Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
About Walnut
View all posts by Walnut
HERMITS!
Those of you who are Balls and Walnuts stalwarts know that published recipes are for . . . jeez, almost said peasants, but that’s pretty classist of me. Published recipes are for beginners. WE ARE NOT BEGINNERS. We are intuitive, creative daredevils in the kitchen. Sometimes you end up with a disaster. And sometimes you end up with a masterpiece.
BEHOLD.
Now stroll on over to the inspiration recipe, King Arthur Flour’s Good ‘n Chewy Hermits, and look at their photo. Those things look like saltillo tiles, not hermits. Y’all are looking at what a hermit should look like.
Feel free to try their recipe, but I’m here to tell you that these sumbitches are tastier and healthier (not healthy. Healthier) than the King’s very own.
Ingredients
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup butter, softened at room temperature (one stick)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ginger (powder)
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1.5 teaspoon baking soda
3 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup molasses
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
2 cups of figs, trimmed, chopped, hydrated (see instructions)
1/2 cup golden raisins
3/4 cup chopped walnuts
1/4 cup chopped pine nuts
I suspect you could substitute regular whole wheat flour without any problems. You could also vary what dried fruits you use, although I like the fact that dried figs are less sweet than dates, for example. The nuts are also up to you — 100% walnuts would be fine, as would hazelnuts or macadamias. Peanuts would be a little weird. I had some pine nuts in the freezer so that’s what I went with, and I think they add an interesting dimension. Pistachios would also be interesting (I’d probably use the same proportion, 3:1 walnuts to pistachios).
Instructions
1. Trim the nasty stems off the dried figs and chop into chunks about the size of two or three raisins. Place in a 2-cup measuring cup, then top off the cup with the raisins. Over this, pour 1/3 cup of boiling water. Cover with saran wrap, and shake it carefully to wet all of the figs. Feel free to do this in a bowl, since it’s easier to stir the fruit. Let this cool to room temperature.
2. Preheat oven to 350F. Spray a 9 x 13 inch pan with nonstick cooking spray.
3. In the bowl of your stand mixer, beat together brown sugar and butter until smooth. Beat in the spices, salt, baking soda, vanilla extract, and almond extract until well combined. Add the flour one cup at a time. This will look very dry — don’t worry. Add the molasses and continue to beat until combined. Finally, add the fruit with the water it’s been soaking in and continue to mix at low speed until well combined.
4. Press the mix into the 9 x 13 inch pan and bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until the hermits begin to pull away from the edges. Cool on a rack. Cut into bars once everything is at room temperature.
5. According to the King, these will keep at room temperature for several days, longer if you freeze them.
Enjoy!
D.
Weight Watchers 2 points/slice Banana Bread
Featuring my new best friend, teff flour, used in Ethiopian cuisine to create injera. Teff is gluten free, so first thing you have to do is add loads of gluten to this recipe. (more…)
Best lemon ricotta pancakes ever
Best lemon ricotta pancakes EVER!
I suspect most folks’ experience of whole grain pancakes is woeful. I’ve sampled these at many breakfast joints, and they’re almost always flat, leathery, and *ugh* wholesome-tasting. Buckwheat pancakes have great flavor, but (A) they’re almost impossible to find, and (B) when you do find them, they’re usually pretty dense. The trick, as we discovered a few years ago, is to mix the buckwheat flour 1:1 with oat flour (we buy Bob’s Red Mill brand for both — mix ’em together, store in a Tupperware canister in your pantry. It won’t last long; you’ll probably use it up before it goes bad).
Lemon ricotta pancakes, on the other hand, are light and airy (usually) but are almost a little too insubstantial. When I eat them, I think, “This is like a crepe. Good vehicle for something else, but is this really breakfast?” Solution: combine the whole grain approach with the whole lemon ricotta shtick and now you have a PANCAKE!
The proportions below make enough pancakes for two people. Recipe below the cut.
Home movies
In dreams lately she’s back from the dead, no worse for wear, sometimes young and able-bodied . . . sometimes not. Last night she was young and able-bodied. I told her she was beautiful and I loved her. She said, “What do you love about me?” and true to form — I mean, it felt like the sort of banter we’d do in our courtship — I said, “I love your intellectual traits and your physical traits.” The sort of humor that Big Bang Theory cashes in on these days, but back then it would’ve felt fresh. She play-kicked me. We were watching a home video she’d shot as a child and there was something about it that made me cry. I think it wasn’t the video so much as the thought of her as a child, not knowing what her life would be, nothing but potential and hope. She saw me cry and apologized. Something like, “Oh, shit, I didn’t realize you’d be able to see me in the reflection” — and then I noticed it, too: young Karen with a camcorder (yeah, I know, anachronism), at most ten years old, reflected in the glass door of some storefront.
Later we were in an airport without enough time to make our connection. Must have been Vegas because I left her behind and ran through a vacant casino, my clothes peeling magically away the further I ran and I knew soon I’d be naked, running; thinking, oh how trite this is for a dream.
D.
Another dream
But first, a recurring memory: we decided to buy our first house in Boerne, Texas, while checking out another home closer to San Antonio. I remember we sequestered ourselves in their boy’s bedroom, sat together on the kid’s twin bed, and contemplated making a serious offer. It took us some time. We suspected the agent was hopeful that we were thinking about bidding on THIS house. I can almost remember details from the room . . . almost. And I keep remembering this scene, perhaps because it was one of the biggest decisions we’d made, and we made it together. (You’d think I would remember when we decided to make a baby together, but nooop.)
Dream last night: we were looking at another house, perhaps also in Texas. It was on a flag lot that tapered in the backyard — sort of trapezoidal layout, broad end toward the street, narrow end behind the home. I thought the lot’s square footage (something like 6800 sq ft) seemed a lot lower than what I really wanted. I imagined what the backyard might look like, but when I went to check it out, it was disappointingly small, dark, and poorly groomed.
The agent had some sort of faux European accent. She was fixing coffee in the kitchen for Karen and was boasting about how she had saved this special flavor for her. Seemed like a BS artist. I checked out the master bedroom: dark, but very large, and I could imagine us filling it up with reptiles and tarantulas. I worried that that might sell Karen on the house, since I wasn’t too impressed with it so far.
But it was nice, overall, being back in that pre-Jake world with a relatively normal (healthier) Karen, planning our lives together.
D.
Another anniversary of sorts
So I spent part of today, the second anniversary of Karen’s death, tending her tarantulas. A few of them are off their diet, so that worries me. But I’m feeding them more often than she fed them, so perhaps they’re molting more often? I hope so. I joined a tarantula group on Facebook. Hopefully they’ll give me some good advice.
A few days ago I had to watch the video, which I thought was my only video of Karen. But this one (beginning at about 2:00) has some good vintage Karen off camera. That’s her stern voice (but good-humored). If I just trust to my memory, all my traitorous memory provides is stern Karen without the humor. But that voice. It’s an anchor. It’s a key. It’s the only thing that gives me access to Karen-as-three-dimensional-human, which memory alone won’t provide. Of all the violence done by that last year or two, that’s the worst of it, I think: that the memories more often than not are harsh, or desperate, or lonely, or hopeless. It can be hard to remember why I was so crazy about her.
Her voice is in that third video, too (Chapter 3 of Lisa Altalida’s Idiots Guide to Dating Girls). But I can only take so much of this.
Maybe it’s all for the good. If I carried within me an accurate representation of Karen-in-her-prime, the sense of loss would be unbearable. And yet sometimes I need to feel that loss and all of that pain. While I’m awake it comes in split-second flashes. In dreams, rarely, it all comes out. A real downpour.
All I’m certain of is that I miss her and I can’t have her. And that she faded away from me for at least a year or two before she died, and I didn’t fully realize it until she was gone.
D.
Anniversary
Would’ve been 32 years today.
For both of us, the wedding was an annoyance (we thought the Buddhist reverend was a twit) and the reception was chaotic. We didn’t get to enjoy the string quartet we’d insisted upon. I have a dim memory of us roaming from table to table, socializing with Karen’s relatives. There was a mini-scandal when one of her female relatives combed her hair with a dinner fork. Another mini-scandal afterwards, when one of the presents was a vase with WITH THANKS FROM SUMITOMO BANK written on its underside.
It was a blur, even at the time — not just a matter of the passing years smudging it all into a kaleidoscopic memory; it was kaleidoscopic even then. The hotel where we had the reception gave us a honeymoon suite with an enormous hot tub. Karen always claimed that her dad looked sick when he saw the honeymoon suite, as if he could imagine his little girl getting defiled soon afterward. We had an okay wedding night, no major olympic feats; we were both tired, and even then she lacked the stamina to have a full day of excitement followed by a night of the same.
She was a beautiful bride. She always did pretty-up nicely with makeup, and she did it so rarely I’d joke she was a different woman. The woman I fell in love with didn’t wear makeup. Not that I minded . . . although there was always that little trace of “what the hell are you doing with me” in the back of my mind.
And even now there are flashes when I don’t realize she’s gone. I was looking at a locum tenens headhunter email the other day. They wanted someone to cover a Northern California facility for various dates in the Fall. I thought about what life might be like post-retirement, and whether I might want to do a gig like that . . . and I had a moment’s concern about how rough it might be for Karen to accompany me on such trips. Travel wasn’t easy for her.
Such moments are rare nowadays. They’re brief, sudden, like involuntary reflexes.
D.
Another damned dream
Two in the last two days, but these haven’t felt like supernatural visitations so much as lectures from my subconscious. Fuck you, subconscious.
***
I found her in a hospital bed, but she looked good nonetheless. She reminded me of how she looked in her hospital bed after she’d delivered Jake. I looked at her wristband and the date was October 2014. So: not dead yet, but not long for this world. Post strife. I was back in time and I had another chance — to apologize, to profess my love, something. I was tearful, agitated, and she knew something was up. She got out of the bed and we walked together — dream transition, now we were in our house, putting our shoes on. I hugged her and told her, “You mean more to me than anything. You know that, don’t you? Tell me that you know that.” But she wouldn’t respond. She wanted to talk about a project for the backyard. “You need to do something about that big pile of soil. Build that island already and be creative. I know you can do it.” We talked about looking on the internet for images so she could show me what she wanted.