Recipe #8: Carol’s Brownies

In his run for the Republican party Presidential nomination, Ron Paul garnered a demographic of supporters and volunteers otherwise surprising for a septuagenarian conservative: college students and young adults. Was it Representative Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy and critical eye on the Federal Reserve that endeared him to this new generation of voters? Maybe so. Or… perhaps it was his stance against the war on drugs. You might know what it’s like to be a college student.

So this recipe for brownies might be more to a hopeful quasi-Libertarian than just a tried family favorite. I am not suggesting the Paul family has been doing – or even espousing – anything illegal: they seem an upright (even overachieving) bunch. It’s just… not hard to suppose that this would be the go-to recipe for untold numbers of celebrants should Ron Paul’s take on the legalization of currently-banned substances be enacted into law.

Basically, they’re brownies from scratch, made from things you might suppose (and/or wish for).

What it takes to bake.
(NOTE: The contents of the baggie are purely notional.)

Baker’s chocolate and butter

Chocolate and fats

melted most smoothly

The main flavor

while eggs and sugar get blended

I tried to make this as smooth as possible without over-mixing

and those two liquids get combined

Like an oil spill

along with the other usual ingredients for brownies: flour, baking powder, vanilla, and – I quote: “chopped pecans (optional)”. O Carol Paul! We’re Texans, are we not? For us, there is no option not to add pecans. …Also, this would be a good point to measure in any additional ingredients you might take it upon yourself to add.

Along with what-have-you

Mix the whole thing thoroughly,

Stirs up easily

spread the batter out in a pan,

For once in a baking recipe, the recommended
9" x 13" pan seems the correct size

and bake.

All straightforward so far. But this is where the recipe takes a turn for the odd, with Carol Paul relating “A good way to frost brownies - the 2012 version of not having to ice them!” – this being to spread “a bag” of chocolate chips and “a bag” of white chocolate chips (also adding chopped nuts “if desired”; see comment above) “over the baked brownies and return them to the oven for 1 minute”. This is supposed to provide an easy, suitable topping for the brownies, though upon reading the recipe at first it didn’t seem right. But I took the recipe at its word and gamely did as suggested. I also figured it would be easier and more even to mix the topping ingredients

Looks like an over-indulgent trail mix

before spreading them onto the baked brownies

Is that a s’mores casserole?

and popping them back into the hot oven for… a minute? I checked after that time and there was no appreciable change to the chocolate chips, so I added thirty seconds to the finishing time in the oven. All that seemed to happen was that the chocolate chips got shinier.

Not much melting gone on

At this point the best I could hope was for the residual heat of the freshly-baked brownies to melt the chips further, enough to make them stick together for some sort of integrated topping on the brownies. But, even after letting the whole pan cool overnight, it was not to be.

What the heck is that?!?

The substratum – the mixed, baked brownies – cut and served just fine, but the topping of chips and nuts just tumbled off the surface of each piece. The elements of the topping didn’t hold together at all. Looks like the 2013 version of not having to ice the brownies would entail leaving the chip-covered brownies back in the oven for five or ten minutes, or however long it would take for the chips to truly melt together (without burning the contents of the pan).

But judging from sampling of this batch of brownies, I likely wouldn’t again bother to get this type of topping right: it simply doesn’t impress me as appealing. The chocolate chips are too much of a solid candy coating that clashes with the more usual and serviceable brownie layer, which was the best part of the final result. The brownies themselves are of the fudge-like variety, quite smooth and tasty. They clearly would have been better with a traditional frosting or even no topping at all. Taken altogether, though, the final outcome of the recipe was… not at all good. I just wanted to try all the options for this recipe – at least those that are given in the cookbook and are legally allowed in my state.

The recipe does not give any variations for high-altitude baking. But I’m confident those of you in the higher parts of Colorado and the state of Washington will know what to do.

Lesson learned: One should be fully informed before varying a brownie recipe

Rating: Two out of five tablespoons of an unspecified dried herbaceous substance

Recipe #7: Bread and Butter Pickles

So here’s the scenario: By the third year of the second Paul administration, all federal farm subsidies have been ended (despite fierce opposition from Tea Party-backed legislators from rural farm states) – in fact, the whole Department of Agriculture has been eliminated; all federally-owned lands (including National Parks) have been auctioned off and are under private ownership (with the landowners themselves issuing and selling their territories’ hunting and fishing licenses at their own discretion); the Federal Reserve has been eliminated (the video of Ben Bernanke recanting his monetary philosophy as he is being stretched on the rack had been the YouTube sensation of the year) and the U.S. is now on the starkest monetary gold standard (only gold coins and bullion are recognized as legal currency, with silver being acceptable for certain small fees… the obsolete paper Federal Reserve notes are only used for fancy, nostalgic games of Monopoly and – once shredded – as insulating material for the outside walls of backyard riot shelters); the BLM, the EPA, the DEA, and the BATF have all been eliminated by Executive Order; and the Fourteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Amendments have been repealed.

In this quasi-Libertarian utopia you – as you have so many times before – don your least-threadbare camo dinner jacket and gather with your family around the table in your dining bunker, offer up a prayer of thanks to the Author Of All Liberty, and dig in to a nearly-adequate meal of newly-caught game (those rabbits seem to be getting scarcer with each passing season, but you’ve heard that several miles to the northwest there’s a pond which might contain some turtles, so you make a mental note to check it out soon), freshly-foraged tubers, and repurposed-plastic-jugs of water from your solar-powered distiller. As you take your sustenance, you get a small hankering for something… extra, something else along with your meal. Not a side dish, exactly – more like a condiment, a flavorful little something that could go with your food, mainly for the taste of it. Something like they used to have in… the Old Days.

Fortunately for your family, you had the foresight, back in the dark days of the Presidential campaign of 2012, to have prepared such a delicacy. “This deserves a special treat,” you say, as you unlock the reinforced steel door of the bunker’s storage cabinet, reach up to the highest shelf, and retrieve a small glass jar…


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Pickles.

Who the hell makes pickles at home? This is asked by a man who grew up in – and has only ever lived in – suburban U.S.A. My father spent his childhood in small towns, but once he joined the Navy there was no looking back. It was the Big Apple for him as a young man, and my mother is a Brooklyn gal through and through. So naturally they raised their family in the suburbs, where pickles grew in large bulk barrels in front of supermarket deli counters. (Remember those?)

Who makes pickles at home? This asked by a man who declined to take the home economics course offered in Junior High School.

Who makes pickles at home? Can you tell by now that I don’t have my kitchen decorated with blue-and-white check wallpaper and images of ducks wearing blue scarves?

Ye country people make pickles at home, that’s who. In short, people who can.

Yes, can. I see this recipe calls for boiling jars, so what else could it be but a canning recipe? I have never canned food before and – frankly – I’m trying not to be scared. What if I don’t get it right? Childhood wisdom among my peers had it that if you opened a can of food spoiled by botulism and took even one whiff… well, by then it was too late. You would die instantly, guaranteed. Isn’t this too much to risk just for some pickles?

Well, nobody said this project of my attempting the Ron Paul Family Cookbook would be easy. I stand determined. No guts, &c. He can who thinks he can!

But I can only do so much: This recipe, as written, starts with a gallon of sliced cucumbers, in addition to a fair amount of other ingredients, and yields seven eighths of a gallon. That’s just too voluminous for me to want to bother with, living above ground as I do. So, having purchased three pint-sized mason jars from trusty Dollar Tree, I decided to fractionate the recipe and deal with only three eights (or .375 as my handy calculator terms it) of its ingredients and yield. I don’t have a big allowance for food poisoning I’m willing to chance!

The ingredients are about what you might expect. Pickles are cucumbers, right? Cucumbers: check! And a few pungent seasonings (notably, tumeric [sic] and celery seed)… not complicated at all.

Soon to be in a pickle

The first thing to do is put sliced cucumbers and onion and unsliced garlic, all salted, together

Primary mix – note the solitary garlic

and cover them with crushed ice for three hours.

Even cooler than a cucumber

Why? I don’t know. There must be some chemical and/or thermal reaction going on at this point… maybe this is the closest the Ron Paul Family Cookbook comes to molecular cuisine. No matter – I didn’t flinch, this step was easy enough.

Toward the latter part of the waiting time I prepped my never-before-used mason jars by boiling them for a long time, thus (I figure) sterilizing the hell out of them.

Out, OUT, ye spores of deadly contagion!
 …Are you supposed to boil the lids? I don’t know.
I’m just trying not to die here.

My humble kitchen is not set up for the aforementioned molecular cooking – and unlike Dr. Paul I don’t have access to medical equipment – so this pot of boiling water is the closest thing I have to an autoclave.

Once emerged from under its icy covering, the fragrant vegetable mixture was reminiscent of a summer salad.

If you dug raw vegetables you’d stop here

But it still had more processing to go. The next step was to mix the sugar and vinegar (as contradictory a combination of foodstuffs as can be) and spices and boil,

Boiling vinegar… yum!

which didn’t take long, then add the vegetables

We’re in this pickle together

and heat for five minutes more. (I slightly overdid this heating, but that hadn’t seemed to do any damage.) Then fill the jars loosely, and boil them five minutes more.

Last chance to get the hygiene right

One really needs a pair of tongs to handle all these hot objects! Which is what I used to lay out the jars and lids.

Maybe the plate shoulda been sterilized too?

The lids cooled quickly enough for me to (delicately) handle those to seal the jars.

The turmeric-stained cutting board tells the tale.
And nothing, but NOTHING, – not even alcohol,
scraping, or vigorous boiling – could remove the
sticky residue left on the lids by the jars’ price tags.
I hate that stuff!

It was gratifying and reassuring to see, an hour or so later, the tops of all the lids had become concave as the jars cooled, indicating a pressure seal had been formed. That what’s supposed to happen, right?

•Twenty Hours Later•

I whipped up a some food that would go well with a side of pickles.

Maybe go good with some panini sandwiches?

If the contents of the jar were spoiled, about this time I’d be able to tell without encountering too much putrescence. Time for the moment of truth.

Listen closely!

The sealed lid pried off with a satisfying (and surprisingly loud) whoosh of air into the jar. And the contents smelled like pickles!

I feel like the jar should’ve had a blue and
white check ribbon tied around it

I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe the onions added something necessary to the mélange (and they did taste good), but the really important concern is: How were the pickle slices? I can happily report: Excellent! This was a universal assessment from everyone at the table. I can describe the pickles as semi-crunchy in the best way – who knew that mushy pickles could seem so wan in comparison? Their flavor was subtle, with just the right levels of acidic and sweet playing off each other, nothing overbearing or harsh, as sometimes is the case with store-bought pickles. This, clearly then, is the advantage of making pickles on one’s own kitchen. And, starting out small and simple is enough to make home canning seem not so daunting. I’m going to wait a few weeks before opening all the jars I canned, to really put my food preserving prowess to the test. With compatible dishes, I’m willing to eat these pickles any time!

Lesson learned: There’s no reason to hold out for complete societal collapse to make your own pickles – even happier occasions will do!

Rating: Five out of five lead-lined bunkers

Recipe #6: Autumn Root Vegetable Roast

Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) might be a kinda-Libertarian free-market individual-rights type politician, but he’s also a physician – and in that last capacity he has a theoretical obligation to tell you at least once (or, more likely, at most once) to eat your vegetables. Thus, this recipe for roasted vegetables.

So now we get to the indubitably healthy food dish! This is a simple recipe – not in terms of it having been devised necessarily for convenience (though it takes only rudimentary working), but in that it’s made with ingredients that have been minimally processed, if at all.

Raw and ready

Most of what goes into this recipe are vegetables as simply as they grew. Plain and simple. The recipe explicitly gives leeway to use whatever vegetables you prefer, but I stuck to the recipe as written. Gotta try to get the real Paulesque experience, you know.

Well, if a quasi-Libertarian is going to nanny it up enough to actually advise you to eat vegetables, you can bet they won’t implore you to make a fuss of it. No sautéing, no mashing, no braising… not much peeling or chopping, for that matter. No sir! Just mix with “a good olive oil,” salt and pepper,

All shook up

Full sheet

and roast

In situ, on the grill.
I used an outdoor grill because I made this autumn recipe in the summer

at 425° Fahrenheit

Control it well, Mr. Weber!

for forty-five minutes. All cooked well enough,

A hot and happy result

except for the red-skinned potatoes. This was likely because I used particularly large ones – the largest ones I could obtain, which is the American way. I wound up taking these out of the finished tray and roasting them for forty-five minutes more.

Altogether, the results were good.

Not a typical serving, but a representative sample of each veggie

I purposely used a light hand in applying the olive oil and seasonings, to let the natural flavors of the vegetables prevail, and it worked for the better. Everyone in my family liked all or most of the results (kids gobbled down the potatoes but wouldn’t touch the brussels sprouts, as is the natural order of things), and even the little charred parts added favorably to the taste of the vegetables (as is right, according to the recipe).

If it weren’t for the decidedly un-Republican hippie-vibe connotations, I’d say this dish would not be out of place in the deli case at your local Whole Foods. (But wait! That could be apt: Isn’t the CEO of Whole Foods one of those organically-grown capitalist Crunchy Conservatives that are alleged to exist?)

Yes, every so often even conservatives in the USA opt to eschew the overwrought fruits of the American food processing industry and instead keep food simple, just as nature The Creator intended. No argument here!

Lesson learned: Simple produce can be elegant, in a natural way… Republicans could pretend they’re back in the Garden of Eden.

Rating: Four out of five doctors

Recipe #5: Orange Juice Pudding Cake

Okay, kids. You’ve had your dessert, dessert, dessert, and meat course. Now it’s time for dessert.

In this case, it is a disarmingly simple cake – akin in its light texture to pound cake, like unto tres leches cake in its oozing moistness, and reminiscent of a glazed donut in its aroma.

Lest you think this is some sort of Frankencake, I assure you it is more integrated than that. It really is quite simple. I can describe this generally as a mild lemon cake topped with a sugar/orange flavoring.

The ingredients are nothing unusual.

What it takes to bake

(Though, I was a bit stumped by the recipe’s calling for “Crisco oil” – was that to mean the smeary Crisco stuff in a can? Probably not, as other recipes in the book call for just “Crisco”, which seems apt for those dishes. And which boxed cake mix ever calls for the canned shortening? So, wanting to be true to Carol Paul’s recipe, I splurged the extra dollar on Crisco brand “Pure Vegetable Oil”. [And what did I get for the money? Soybean oil. That’s it – that’s the only thing listed in the ingredients. Other brands of “vegetable oil” were like this too; why? There is nothing wrong with soybean oil, not even in the American public’s mind. Why don’t the producers label the stuff as soybean oil on the front of the package as well as on the back?] After making the cake I can honestly estimate that any soybean oil would have worked as well. So why call for “Crisco oil” specifically? One clue might be found in the fine print on the back of the bottle: “MANUFACTURED BY: […] THE J.M. SMUCKER COMPANY  ORRVILLE, OH”… and a cynic could appropriately suppose Mrs. Paul is ingratiating her candidate husband with the good people of the “important swing state” [as the news reports invariably describe it] of Ohio. My final judgment is: If you don’t have a stake in electoral politics, any soybean oil will do.)

Mix up the appropriate cake stuff, and get an appropriate batter.

Batter up

Bake the cake until, as the recipe puts it, “the middle does not jiggle.” I pride myself on being a good judge of jiggle, so I left the cake in the oven a few minutes more than the time the recipe otherwise suggested. Maybe a few too many minutes more, as the cake got to browning at the edges and was pulling away from the sides of the pan – but ultimately this might have worked out for the better, as we shall soon see.

The recipe next instructs to prick the cake with a fork all over the top.

Stick a fork in it. The recipe said so!

This is to prepare it for the deluge of topping.

Some thin glaze

The topping is very thin. It is a mixture of orange juice, melted butter, milk (or water, the recipe states it’s your choice; water!) with confectioner’s sugar dissolved in. This isn’t a glaze so much as a liquid. “NOW! MORE MOIST!” the screaming blurbs on the cake mix boxes are apt to proclaim… but you want moist? Pour this over a newly-baked cake and you’ll get it dripping moist.

Slosh

It doesn’t stay on top of the cake – actually, it does at first, but only until it gets all absorbed into the cake within a few minutes. And then the cake is moist through and through.

That’s more reasonable!

Had I not overbaked the cake a little bit, I can only imagine what the moisture level would have been after this step. Since the cake got a liquidy topping deluge, it turned out to be pretty forgiving that I had left the cake in the oven a minute or two too long.

I really had trepidation after this step, at first, as at this point the cake’s main scent was an overpowering butter smell. But this soon mellowed to a sweet, light smell reminiscent of nothing so much as a glazed donut. Not unpleasant!

You don’t have to use a spoon

But the cake itself tasted more compelling, with a lemon flavor that was satisfying but light enough to be subtle. The orange juice in the glaze might have added an additional fruity flavor, but I suspect it was mostly there for the tangy sweetness. It all worked well together, and you can’t top this cake for moistness. My family all gave it positive reviews and ate it regularly. This is a dessert that pleases and not overwhelms.

Lesson learned: You want a moist cake? Pour liquid over it.

Rating: Nine out of ten sopping crumbs

Recipe #4: Sherry’s Easy Brisket

Finally, some real food. Quasi-Libertarians do not live by dessert alone, and the rest of us shouldn’t either.

What else could it be but an entrée? One made from a big hunk of beef, and you can’t get more stereotypically American than that.

You also can’t get more American than the convenience that is at the heart of this recipe. The soup mix and salad dressing manufacturers of this world did all the preparing and combining of the flavorings, so you don’t have to!

Somebody said it would be easy

Not that I’m complaining. I’m not above convenience cooking. I’m all for anything that makes preparations for cooking a three-and-a-half-pound chunk of meat easier.

So easy it was, to combine all the pre-prepared flavorings and pour them over the uncooked meat,

Red and raw

and then put the whole covered deal into a 250° oven to cook for hours on end.

Later that day

I actually like this pace of cooking, getting something going and forgetting about it for three or four hours. It turns out that this is best for cooking brisket – “low and slow” is the term – but I perhaps could have left it to cook longer, as the meat didn’t come out as tender as brisket should be.

Edible, though

Or so I was told. Remember, I’m a vegetarian, so this dish wouldn’t have appealed to me anyway. But the rest of my family loved it, fairly gobbled it about all up. The flavor was reported to have been very, very good (in fact my wife has been beseeching me to make this again), and I’m willing to give the recipe the benefit of the doubt and take personal blame for the less-than-ideal texture of the meat. If even a vegetarian of near thirty years standing can make this dish come out compelling enough, well, it must be easy indeed.

Lesson learned: Big chunks of meat are not as revolting if you don’t think about them so much

Rating: Nine out of ten dead animals

Recipe #3: Cherry-Pineapple Dump Cake

Another dessert item? I’m figuring diabetes does not run in the Paul family. All this sugary stuff! This cookbook wouldn’t be half as sweet if Dr. Paul were a dentist instead of an OB/GYN.

But… “Dump”? Please let me believe this word was applied to this dessert’s name because of some cutesy Paul family moment. If “Dump Cake” is a more common term than that, I’m glad to have lived my forty-eight years without having previously run across it. The most charitable thing to deduce is that the term comes from this dish’s preparation: the ingredients

Ready for dumpage

never get mixed together, but are simply spread out into the pan one after the other…

Mix into the dump

dumped into the pan, to put it crudely. Needless to say, preparation is a snap.

I’ve never actually looked through any of those 202 Surprising Things to Do With Cake Mix-type cookbooks, but I imagine this recipe might well fit right in with any of them, since this dessert gets topped with yellow cake mix – dry and straight out of the box. Over that gets poured melted butter, which doesn’t absorb in at first.

Gold puddles top the dump

Let’s see: Layers of fruit, sweetened grain on top of that, the whole assemblage then gets baked… That would be anyone else’s definition of cobbler.

The dump gets “golden brown and bubbly”

It seems the butter, along with the pineapple juice that gets dumped (along with the crushed pineapple) into the pan first thing, soak in and/or steam up and moisten the cake mix as it bakes. The butter, cake mix, and toasted pecans really make a rich, fetching aroma. This is a flavorful dessert.

Warm dump

One thing I worried about before baking this was that the pineapple would perhaps add too much flavor. I love pineapple, but I thought it wouldn’t lend itself well to any sort of cobbler. No worries, as it turned out: The pineapple pieces were pretty inconspicuous in the final result, at least to me – apparently their role was mostly to serve as a sweetener.

None of this bothered my family, all of whom had good reports about this dish. We all liked it, but never could say the proper name of this dessert without tripping over the word “Dump”.

Lesson learned: O, be some other name!

                                What's in a name? that which we call a cobbler

                                By any other name would taste as sweet

Rating: Eight out of ten vaguely disgusting labels

Recipe #2: Mama’s Peanut Butter Cookies

More of the sweet treats-type food. The subtle plan seems to be: Grab the voters by the sweet tooth.

Or, maybe: Grab ’em by the heartland, as it’s hard to think of a more plainly all-American treat than peanut butter cookies. Doing a little lightweight research happily confirms my suspicion that these baked treats were indeed invented right here in the good ol’ U. S. of A. That just seems right.

Looks like the Pauls are playing on my emotions, now. So: To the task at hand!

This is a simple recipe, as befits a homespun classic. I was able to whip these up in less than ninety minutes. And, as was the case for me, you might even find you already have all the ingredients on hand. No special shopping trip needed!

The ingredients

(Though the fine print on my package of what I took to be white sugar gave me pause: “[…] Replacement For White Refined Sugar” is the way my sweetener made from evaporated cane juice is described. The recipe specifically calls for “white sugar”, so probably I didn’t follow it as closely as I thought. I’d like to think the organic sugar I used is completely interchangeable with the usual refined white sugar – wouldn’t it be, if my kids can make Kool-Aid with it? – but next time I’ll be more comfortable to hew to the recipe more exactingly.)

The ingredients are straightforward, so the recipe’s proprietary nature lies in their proportions and the order in which they get combined. All mixed, they made for a crumbly dough,

All mixed up

which was easy enough to apportion into individual cookies. Showing that respecting tradition is a hallmark of conservatism, the recipe instructs to “press down with fork to make an imprint,” though anybody who grew up in the US would know at least that much about making peanut butter cookies.

New and impressionable

All baked, the cookies had a nice light color and texture. I left the second (smaller) batch in the oven a few minutes longer than the prescribed time, and they were the better for it – a little bit firmer and crispier.

Yeah, I use parchment. So did the Founders!

All around, the results were fine. No one in my family complained, and I know I enjoyed the finished product.

Pairs well with cold milk

Lao Tzu said: “Ruling a country is like cooking a small fish,” and I’m guessing the Paulian analog to that would be: “Governing a republic is like baking a batch of peanut butter cookies.” It’s hard to mess up a classic if you don’t get too innovative or ambitious.

Lesson learned: Sometimes simple and traditional is all you need.

Rating: Four out of four fork tine impressions