I ate cricket! (In chip form, mind you)

We had a treat for lunch today: my cricket chips, which I pre-ordered way back in mid-winter, arrived this morning. Amusingly called Chirps, these chips come in three flavours and are the creation of a new company called Six Foods.

As you can see in the picture, the chips came with a nice canvas tote bag. I quite like the slogan on it: "Bug Appétit." I'll definitely be carrying that around in public! Also included was a sweet handwritten letter, thanking us "Bug Lovers" for supporting the company, and also providing some interesting information on their process from dream to product:

We've worked with a food pilot plant for eight months to create the recipe & it has been a huge learning experience for us. We've experimented with 50 different recipes, obscure ingredients (teff anyone?), and called over 400 manufacturers till we found the right partners.

Thank you for being patient with us through this process. As a token of our love + appreciation, there's an extra Six Foods tote for you.

Bug Appétit!
Laura, Meryl, + Rose

Wow, Laura, Meryl and Rose, you are some hard-working entrepreneurs! Good for you.

The Chirps packaging advertises that Chirps contain "3X more protein than regular potato chips," but really, they should be compared not to potato chips but to tortilla-bean chips. So I'm doing that. According to caloriecount.com, Kettle Tortilla Black Bean chips contain 3g of protein, 18g of carbohydrates and 7g of fat. Beanitos are another chip worth comparing with, as they also contain beans, although not corn. According to the Beanitos web site, Black Bean Beanitos have 4g of protein, 15g of carbohydrate and 7g of fat. Chirps chips contain 6g of protein, 12g of carbohydrates and 6g of fat. So yes, Chirps win, in terms of having the most protein. They also have less fat and a better carb to protein ratio.

At this point you may be thinking, "Never mind all that, how do they taste?"

When I ordered Chirps, I opted for the variety pack so that we could try all three flavours: natural, cheddar and BBQ. So we had to decide which one to open first. I thought the natural bag first would be a good choice, as it would allow us to better appreciate the unadulterated flavour of cricket. So we did that, and... they're quite tasty. Better than original Beanitos, I would say. They have little black dots in them, but those are the chia seeds, not the crickets. No visible bits of cricket can be detected in this product, so if you're squeamish about that, you can set your mind at ease. They look and taste somewhat like tortilla bean chips, but with a slight difference, and I'm not sure how much of that is the chia seeds and how much is the cricket. Also, they are stiffer and crunchier than the typical tortilla chip. In terms of hardness, they remind me of Mary's Crackers.

So I can recommend Chirps by Six Foods as a gentle introduction to the world of bug-eating for anyone who would like to take the plunge but is not ready to stuff a whole cricket or mealworm in their mouth, a la Millennium Farms. That's quite advanced for us weeny Westerners, and I'm happy to leave that for later.

Ingredients in Chirps, Natural Flavour

• Navy Beans
• Sunflower/ Safflower Oil
• Corn Flour
• Chia Seeds
• Pea Flour
• Cricket Flour (Gryllodes Sigillatus and/or Acheta Domesticus)
• Salt

Allergy Alert

The Chirps packaging advises that "If you have crustacean shellfish allergies, you may also be sensitive to crickets."

Recipe: Kale Chips (Garlic Flavour)

Kale chips are a tasty, nutritious alternative to potato or tortilla chips—but they cost nine dollars a bag at the health food store. It makes more sense to make your own.

Ingredients

• 1 bunch kale, washed and dried
• 2 tbsp. vegetable oil
• 1/2 – 1 tsp. garlic powder, depending on taste
• Salt (optional)

What is a "bunch?" Not a very precise measurement I realize, but the quantities are not crucial here; tweak as desired. A bunch is about what you'd get wrapped up at the supermarket. If on the other hand, you buy a whole plant at a farmer's market, it will be a good deal bigger, maybe twice as big.

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F. You can use a toaster oven, but you might need to halve the recipe to get it to fit.

Place oil and garlic powder in a mixing bowl. Sprinkle in a little salt if you want. I don't think it's really necessary. Mix. Remove kale leaves from stems, tear into bite-sized pieces and add to bowl. Save the stems for something else. Add them to a soup or something.

Toss the leaves with the oil until well blended. I think the best way to do this is with your hands.

Spread the oiled leaves onto a baking tray and bake in oven for 10-15 minutes. You might want to flip them halfway through. Keep an eye on them so they don't overcook. They're done when they're crispy all the way through and brown at the edges but not right to the middle. Delicious!

I developed this recipe on my own. Then, when I decided to write it up and post it, I did a search online and discovered that there are already a bazillion kale recipes available. So, I'm not as original as I thought, and maybe my drop in the bucket is not really necessary. Still, here it is, for what it's worth, and I hope it's worth something.

Recipe: Vivian's Dark Chocolate Orange Peel Bark

This recipe came about the day my hubby and I returned from grocery shopping with a bag of discounted oranges and a chocolate bar. I thought, why not put these two things together? So I did a search online for chocolate orange bark recipes, and discovered that the orange peel was invariably candied through the use of white sugar. Being me, I couldn't help but marvel at the oddness of adding outside sugar to a substance that surrounds a lot of naturally-occurring sugars and vitamins. So I decided to see what would happen if I used the juice from the orange instead of sugar and water. What happened? Deliciousness, that's what happened.

Ingredients:

• 100 grams dark chocolate, preferably 60-80%
• 1 orange

Wash the orange, cut in half and juice. We have one of those manual orange juicers where you impale the orange half on a conical thing. If you don't have a juicer, you might try squeezing by hand and/or with the back of a spoon, but try not to mess up the peel too much, because you're going to need it.

Put the juice aside and cut the spent orange halves into segments. Remove the squished pulp. It's not used in the recipe, but it's still good eating. Now lay each segment zest-side down and slice away the pith with a paring knife or other small, non-serrated knife. Watch the fingers. (If you don't know, the zest is the orange stuff on the outer part of the peel and the pith is the yellowy, bitter stuff on the inner part of the peel.)

Throw away the pith and slice the zest into little strips, about an eight of an inch thick. Put the zest strips into a saucepan with the juice from the orange and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer until the liquid is almost boiled away, stirring often. The zest will be coated with a sort of sticky juice reduction. Scrape it out of the saucepan and put it on a plate. I left it for a couple of hours in the fridge to dry out, but really I don't know how much difference this made; it never got completely dry. So skip this step if you don't have time, in which case you don't even have to turn off the burner. But you'll probably want to use a clean saucepan for the next step. Chocolate changes its texture if you get liquid into it when it's melted.

In the clean saucepan (or in the orange-juicy saucepan if you couldn't care less about your chocolate's texture—I mean, it's chocolate, right?) melt the dark chocolate over low heat. The traditional way to do this is with a double-boiler, to prevent burning. I don't have a double-boiler, so I just use the lowest setting on my electric stove. If you have a gas stove, I suppose you might not be able to get away with this. And if it's a warm day, leaving the chocolate out in the sun for a while might also be an option.

Use a rubber or silicone spatula to scrape the melted chocolate out onto a cookie sheet, aluminum pie plate, or something else flexible. (If it hardens on something rigid, like a plate, you may have trouble detaching it.) Finally, sprinkle the juicy orange peel over top. Oh sure, you could have just stirred the peel into the chocolate, the way you would with almonds if making an almond bark, but the orange peel is such a pretty colour, especially against the dark background of the chocolate, that that would be a shame. This way, you can listen to your friends ooh and ah over the beauty of your candy. Refrigerate until firm, about 2 hours. It's a nice thing to bring to dinner parties. Or you can stay home and eat it all yourself, which is the option my husband and I chose.

Sorry I don't have a picture. It didn't last that long. I'll see about taking one next time I make this.

A Radical Restaurant Proposal

How about bringing me what I ordered? And nothing else?

Today I met a friend for lunch at a restaurant. I ordered a chicken Caesar salad... very carefully. No croutons. Dressing on the side. I thought that should have done it. I mean, I know what goes into a Caesar salad. But the salad arrived with two big slices of garlic bread sitting on top.

Expressing my surprise, I picked off the offending slabs and explained to the waitress that I neither wanted the bread nor could eat it, since I have celiac disease. An agonizingly drawn-out conversation followed.

"Should I have them make you a new salad?"

"I don't think that's necessary. I hate to waste food."

"Are you sure you'll be OK?"

"I don't think I'm so sensitive that one breadcrumb is going to affect me."

"But it might be better to be safe..."

"It sounds like you'll feel more comfortable if you make me a new salad."

"No, this is for you..."

And on, and on. Finally I persuaded her that the salad was all right for me to eat, and handed her the bread. I like to dump pieces of bread right in the hands of serving people. They seem reluctant to touch it. Maybe they don't want to get butter on their hands. But what do they expect me to do with it? Leave it in a heap on the table? Perhaps make it into an impromptu centrepiece?

Before the waitress left, she told me that in the future, I should always tell my server about any allergies I have before ordering.

"She's right," I said to my lunch companion. "I should." I wondered why it is I'm reluctant to do so. Perhaps it's a desire to avoid that scarlet letter feeling, that public declaration of oneself as a sickly oddball. But something else was bothering me. I thought I'd ordered pretty carefully, and somehow it wasn't enough. Why did I feel as though the waitress, indeed the entire restaurant business, is somehow trying to fob its responsibilities off on me?

Later that day, I figured it out. I'm tired of restaurants serving me food that I didn't ask for and don't want. Is this such a radical notion: serve me what I ordered, and not what I didn't order?

I don't think I'm merely being whiny. It's true that I don't enjoy the necessity of giving a spiel on my digestive health to the wait staff every time I eat out. But in fact, this is not just an allergy problem. Once, I ordered chili at Boston Pizza and it arrived with cheese all over it. I didn't want cheese. Nothing in the menu said that the chili came with cheese. I could not have avoided this situation by discussing my allergies with the waitress, since I have no dairy allergy.

I didn't send the chili back. I carefully scooped off the cheese and deposited it on the side of my plate.* As I said earlier, I don't like to waste food. Also, I think today's prevailing restaurant climate may have affected me. I felt as if the situation was my responsibility because I hadn't read the cook's mind all the way from the dining hall. I had failed to anticipate that he might put unrequested cheese on my chili.

Ketchup can also be a problem. It's an oddly popular condiment, so restaurants tend to assume you want it. Many wait people will slap a ketchup squeeze bottle on your table as soon as you put in an order, whereas if you prefer vinegar on your fries, you have to ask. I don't mind the ketchup squeeze bottle, but I hate it when a little ketchup-filled plastic tub appears on the side of my plate with my meal because I know that every ounce of it is going to end up untouched in the garbage, along with the once-unused plastic tub. All waste, which could have been avoided if only they'd asked.

And what happened to asking? Remember when wait staff used to ask you questions? "Fries or baked potato? White or brown toast?" Some of the higher-end restaurants, like Swiss Chalet, still do this.† But many don't. I think this may have to do with the newish trend of dropping by your table after you've received the food and asking something like, "How's everything tasting?" or "Is there anything else I can get you?" Perhaps wait staff decided that there are only so many questions they can deal with having to ask, and if they had to ask these post-order questions, then the pre-order questions had to go.

Well, I don't think this is a worthwhile trade-off. The pre-order questions are more important. Rather than abandon pre-order questions in favour of the repetitious and potentially disruptive "Can I get you anything else?," restaurants should provide patrons with some sort of signalling device they can use to let the wait staff know when they need something. I have long thought it would be great if restaurant tables each came equipped with a little flagpole and flag that you could raise when you needed service. This would be easier for the customers and easier for the staff. Further, the flags could add to the overall design motif. They could be brightly coloured, or styled to match the room decor. Restaurateurs, please feel free to use this idea without giving me credit. The joy I may one day feel upon walking into a restaurant and seeing a mini-flagpole on each table will be reward enough for me.

If you don't want to ask questions and you don't want to equip the tables with flagpoles, why not print on the menu everything that comes with the dish by default? Then at least people like me will be in a position to specify what we want and don't want on our plates. We won't have to wrack our brains to work out every surprise ingredient the cook might decide, on some crazy, onion-fume-influenced whim, to plunk on top of the meal.

I know I can't change the world. I can't make restaurants stop serving me things I didn't ask for. So I resolve from this day forward to tell wait staff that I have celiac disease. Frankly, I doubt it will solve the problem. I fully expect that at some future date, I will order by saying, "I have celiac disease. I can't have any wheat. So I'll have the chicken Caesar salad, no croutons, dressing on the side." And the salad will STILL show up with garlic bread on top. And the waitress will be all like, "Oops, garlic bread has wheat in it." Because waitresses aren't paid to think. If they were, they might wonder why a person who didn't want croutons would want garlic bread, which is, after all, a larger chunk of the same exact thing.

So I'm quite sure that the scenario I've described will eventually come to pass. But when it does, I'll be able to send the food back with a clear conscience. Likewise, my other resolution is to return any dishes that come with unexpected cheese on top. Yes, there will be food waste, and no, I won't be the one responsible.

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* When my husband proofread this, he suggested I could dump the cheese into the waitress's hand, the way I did with the bread. I thought this amusing enough to share, although I want to make it clear that I do not advocate waitress abuse of any kind. [back]

† I live in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Here, Swiss Chalet is one of the higher-end restaurants. [back]

How to Make Gluten-Free Bread: a Quick Primer and Three Recipes

Gluten, that super-long protein string that gives wheat bread its delectable fluffiness, can also make some people sick. In celiac disease, the consumption of gluten creates an immune reaction in the intestines and flattens the villi, the little hairlike things that are responsible for absorbing nutrients. No villi, no nutrient absorption. You can see how that would not be a good thing, but it gets worse. People who have celiac disease but continue to eat gluten are at increased risk for colon cancer and type I diabetes. So if you have this condition, it's really important to lay off the gluten.

An interesting fact about gluten: no human being can digest it. That's right: even if you're not celiac or gluten-sensitive, you're not breaking the stuff down. Not being birds, we're not designed to eat grains. It's just that in most people, the little strings sit around quietly in the intestine not causing trouble, while in a minority of people, the intestine gets fed up with the alien presence and launches an immune system attack.

So what to do if you belong to this minority? Whether we're designed to eat grains or not, most of us don't want to give up eating pizza and sandwiches.

The trick is to find another substance that will bind your dough together the way that gluten does. Two types of ingredient that will have this effect are gums (xanthan, guar, etc.) and eggs. In most cases, you'll need to add either a gum or some eggs to your dough, or the resulting bread will crumble to bits, and that's a pain when you're trying to butter it. (For the one exception I know of to this rule, see socca bread. That's a flatbread though.)

Most gluten-free recipes also include some sort of starch, typically a mixture of some of the following: potato, corn, tapioca and arrowroot starch. Starch lightens up the bread so it can rise higher. It is not a requirement though, as we'll see later.

As for the flour, a blend of flours are typically used. One popular flour in gluten-free recipes is garbanzo-fava flour, a mixture of chick pea flour and fava flour. This flour, often referred to as garfava for short, is said to rise well. Rice flour is commonly used as the base flour. Buckwheat is sometimes added for extra fibre. Sorghum flour, from the seeds of a grasslike grain, is added for flavour, as it has a natural sweetness.

This is about all I know about gluten-free flour blending, which appears to me as an arcane science akin to alchemy. Still, I say, don't be afraid to experiment. The worst that can happen is that you'll have to throw out a loaf of bread. And most of the time it isn't that bad. At the least you can usually turn it into breadcrumbs and bread fish with it, or make it into turkey stuffing.

But maybe you don't want to bake. Baking is a lot of work. You might want to go to the supermarket and buy a gluten-free bread in a bag, premade. Fair enough, but there a couple of things you should know:

• Most store-bought gluten-free bread is disgusting. It's like chewing on a mattress, only with less flavour.
• Most store-bought gluten-free bread is very low in fibre, because it is made primarily out of white rice flour*. This goes a long way towards explaining its lack of flavour as well.

That said, I do know of a great gluten-free bread mix that you can buy in a supermarket. It's not a premade bread, so you still have to do some work, but it's worth it. It's better than any other gluten-free bread I've tried. It's Bob's Red Mill Homemade Wonderful Bread. The name sounds boastful, I know, but they're telling the truth.

If you're just starting out with gluten-free baking, you may be reluctant to go out and purchase a weird and freaky ingredient like xanthan gum. I know I was. So try the following two recipes, which can be made without it. They also don't contain any starch. The third and final recipe is a more traditional, gummy, starchy, gluten-free bread recipe; basically, it's my attempt to duplicate Bob's Red Mill Homemade Wonderful Bread, and I think I didn't do too bad a job of it, if I do say so myself.

Recipe #1: Rolls

This recipe is really passover rolls with gluten-free flour taking the place of the matzoh meal. You see, during Passover, in commemoration of the escape from Egypt when the Jews had to make a quick snack before fleeing, leavened bread is forbidden. That means no yeast or baking soda. However, Jews have a long history of getting around the letter of the law while doing what they want: witness that string that Hassidim put around their neighbourhoods during Shabbos. So naturally they found a way to make rolls light and fluffy without yeast or baking soda. It just takes a lot of eggs.

This recipe is adapted from the recipe for passover rolls in Second Helpings, Please! Revised edition. Mt. Sinai chapter #1091, B'nai B'rith Women, Montreal, Canada.

• 2 cups gluten-free flour (whatever kind you want: I used 1 cup brown rice flour and 1 cupbuckwheat flour. If you like it sweet, throw in some coconut flour)
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 cup water
• 1/2 cup oil
• 4 eggs

Combine dry ingredients. Bring oil and water to a boil and add to dry ingredients. Mix. Beat in eggs one at a time. Let stand for 15 minutes. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Oil a cookie sheet.

Oil or wet your hands so that the dough won't stick, and shape rolls. Place on cookie sheet. Bake for 1 hour or until brown.

The resulting rolls are nice and crispy, and surprisingly puffed up inside. Now, you may be concerned about using such a lot of eggs. I find you can reduce it to three eggs and still get good results. Just replace the missing egg with 1/4 cup of water. You can also replace as many eggs as you like with egg white, for a lower-cholesterol roll.

Recipe #2: Socca

This recipe is from Mediterranean Light: Delicious Recipes from the World's Healthiest Cuisine by Martha Rose Shulman. Shulman does great cookbooks.

• 2/3 cup chick pea flour
• 1/4 to 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 cup cold water
• Pepper
• Olive oil

Beat together the flour, salt and water with a whisk or blender until there are no lumps. Add freshly ground pepper to taste.

Now, some timing issues. The oven has to preheat for 30 minutes, but the pan has to heat up for 15 minutes. So as soon as you've got your batter beaten up, turn the oven to 475 degrees F, then set a timer for 15 minutes. Oil a pan with the olive oil; a 12-inch pizza pan will do nicely. When the timer goes off, stick the pan in the oven and set the timer for another 15 minutes.

When the timer goes off again, yank the hot pan out of the oven (don't forget your oven mitt!) and pour in the batter. Put it in the upper third of the oven. Shulman says to bake for five minutes, then turn the oven to broil and broil for 3 to 4 minutes. I don't think I bother to do this. It's been a while since I made this bread, but I think I probably just bake it for 8 or 9 minutes.

Full disclosure: the reason I don't make this bread often is because it's wildly addictive and I ate myself sick on it the last time.

Recipe #3: Sandwich Bread

As I said above, this is my attempt to make something similar to Bob's Red Mill Homemade Wonderful Bread.

• 1 1/4 cup chickpea flour
• 1/4 cup fava flour (or: replace the above with 1 1/2 garfava flour)
• 1/2 cup sorghum flour
• 1 cup starch (I don't think it matters terribly which one you use. To get closest to Bob's recipe, try 1/2 cup potato starch, 1/2 cup minus 1 tbsp. Corn starch and 1 tbsp. Tapioca starch)
• 1 tbsp. Xanthan gum
• 1 1/2 tsp. Salt
• 2 1/4 tsp. Yeast
• 1 1/2 tbsp. Maple syrup
• 1 beaten egg + egg whites to 3/4 cup
• 1 tsp. Cider vinegar
• 3 tbsp. Olive oil
• 1 2/3 cup water

Warm up the water. I like to put it in the microwave for about half a minute. It should be about bath temperature, not so hot that you can't comfortably wiggle a finger in it. Add the yeast, stir and let sit 5 to 10 minutes while you blend the rest of the dry ingredients together. Mix the eggs, egg whites, maple syrup, cider vinegar and oil in a separate bowl. When the yeast is ready, add to the wet ingredients and then mix the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients until well blended. Bob's Red Mill actually says to use an electric mixer, but I find a fork adequate to the task.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Oil a loaf pan and pour in the batter. Smooth out the top with a rubber spatula. Cover and let rise in a warm place for 20 minutes. Place in oven and bake for 45 minutes. Bread is done when it makes a hollow sound when you tap it. Let it cool in the pan for 20 minutes before removing and cooling all the way on a rack.

Variations:

• Egg-free version: You can reduce or remove the eggs by substituting water. One egg is equal to about 1/4 cup of water. If you remove all eggs, you should also up the xanthan gum by a teaspoon.
• Starch-free version: Starch is not essential to gluten-free baking. It is just used because people are accustomed to light and airy baked goods. You can substitute the starch with the same amount of brown rice flour.
• Egg-free, starch-free version: You can do both the substitutions described above at the same time. However, the result is not as tasty, in my opinion. It might be worth replacing some of the egg with apple sauce, although I haven't tried this myself.

Rest assured that all suggested substitutions (aside from the apple sauce one) have been tested in Vivian's kitchen have have been found to give acceptable to delicious results.

Further Reading

The best gluten-free cookbook I have found so far is unquestionably Babycakes by Erin McKenna. It's more dessert-centred, featuring cup cakes, cakes, muffins and pies, but there is also a chapter on tea breads (breads made with baking powder rather than yeast). All recipes are scrumptious. On top of all that, Erin goes to some lengths to make her desserts as healthful as possible; most are sweetened without sugar. Note that not all recipes in the book are gluten-free; some call for spelt flour.

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* Can I just say something here? Why does white rice flour exist? Why does white rice exist? Why doesn't everybody just eat brown rice? Is it part of that self-destructive human condition that also leads to the existence of movies like Jackass 3D? What I find particularly weird about white rice flour is that even brown rice, really, doesn't have much fibre. It's a lot lower in fibre than rye or even wheat. So if you find fibre that unappealing, brown rice should be fine. [back]

My Christmas Dinner 2010: Recipes and Suggestions

You may be wondering what a Jewish woman is doing preparing Christmas dinner, much less writing about it. It's true that I'm nominally Jewish, but the ubiquitousness of Christmas--the carols, the TV specials, the shopping madness, the time off work--is a reality of the culture in which I live. Anyway, Paganism has always spoken to me more than Judaism or any other religion that emerged from the Middle East, and really, Christmas is Yule, a pagan celebration of the winter solstice. None of the customs, from tree decorating to lights, have a thing to do with Jesus, who, if he ever existed (which some have called into question), was born in a desert in July, and was, to boot, a nice Jewish boy. So there. Now on to the food.

Sweet Potato and Apple Stuffing

This is a modified version of a recipe I got from The Good Cook: Poultry, by Time-Life books, who in turn got it from Louisiana. I'm always interested in stuffings that don't contain bread. In addition to being a pleasant change from the ordinary bread-based stuffing, they are gluten free and good for celiacs and anyone else who doesn't do well with wheat. It's delicious too.

The original recipe calls for sugar. A lot of recipes with sweet things in them call for sugar. Sweet potatoes with sugar. Beets with sugar. And so on. I have always found this to be insane. It's like putting blue eyeshadow on a blue-eyed woman "to bring out her eyes," except that instead of simply being in bad taste, it's bad for your health as well. No sugar in this version, and it's still plenty sweet.

• 4 cups diced apples
• 1 cup chopped celery (I didn't have any, so I used white turnip)
• 1 cup water
• 6 sweet potatoes (about 3 lb.)
• 2 tbsp lemon juice (I used cider vinegar)
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 4 tbsp butter
• 1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
• grated peel of 1 lemon (I left this out)

The recipe said to peel the apples and sweet potatoes, but I didn't bother. Both have perfectly edible skins. Yes, the sweet potato does too. Try it some time; it saves effort and reduces food waste.

Steam or boil the sweet potatoes for 25 minutes. While you mash the sweet potatoes with the butter and cinnamon, simmer the apples and celery in the water until tender. (If you use turnip, as I did, you'll need to put it in first because it takes longer to cook than the apple.) Mix the apples, celery and chopped nuts into the sweet potato mush and stuff it into your turkey.

Turkey-Cooking Suggestion

Cookbooks and every other turkey-cooking expert I've ever heard of advise you to place the turkey on its back to cook it. It is, I believe, a presentation thing, but results in the quickest-cooking part of the bird--the breast--being exposed to the most heat. You are then expected to get around this by basting, or by covering the breast with bacon. If you're lucky, it works out. More likely, you end up eating overcooked breast meat, or slicing off the breast meat and eating it first while you put the still-uncooked remains back in the oven, because you've been waiting for hours and you're starving and you can't take it any longer.

Well, try this. Place the turkey on its breast instead. Now the dark meat, which takes longer to cook, is getting the most heat, while the white meat is protected from being overcooked. Doesn't that make more sense? I think so. It's what I did this year and my turkey came out perfect. The stuffing was fabulous too--better than cranberry sauce.

Mince Pie

A modified version of a recipe from The Vegetarian Feast by Martha Rose Shulman. Here's another recipe that cries out to have its sugar removed. It's made mostly from dried fruit, which is very sweet, plus it contains juice. Why would you add sugar, or even honey or other sweetener? That would be dumb. Leave it out, and you can actually taste the fruit. And buying mince pie filling in a jar, when you can easily make a more delicious version at home, is also questionable.

• 1 pie crust (see below)
• 1/2 cup currants
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 2 apples (I used russets; they're very nice)
• 1/3 cup chopped, pitted prunes
• 1/3 cup chopped, dried, pitted apricots (get the sulfite-free ones from the health food store; they're better for you)
• 1/4 cup chopped, pitted dates
• 1/2 cup broken pecans or walnuts
• Juice and grated peel of 1 orange (I used a Mandarin orange)
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground clove
• 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
• 3 tbsp rum (I used Screech rum from Newfoundland; good stuff)

Since preparing Christmas dinner is a huge chore, a job for a masochist, it's a good idea to make the filling part the day before. Grate the orange peel, then cut the orange in half and juice it. (At which point, if you used a Mandarin orange as did I, you will discover that the peel disintegrates under the stress. So proceed with care.) Throw the dried fruits, nuts, juice, peel and water into a pot, bring to a simmer, cover, and cook over low heat for 20 minutes or until it's all nice and mushy. Add the spices and booze, mix and cook for another 5 minutes. There. You're done. Told you it was easy.

Pie crust

One of the things that has mystified me all my cooking life is why cookbooks call for such a small amount of water in pie crust. "Oh yes," they coo, the liars, "just chill those 3 dainty tablespoons of water with those ice cubes, and your crust will be fine." Then you try to roll it and it cracks into particles like a freshly-unwrapped ancient mummy. (Sorry if that metaphor wasn't appetizing.) Well, I've had it. I'm doubling the water quantity, and if any pie crust experts out there want to float over to this blog and mock me, feel free. I'll just ignore you.

• 2 cups some kind of flour (this year, I used 1 cup brown rice flour and 1 cup buckwheat)
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 oil or fat (I used chicken fat. There, that's Jewish)
• 1/2 cup or more water, and I don't believe it makes any difference whether it's iced or not

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Combine dry ingredients. Work fat into flour mixture with hands, a butter knife or one of those pastry cutter things until the little bits are smaller than peas. Mix in the water and add as much as you need to make a dough that holds together. Roll the dough out on a floured surface, or if that doesn't work out for you, which it often doesn't for me, pick it up in little pieces and press it into the pie pan, as you would for a crumble crust. There's no shame in that. Pie crust is like love and war: all's fair so long as it gets the job done. Poke a bunch of holes in the bottom with a fork and prebake for 5 minutes.

Remove from oven and cool, then spoon in the mince. Top with a lattice crust if you like, or with an unbroken top crust, or even sprinkle the dough on like a Dutch apple pie topping if that works better for you. Did I mention pie crust is like love and war? Now stick it back in the oven and bake for 40 minutes. Cool and eat, if you have any room after all that turkey. If not, it makes a delightful breakfast.

--Brought to you by The Rebel Cook (my new name for my cooking alter ego)