Deborama’s Kitchen — Catching up after an embarrassingly long silence

Part 1 Reverse Chronology Jan. 2023 to Nov. 2022

It has been about a year since I did a Deborama’s Kitchen post. So much has happened. Including me turning 70 on November 5 and having a big party the night before, then a fancy dinner in St. Paul on my actual birthday.

Also including me getting COVID for the first time. I tested positive and first had actual COVID symptoms on December 22, so you can imagine what kind of Christmas I had. I had no appetite, loss of smell and taste (not great when you’re a restaurant critic! Oh, didn’t you know that? Yeah I write a restaurant review column for a local paper) loss of appetite, weakness, fever, fatigue, and inability to sleep right when I most needed sleep.

On the plus side, my two adult kids, who live on opposite sides of the country (and I live in the upper midwest) were very caring and good to me, calling or texting daily while I was ill, which was about four days for the acute phase and a slow 7–8 days of recovery. My son sent me a wodge of money for my birthday / Christmas which I had received just before getting sick, and which was very welcome because I went to Kansas City for Thanksgiving and got slightly into debt. I don’t have enough income to live in debt, so I am very eager to climb back out of it, and his gift helped a lot.

While I was sick, my daughter sent me care packages of food and supplies. I upped the immunity boosters in my daily supplements and relied on delivered groceries, the stuff my daughter sent me, and eating my pantry for almost a month, from early December to early January.

My son also sent me a couple of gifts for Christmas even though I wasn’t expecting any more. One is a photo-sharing digital picture frame, so I can get instant photos of my youngest granddaughter, his and his spouse’s only kid. Another was something I had been meaning to get myself — the Breather, a breathing workout device such as respiratory therapists might prescribe, but OTC. I am just starting to use it regularly as part of my recovery and more from COVID.

But mainly I should catch y’all up on my kitchen. Here is my most recent photo of something in the kitchen; I made my Pear, Pecan and Stilton Salad today and thought I’d do a little still life of the ingredients. The canned mandarins turned out to be a mistake. Someone (my health clinic when I had my yearly Medicare checkup) gave me a poor person’s food packet, which I accepted because I was feeling very poor that day, so I had this can of oranges and I guess I had just forgot, over these years of being a food snob and enjoying fresh produce, how blah canned mandarins actually are. They didn’t really ruin my salad but I left them uneaten in the bottom of the bowl. Everything else was .

I was still sick enough to have neither energy nor appetite to make a fancy black-eyed pea based dish for New Year’s Day this year. I did try; I made a sort of hybrid between a Moroccan Lent dish and cassoulet. I mixed Moroccan spiced tofu cubes, red bell pepper, and onion, pre-sauteed, into canned black-eyed peas, tomato paste, yellow mustard, and molasses, and then baked it. I can’t even tell you if it was good or not. It was during the time when I couldn’t taste anything, even though my symptoms were otherwise gone. So here’s a picture from two years earlier, when I mixed canned blackeyes with canned baked beans and made a nice gratin topping.

I don’t even remember what I ate on Christmas. Probably just toast and tea.

The most vivid memory of good food was from my sojourn to Kansas City where we had a mini-reunion and Keefer family Thanksgiving. The thing I said about my kids applies to our whole family, to be honest. I am the matriarch of the family, and my father, at 96, is officially the patriarch but the actual duties, such as they are, have to go being shared between my two younger brothers. The older of them is the actual oldest Keefer at gatherings but the younger one, the only non-Boomer amongst us at 55, is our dad’s attorney in fact. Our dad has very advanced senile dementia and doesn’t know any of us, but he is very cheerful about it.

So it was my idea to have this get together since I had just turned 70. Amazingly all the siblings and quite a few of their kids and grandkids managed to make it. (I had five younger siblings, but one died nearly a decade ago.) Altogether we had I think 19 people at Thanksgiving dinner. My youngest brother is an ex-chef (now on his third brilliant career) and my sister who was the host and my other sister who came from Alaska with her spouse are both very good amateur cooks, as am I.

I made Polish rolls, a Keefer family heirloom recipe that came to us from the Polish mother-in-law of my late paternal aunt Betty, my favorite aunt. I made one with poppy seed filling and one with pecan filling. I was very pleased that my newest sister-in-law, who is Jewish and was born in St. Petersburg (or Leningrad as it was then, in case you thought I meant Florida) said that the poppy seed rolls were a perfect evocation of similar pastries in her family’s traditions from Eastern Europe.

Here’s the recipe:

• Preheat oven to 350 F and grease one or two baking sheets; you’ll also need three mixing bowls of different sizes, a small saucepan, a candy thermometer, a rolling pin and space to work, a few butter knives and a pastry brush.
• If you’re using canned filling(s) such as prune, nut, or poppy seed, open the cans. You can make your own fillings too. The pecan filling is crushed pecans, brown sugar, a few drops of vanilla and one egg white, mixed into a spreadable paste.
• Mix 3 tablespoons of sugar into 3 cups of flour (bread or all-purpose) in a medium-sized bowl and set aside; separate 4 eggs into a small bowl of whites and a small bowl of yolks. Whip both lightly, just to break up the yolks, and the whites till just frothy but still liquid.
• In the largest bowl, cream 1/2 pound of butter (two “sticks”) into 2 tablespoons of sour cream.
• Put 1/2 cup of milk into a small saucepan and warm it to exactly 100 degrees F. Add the beaten egg yolks and a packet of instant dry yeast.
• Add the milk-yeast mixture and the flour-sugar mixture alternately in three parts to the butter mixture in the large bowl, ending up with a slightly sticky dough. Knead in the bowl for five minutes, no proofing required.
• Divide the dough into two balls. One at a time, roll out each on a floured surface with a floured rolling pin until it is about 8 by 12 inches and about a half inch thick. Spread filling almost to the edges and then roll it up jelly-roll style.
• The hardest part is getting the roll onto the baking sheet without deforming it. If you don’t have a peel or other tool, you can hold the sheet at the edge of your rolling surface and keep rolling it off the edge and on to the sheet. Egg wash the two rolls and then bake them for approximately 50 minutes.
• Let cool on a rack. To serve, slice off 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick slices. One or two slices will fill up most people as they are very rich.