scared to throw it away. So it lived for years in her recipe box, accumulating dust but no stains, because once upon a time, she, too, was a (slightly) less confident 20-something, anxious to please and not wanting to offend.

Here's the thing: if you changed the name of this meal to Salmon Terrine, no one would have a problem with it. And honestly, it's easy to see why not. This dinner was delicious, possibly because I left out something called 'Tempo,' which was the first ingredient and I'm pretty sure was just 1960's code for 'MSG.'* This is the perfect meal for this time of year, when the weather goes from summery to frigid in the course of a day and you want something cosy to eat that's not absolute stodge. It's filling, simple, and easy to make on a budget. Serve it with some roasted veggies and it makes the perfect springtime meal.

*Since I couldn't find Tempo, I made up my own seasoning, which is what I listed below, but feel free to get creative.

The verdict:

3 spoons out of five. It's delicious, easy, and affordable, but it's not exactly a glamorous meal. Make this when you're staying in with a friend who you don't need to impress for a cosy night in.

the recipe:

Salmon Terrine

the ingredients:

½ tsp onion powder
½ tsp garlic powder
1 tsp dried dill
½ tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
2 eggs, beaten
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tbsp butter
Scant ¼ c milk
2 cans of salmon if you're in the UK, or, if you're Stateside, figure out what you think a 'tall can' is, and use one of those.

THE DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 176C/350F.
Butter a small loaf pan and set aside.
Mix all ingredients together in order given.
Pack firmly into loaf pan.
Bake 30-35 minutes until firm and golden brown on top.
Slice and serve with a salad or roasted veggies.

Serves 2, heartily, or 3, petitely.