To Life, To Life with Chocolate Chips

The week before I went to UMASS Memorial to have that surreal, I will never forget farewell, I got a call on my cell phone while I was at work.  Now if you don’t know me very well, you might not know how much I despise my cell phone.  How much I try to avoid using it at unnecessary moments, like work.  My friends still do call and text me… but are pretty sensitive to the fact that I work.  And of course I saw this call come up as I was wrangling with some annoying customer service person on the phone for work.  Some seeming disaster that actually eludes me now.  I just know my head clouded as I saw a friend’s name show on the caller ID and had to let it go to voicemail while I dealt with that other annoying matter.  But I made the callback… already with the sick feeling in my stomach of the news it was going to reveal.

It was just about a year ago exactly that my friend Lisa was given the grim diagnosis that her cancer had come back with a vengeance.  I met Lisa through theater – kind of appropriately considering the kinship and mutual love of social justice, feminism, politics, and art - during a production of the Vagina Monologues.  I can’t even remember which monologue was hers.  Maybe she was just part of the ongoing ‘chorus.’  But she wore a pink feather boa.  It’s one of the most vivid details about that show in my memory.

Lisa had a family and a full time job as a social worker.  She lived in Sturbridge.  I still lived out the Boston way.  But there was great opportunity for political empathies on Facebook… and the occasional run-in at a theater production.  Then somewhere in the Facebook postings and invitations, she found my supper club and wanted in.  Because I was having a pumpkin themed dinner.  Unfortunately her best intentions did not get her to that dinner, but she saved the bottle of pumpkin wine until she was able to come to a supper early last November before heading over to work.  

I think it is a curious thing – coincidence – timing –whatever that Lisa and my grandmother left this life within a week of one another.  They were both such dynamic women.  Full of love, love, love.  For their children.  For their spouses.  For their friends.  They both were genuinely interested in people… and in the world.  Smart, sassy women without whom this world feels a little empty.

Tonight the Sturbridge theater community is paying tribute to Lisa.  I am happily attending… but also happily contributing to the night’s refreshments.  When the call was put out to offer up baked goods, it seemed a perfect opportunity to bring together my love of these women.  

In honor of her love of pumpkin, I opted to make my own recipe of pumpkin chocolate chip bars.  I didn’t even think about this blog much as I got up first thing this morning and made a batch… so no pictures, I’m afraid.  BUT in spite of the fact this is not a Mary Brennan recipe, I will post it here.  I know these bars have visited her kitchen once or twice… and they are pretty good.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bars

Ingredients:
2 ½ c. flour
1tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. salt
¾ tsp. cinnamon
¾ tsp. pumpkin pie spice
1 c. butter, melted
1 c. white sugar
1 (15 oz) can pumpkin puree
2 eggs
1tsp. vanilla extract
2 c. semisweet chocolate chips
Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 375°.  Grease 13 x 9 pan (I use my favorite Pampered Chef stoneware brownie pan)
2. Stir together first six ingredients.
3. Blend butter and sugar until smooth.  Add pumpkin.  Add eggs, one at a time.  Gradually blend in dry ingredients.  Fold in chocolate chips.  Spread mixture evenly into prepared pan.
4. Bake 35-45 minutes.  Best served warm (with a cup of coffee).

(I did not take pictures of the making of or finished product before packaging them into pieces for sale tonight.  BUT I did think to take a snapshot of the crumbs I sampled with my morning coffee)

The second recipe for today’s blog is what I made for the reception after my grandmother’s wake.  It’s the first recipe I made from this recipe box.  I chose it, mostly, because it can be made without nuts.  In fact, that’s how I’ve made it – mostly because I haven’t had any in my kitchen.  But the mandate for tonight is no nuts.  It’s something I remember from that pantry closet – maybe even more vividly than peanut butter bars.  And while the recipe is Nestle, to me it is my grandmother because she was the supplier.

Original Toll House Pan Cooky (Gram’s spelling – she also gave credit where credit is due by inserting Nestlés underneath)
1 c. pls 2 Tbsp unsifted flour
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. salt
½ c. butter softened
6 Tbsp. sugar *
6 Tbsp. brown sugar
½ tsp vanilla
1 egg
1 c. choc chips
½ c. nut meats  (I found this descriptive term amusing considering Gram and my mutual disdain for squirrels)

Preheat oven to 375°.  In small bowl, combine flour, baking soda, and salt.  Set aside.  In large bowl, combine butter, sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla.  Beat until creamy.  Beat in egg.  Gradually add flour mixture.  Mix well.  Stir in chips and nuts.  Spread into greased 9 in square pan. Bake for 20-25 minutes.  For crisper cookie, spread dough in 13x9 pan.  Bake at 350° 12-15 minutes.

*In case you’re wondering, there are 16 Tbsp. in a cup.  I doubled this recipe – so 12 Tbsp = ¾ of a cup.

(Basically in the end, you end up with a bowl full of cookie dough.  And you could make cookies, I suppose.  But they are easier to package as bars... and I actually like them better.)

As I went to pull off the pictures from my camera for this post, I found I still had one of Lisa and me at brunch raising our mimosas and smiling.  A woman with so much spirit and love.  She lived the mantra Carpe Diem, even through this last bittersweet year.  I am grateful for the visits I had with her in 2012.  And, this may be a tangential detail to this post… but I broke down and bought a device that will enable me to take pictures – mostly for this blog… but because of this blog, I seek to capture the stories of my day to day.  I had the option to inscribe it on the back.  I chose Carpe Diem.  

The Pantry Closet

Typically you enter my grandmother’s house through the kitchen.   Up until a few years ago, you would enter from the breezeway that connected the house to the garage.  There was a steel shelving unit with gardening gloves, a few pots, and usually an egg carton or two full of the balls that were from poorly aimed strokes on the golf course across the street.  A few years ago that breezeway was incorporated into the kitchen.  But it didn’t change the view of the stove and counter that meet your eyes when you come in from the cold.

This is the stove where all these recipes began… and have been perfected to innate nuance.  Often you would walk towards that stove still warm from baking the pan on the oven.  But sometimes it was cool, with just enough aroma to indicate there was something hidden under foil in the pantry closet.

If you walk out of the kitchen, a few steps into the hall, beyond the mirroring doors of the cellar and bathroom (the one where the whisky keeps company with the toilet bowl cleaner), you will face two doors.  The one directly in front of you goes into the TV room – which was originally a shared bedroom.  Beside that door, just as the hallway turns to lead you into the living room, is the pantry closet.  

This closet once provided additional storage for the three young women who occupied that bedroom.  So it has a sort of built in set of dresser drawers, now holding table cloths and extra napkins and such.  Above it are several shelves where extra plates sit in wait for large family meals and gatherings.  Plenty of mugs for tea to follow ample buffets.  The tea for those mugs.  A miscellany of serving dishes and storage containers.  Even the door into the closet has a special purpose, holding the calendar of birthdays so every single member of the family, near and far, gets a birthday card.  But that was a treat that came to my own mailbox.  The treats in the closet rested some place between those plates and mugs.  And one of them usually involved a metal baking pan covered in foil.

The recipe boxes are full of the sweets one discovered under that foil.  Chocolate.  Butterscotch.  Oatmeal.  Blueberry.  Or… peanut butter.  This weekend I expected to attend a meeting where I could bring a plate of one of these sweets to share.  Unfortunately a flat tire stood between me and that meeting… but left me at home to still make peanut butter bars.

If you have a sweet tooth, these bars will definitely satisfy it.  They also bring together one of the greatest edible combinations.  Peanut butter + chocolate.

This was my first attempt at peanut butter bars.  Several of my cousins have preceded me and done very well.  I… well… I took some liberties with this recipe (again) and while I definitely have a sweet delicious treat, they aren’t exactly the same ones that were underneath that foil.

My poetic licenses:
1. I used butter.  Mostly because that’s what I have in my fridge.  But that’s mostly because I don’t really do margarine any more.  In fact I have to give Gram a bit of credit for that when in a discussion about WWII rations, she described how they made margarine by adding yellow dye to lard.  Mmmm.  Yum.
2. I used quasi natural peanut butter.  And by quasi, I mean it’s not the stuff from Trader Joe’s that I normally eat – where the ingredients are peanuts and oil.  This peanut butter wasn’t Skippy, but the second ingredient on the list was definitely sugar.  Not that I really needed it because…
3. I used organic sugar.  Again, that’s what I keep in my cupboard… because that’s what I buy at Trader Joe’s, which I’m sure time will show you is one of the main suppliers of my kitchen.  But I did stick with the recipe and used corn syrup. 

Those disclaimers made, here’s the recipe that I found on a very weathered, still textured with some flour, type-written with plenty of handwritten notes index card.

Peanut Butter Bars
Ingredients:
1 stick of margarine
1 c. peanut butter
¼ c. corn syrup
1 ¼ c. sugar
1 tsp. salt
2 eggs beaten (add one at a time
1 c. flour (there is a parenthetical note about wheat germ - ? included so ??)

Mix together and put in an ungreased 13 x 9 pan.  Bake 15-20 min at 350°.  (My gas oven took closer to 30 minutes)

Frosting:
½ lb confectioners sugar
2 Tbsp. margarine
2 Tbsp. peanut butter
1 tsp. vanilla
1 Tbsp. cocoa
1/3 can evaporated milk

Mix first five ingredients.  Add milk gradually.  Spread on cooled brownies.

I finished this recipe and started to look it over for transcription when I noticed the bottom left corner folded over on the back of the card.  Underneath was the name Nancy Perkins.  My initial investigation (also known as my mother) yielded no answer to who Nancy Perkins was… except that we are in fact related to a whole lot of Perkinses.  But how a Nancy is connected to them, we have yet to resolve.  Stay tuned.

One postscript to this entry.  I did mention treats in the pantry closet.  My grandmother was not the only supplier of sweets to the grandchildren of Mt. Pleasant Ave.  On the next to the highest shelf there has always been a large jar, rather like a vase, full of hard candies.  It was always pretty to look at the rainbow of Brach’s candies with which my grandfather would fill it.  Butterscotch, red and white peppermint.  The shiny maroon of hot cinnamon.  Wintergreen.  If you were lucky… or proved yourself good after a day at Ma and Bubby’s, that magical jar would come down off the shelf with an opportunity to pick one sugary jewel for the road.  The jar is still there with the birthday calendar and the extra plates for Christmas, as if frozen in happy anticipation. 

Who needs a wardrobe into Narnia?  I had a pantry closet.