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

Recipe #1: Oreo Cake

Now this is the way to open a cookbook. A lesser volume – one written by an actual chef, say – would likely start off with some sort of appetizer, maybe an arugula and elaeagnus berry canapé with a Béarnaise reduction sauce… but not here! You think Republicans do arugula? (Do you even think they do acute accents?) Nope! If being sort-of Libertarian includes jettisoning any notion of saving dessert for last – who needs the ministrations of some prim, elitist dietician? – then I’m almost ready to sign up.

Put it this way: Would the Michelle Obama Cookbook even include an Oreo dessert, much less start with one? Don’t bet your skinny jeans on it.

But first, to smash some Oreos.

Just because it’s 2012

Those would be special, 2012-only Birthday Cake Oreos, all decorated out to commemorate one hundred years of chocolate sandwich cookie goodness. (So the debut of Oreos was contemporaneous with the Titanic disaster. Who knew? Maybe Mrs. John Jacob Astor IV consoled herself with a cold goblet of milk and a silver tray piled with Oreos.) Peggy Paul notes in her recipe: “I use double stuffed [sic],” but I thought I’d commemorate the year Ron Paul is making his most prolonged grab for the brass ring yet by using these 2012-specific cookies.

These commemorative Oreos won’t stay fresh forever

It’s a pretty simple recipe, chock full of sugar and fats, as most worthwhile desserts are wont to be.

The ingredients

The cake basically is supported on a crumbled Oreo crust, and the commemorative centenary sprinkles certainly stood out amidst the brown crumbles.

A break from monochrome Oreos

After that, it was the layering of the gloppy stuff: cream cheese mixture, chocolate pudding, Cool Whip.

Careful layering

“Decorate with slivers of chocolate or crushed cookies,” saith the recipe, but was there even a choice? If I’m going to go Oreo I’m going to go all the way Oreo.

I probably could’ve crumbled the Oreo topping more finely

The result? I let the cake cool in the refrigerator (as instructed), but perhaps not as much as optimum (but there’s always subsequent portions for that). The pieces cut with a plastic spatula held together well enough.

Pretty together

And they found favor with most of my family, myself included. “Just like a regular Oreo pie,” it was pointed out to me. It is a rich dessert. If anything, it was maybe a touch too sweet, but I wonder how much the special-flavor Oreos are responsible for that. (Probably no worse than Double Stuf would be.) To me, the big pan of it brought to mind nothing so much as the even bigger trays of gloppy desserts to be had at the dessert counters of Golden Corral… and I mean that in the most appreciative, jam-another-spoonful-into-your-stuffed-belly way.

So: this venture started with a most functional, no-sugar-barred markedly sweet dessert, liked by one and all who tried it. It’s clear the Ron Paul family is doing its sugar-laden best to ingratiate itself with ours. They’re off to a good start – culinary, if not political – with this.

Lesson learned: Gather ye commemorative cookies while ye may.

Rating: 90 out of 100 notional birthday candles

Intro

“boudin sausage”?

What I hope to get into here is, mainly, a bit of fun, as I can’t take the Ron Paul Family Cookbook entirely seriously. Who could? It seems such an anomaly. That’s one thing I like about it.

I’m not out to ridicule the Ron Paul Family Cookbook – I actually find it quite charming that a major-party would-be presidential candidate would, in this day and age, (partially) raise funds for his campaign by selling such a humble, homey booklet. Would that all the candidates did the same! Would that they all – dare to dream! – only raise money by selling such trifles. Take that, Citizens United!

I ought to dispense with the political considerations forthwith: I live in Texas, so my vote in the upcoming presidential election will have exactly null effect. I don’t expect to vote for Representative Paul, or any other Republican. (I’ve almost always been out of step with how most everyone else around me votes, no matter where I’ve lived. Most often, the people I vote for lose. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.)

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of any political party: I am, in the pollsters’ parlance, an independent. (Not that anyone has ever polled me on my opinions). Republicans are big on stirring in faith with politics, but the closest I myself come to that is by taking it on faith that no one wants to hear about my politics. They’d make for boring reading. So: though it’s inspired by a political artifact, I don’t intend there to be a lot of political opining in this blog… only as much as levity warrants.

I know, I know: By purchasing my copy of the Ron Paul Family Cookbook, I contributed to the campaign of a Republican, something I’m not otherwise known to do. (But for a copy of a Warm Sauteed Bananas recipe it was worth it.) I mostly disagree with Ron Paul, albeit less than I do most other Republicans (though, about the racist and otherwise bigoted ravings in his past newsletters, I can only strongly state that it is, at best, inexcusable for him not to have known better), and the points with which I do agree with him (not supporting a marriage amendment to the federal Constitution; dispensing with the war on drugs; opposing the so-called Patriot Act, wanting to bring the troops home) basically ensure he will never be a Presidential candidate in the Republican party. No one holding those positions could be – in his lifetime, anyway. (Dare to further dream!)

So… since it’s not mainly political, I intend for this blog to be mainly culinary. Though… that could be too fancy a word for it, and for my attitude toward cooking in general. Food-oriented, let’s say – a more aptly humble term. I do enjoy cooking, but day-to-day I don’t set out to cook anything particularly complicated. I’ve got (lots of) other things to do. So I tend to keep my meal preparation on the simple side. (It’s telling that when my father told me I could have just about any of his extensive collection of cookbooks it didn’t even occur to me to take his copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. [I did, however, openly covet his copy of Mr. Food Cooks Like Mama, with which he wouldn’t part.]) Do people still use the word “gourmet”? Whatever they’re calling it nowadays, I’m not it.

If nothing else, this cooking venture should lead me to present new dishes to my family.

And it will be the other members of my family to judge many of them, as I’m happily vegetarian, and not even the Ron Paul Family Cookbook could inspire me to want to eat the fish or meat dishes. I’ll gamely cook them, though (as I often cook non-vegetarian meals for my family). For the vegetarian dishes, I’ll include my own assessment in their rankings.

I have decided to follow the recipes in the Ron Paul Family Cookbook as closely as possible (with the sometime exception of fractioning some of the higher-yield ones). I will resist my usual urge to “healthify” the recipes: I won’t use whole wheat flour if the recipe simply calls for “flour”, for instance. (While doing so would be technically accurate, I’m just assuming it’s not what the Ron Paul family would do.) And much as I love the big ol’ jar of coconut oil sitting in my pantry, if a recipe calls for Crisco I’ll just see to it that I make my first-ever purchase of the canned shortening. I want to get the full effect of the recipes, to get the dishes as the recipes’ authors intend them to be.

So that’s the what and why. This little project is being fun already! Get me started cooking!

Idea

Inspiration

You know how there was this food blog? And in it this married woman in New York City sets out to make all the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and writes about it all? And along the way she happens upon lessons of Life and Love and Living As A Hip Young Person In The City? You know, and it becomes really famous? Meryl Streep starred in the movie.

Well, maybe I could do the same thing, only using the Ron Paul Family Cookbook – surely as influential a culinary volume as any of our time. I think I’ve got the kitchen skills to pull this off. There’s a Walmart only three miles from my house, so getting all the exotic ingredients shouldn’t be a problem. I, a married suburban middle-class shlub, could start at the beginning and work my way through each recipe in turn, and see what lessons in Love and Life and Abolishing The Fed I encounter along the way. And, to see if my family becomes quasi-Libertarian (if not outright Republican) by the time the last morsel of Creole Praline Yam Casserole is consumed. 2012 seems a good year to start this.

Adam Scott could play me in the movie.