I am.

I wasn’t always like this,

sucked so dry I needed to buy slick lotions

to rub into my skin–

I wasn’t always like this.

Oh, the wonders I once held

warm in my cupped hands, then forgot.

I turn the page, waving like a white flag.

I lived once

without my need:

The mouth that yawns wide,

a deep black hole.

The mouth that hates silence. Asks

too many simple questions.

The mouth I always feared

was too big.

The mouth I made too small.

Can we teeter together

on this knife’s edge of having and wanting –

the blameless mouth and

the blameless woman

who wears you

like a crimson rose, opening

on her expansive, snow

silenced fields?

The above is a compilation of lines taken from a variety of poems in poet Jessica Fox-Wilson’s Blameless Mouth manuscript. As a long-time friend, I am hoping she’ll forgive me for fracturing and reconstructing her work as part of my participation in her virtual book tour to give you a taste of her book.

I had many grand plans for this stop on her book tour. I envisioned pairing exciting new recipes with her poems on hunger and satiety. I envisioned relating the themes of Blameless Mouth—consumption both mindful and unmindful, wanting, possessing—with the politics of the way we eat. I considered tying masculine and feminine relationships to hunger and food to a close reading of her remarkable collection.

Ultimately, I have done none of these things.

My own relationship to food lately has been changing. I am nearly four months pregnant (YAY!), and, thanks to some powerful, persistent nausea, I spent a good deal of the past 3 months avoiding the kitchen and dreading food. As I have entered the second trimester, however, food has again begun to look and smell and taste appealing, and I find myself more and more back in the kitchen I love as my energy levels slowly pick up. The food I make now is not just for myself and my husband; it is for the tiny person I am only just beginning to know.

I can’t yet know the ways in which becoming a mother will change me, but I know that many of the aspects of women’s lives portrayed in Blameless Mouth will be part of that transformation: voice, agency, hunger, and satiety. Jessica’s poems examine what women seek, what we are willing to speak, how we silence ourselves and are silenced by others, how voids are created inside ourselves as we grow into women, and what role we and others have in filling such voids.

I am neither a young mother nor an inexperienced person, which means that I will be fortunate enough to approach motherhood from a position of relative strength. I have learned to acknowledge the importance  of satisfying my own hunger even as I care for others and learned to be comfortable speaking what is worth saying in spite of my fear. I have grown to be at peace with my own blameless mouth. That peace is what I most want to teach my child, boy or girl.

Jessica’s collection of poetry runs a wide range, depicting both fear and fearlessness when faced with one’s true self and one’s own desires. For that reason, Blameless Mouth has broad application; so many women can see themselves in the women portrayed in this book. All of us are intimately familiar with what it means to be scared and silenced and ashamed and uncertain at times. All of us also know what it means to be bold and confident and fierce and strong. In being and expressing honestly who we are, in accepting ourselves in the present moment even as we critically examine both self and society, we are all of us blameless.

If you haven’t yet read this book, pick up a copy. It’s honest, clear, compassionate, and compelling. In it, I see myself and the women around me. It’s beautiful, memorable, and utterly remarkable.

This past week, I experimented with a few new items while looking for some lower-sugar options for diabetic friends and family. I call this a “recipe hack”; cracking the chemistry of cooking to understand what gives a recipe its yum and consistency while also making it work for what you need. In this case, the need was less sugar! Sadly, all this hacking leaves me pressed for time to take and process pictures, but, since I modified existing recipes, please feel free to go admire the pictures on the recipes linked below! This is going to be a quick and dirty explanation, just to give you an idea of how you can play with recipes on your own to work with your guests’ needs and preferences.

First up: Savanna cheesecake bars by Paula Deen.

Yes, Paula is usually more known for decadent yumminess more than healthier options, and no, this isn’t a health food, but it does have several redeeming qualities over many other holiday baked goods. My version packed the cookie crust with pecans and whole grain flour, I used lower-fat Neufchatel cheese instead of cream cheese in the cheesecake part, and I slathered the completed bars with a homemade fresh cranberry glaze spiced with ginger and cinnamon. We love cheesecake, and I have a thing for fresh cranberries; this one was a big hit in the taste testings in our house.

You can see the recipe at the link above, which I won’t reprint out of respect for the copyright. What did I change in my version?

Crust: I used whole wheat flour, replaced the sugar with agave nectar, cut the butter down to half a stick, and added 1/2 c. of dried, unsweetened coconut.

Filling: I used Neufchatel instead of cream cheese, substituted 3/4 c. agave nectar for the cup of sugar, added 1 Tbsp of flour, and tossed in zest from an entire lemon along with the juice from 1/2 of it

Finally, for the topping, I cooked down a pile of cranberries along with pomegranate and orange juices, cinnamon, allspice, fresh ginger, nutmeg, and agave nectar to taste. It thickened up on its own like a champ. It holds up well in both the fridge and the freezer, making it a great bake-ahead option.

Next up was something truly “fussy”: peanut butter cups. Think coating little paper cups with melted chocolate. Basically, if it’s something I had any interest in doing regularly, I’d take the commenters’ advice on that recipe and invest in some squeezy bottles rather than trying to swizzle or paint the chocolate. Life is short.

I used this recipe as a base, making several modifications to make it lower-sugar.

For the chocolate shell, I melted together half semisweet and half bittersweet chocolate with butter instead of shortening. The filling was a different beast entirely than what was originally printed. I mixed 1/2 c. natural peanut butter with 2 Tbsp flax seed oil, 1 Tbsp powdered milk, 2 Tbsp brown rice syrup, 1/4 c. agave nectar, and 1/2 c. oats (which I ground into flour in the Vitamix before adding to the PB mixture) and 1/2 c. dried coconut (also flour-ized). I did not heat the filling at any point.

Verdict? For me, not worth the effort. I am not a woman with the constitution to paint tiny paper cups with chocolate. However, it’s a fun gift for a peanut butter-chocolate addict you want to treat, and the Unicyclist sure enjoyed these.

That’s all she wrote, folks. I must zoom on out of here–presents need to be wrapped and much else needs to be done! Have a wonderful rest of your week. If you have time, drop in and tell me in the comments what your own best holiday recipe hack has been!

A large part of ourselves and the environment we have built can be illuminated if we are bold enough to identify hunger in our lives, critically examine our consumption, and cultivate a sense of satiety that perhaps doesn’t depend on consumption, at least not in the sense of exhausting resources.

For quite a while now, Jessica has used her own blog to make public her journey as an artist. She invited us in as she moved from concept to concept, from one stand-alone piece to another. Over time, she has nurtured a series of poems that have grown like a tangle of flowering vines from a single common root. Last week she posed a challenge to those of us who have been watching her build her narrative one verse at a time.

Tell me, she said, what would it mean for you to be blameless?

This is a question with heft and jagged edges. It’s the kind of question that must be handled gingerly, or it cuts. Often deeply. At the same time, it is a question that yields nothing if not grasped firmly with both hands.

It’s a question I have avoided answering for the past week.

Part of me believes that to be blameless is to be inhuman. We are all of us bruised and corrupt and angry and selfish at times. We are all of us careless and hasty. All of us understand what it is to begrudge another. All of us have been supremely worthy of blame at different points in our lives. What would it mean to be blameless? I collect even the most minor missteps I have made in my life. In my memory are dozens upon dozens of monuments to my fallibility, all of them gleaming dully like trophies. I don’t visit them regularly, but they’re there. Whenever I believe myself to be at fault for yet another infraction, I find myself there, surrounded by the collected errors of a lifetime on display in my mind. I run over and over and over them. I know all their shapes and weights and textures by heart.

I cannot be blameless. Over the years, however, I have come to understand that each and every one of the times that I have found myself to blame has been essential to beauty, to growth. Understanding the consequences of haste, the opportunity that comes with weakness, the wisdom that comes from recognizing the hurt I have caused to another—these are pieces of my life worth treasuring. Not only do they have a great deal to offer, but they also have been bought at a price. This is, perhaps, what it means to be blameless. To walk through life acknowledging when I have done wrong, avoiding similar missteps as best I can, and holding the insights from these moments as precious because of the cost at which they were bought.

To be blameless is also to be fearless, particularly where our voices are concerned. Frankly, our mouths are known to get us into trouble. We hunger for food, people, things, love. Sometimes, our mouths are full of a bitter truth, an unpopular opinion, or a call to action that demands we give up our own comfortable apathy. Too often, especially as women, we are berated or berate ourselves for speaking truth openly or for hungering, for wanting more than what we are generally allowed. Being blameless means accepting hunger as a necessary part of living and fearless speech as necessary part of living well.

Ultimately, to be blameless is not to be free of blame. It is simply to forgive ourselves and to understand that so much of what is good and beautiful in us is there not in spite of our flaws, but because of them.

I love that Jessica’s first widely public manuscript is Blameless Mouth. With each poem, with each day well-lived, with each misstep, Jessica has been growing more fearless. Although she may not know it, I have been growing more fearless alongside her. Today, here she stands in a crowd of loved ones and strangers, her hands weighted with poems.

Her blameless voice is about to be heard.

For anyone who has missed the writing on the wall, I am an experimental cook. So, in all honesty, my Christmas goodie-fest actually started two days ago when I made mint chocolate “fudge.”

I knew full well that messing with fudge was to tempt fate since fudge, like caramels and other types of candy, is a chemistry project first and foremost. For that reason, I attempted to respect the protein, sugar, and fat ratios as much as possible while also trying to replace half the sugar with agave nectar and cutting the overall sweetness of it. I knew full well I wasn’t guaranteed fudge, but I figured I’d wind up with something interesting. And I did: a delicious, soft, creamy concoction that could be scooped and keep its shape. I had, I quickly realized, the perfect center for a minty truffle. So today, that’s where I started. I scooped the filling into balls and popped them into the freezer for about 15 minutes while I melted dark chocolate over a very low heat on the stove. I then smoothed out the minty bits, rolled them around in the dark chocolate until covered, and popped them onto a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper to harden.

Quoth the Unicyclist: “A smooth and tasty little minty treat.” A flop if you had your heart set on fudge, but a total score as an all-natural, reduced-sugar chocolate truffle.

Since I still have chocolate on the stove, I think I’m going to go right into the predictable-but-delicious world of chocolate-covered pretzels. Then, however, I’m going to get really nutty. Cranberry caramel tarts, rosemary pine nut cookies…who can say? Stay tuned for updates and pictures!

***do-do-doop-do-do-doop-do-do-doop** [with Wayne and Garth fingers]

So, I wound up going with a chai and almond shortbread for the present, which I created by marrying an Earl Grey shortbread recipe with a hazelnut shortbread, subbing chai for the Earl Grey and a mix of raw and toasted almonds for the hazelnuts. It is, unsurprisingly, buttery and rich and spicy, and it makes the house smell amazing. The almonds and the ground tea add some great texture, but I almost wish I had used a spice grinder instead of a food processor for the tea; you do get some respectable nibbles of clove and cardamon in there, which may not appeal to all my holiday nibblers. I like it, but I also think cacao nibs are awesome. I think I am a minority. In any case, I am considering dipping one end of each shortbread in white chocolate and sprinkling a bit of toasted coconut on it, but I am going to wait and see how it is once it fully cools before I go playing with it.

Speaking of dunking, I did dip some short pretzel rods in dark chocolate and sprinkle chopped toasted almonds on them. They’re good, but I suspect they’d be awesome with semisweet chocolate instead of dark and little toffee bits sprinkled on them instead of almonds. If you’re looking for inspiration, that would be my suggestion on how to get the elusive additional yum factor and some visual appeal  without going the route of Christmas jimmies and artificial color.

***do-do-doop-do-do-doop-do-do-doop** [with Wayne and Garth fingers]

Taste testers’ verdict is in: don’t mess with the shortbread. Looks like it will remain white-chocolate- and coconut-free.

The evening is winding down, but I think I might do one last project and dip a few pretzels in white chocolate as well. Later this week, once I can get in and do some shopping, I am looking to try a few more of these recipes that caught my eye today: lemon ricotta cookies, polvorones (also known as Mexican wedding cookies), and perhaps some cheesecake squares with a fresh cranberry glaze. I am really intrigued by the rosemary pine nut cookie recipe I saw as well, but my project list is getting a littler butter-heavy between the shortbread, polvorones, and inevitable sugar cookies yet to come. I think I need some gingerbread or fruity options to balance it out. Or peanut butter balls. Or some minty brownies. Mmmmm.

Dear cookies:

Why must you all be so tasty?

Love,

Me

As the leaves grow bare and brace themselves under the freezing temperatures of late fall, I tend to shift into a more introspective mood. I make tea, embrace books, listen to the calls of birds swooping southward.

For those of us who live in northern states, migration is  a concrete fact of the season, woven into our cognitive and emotional conception of autumn. Geese fly in sharp angles overhead, calling out in their harsh voices, over and over. Huge clusters of sparrows swoop over the now-empty grain fields. Gradually, many animals disappear to warmer climes. However, until my uncle Mike, an avid naturalist, took me to Indiana in 2004, migration was just a single thread running through the fall tapestry, much like the rust-colors of the landscape,  the acrid smoke of burning leaves, and the growing chill in the air. Six years ago, he took me to Jasper-Pulaski, Indiana, for the first time, and I caught a glimpse of the phenomenon on a completely new scale. Yesterday, I packed up some gear and brought the Unicyclist with me for a return pilgrimage.

At sunset Friday and again at sunrise yesterday, we stood huddled together on the edge of Goose Pasture, watching literally thousands of greater sandhill cranes from the Great Lakes population kite into the open field. For those of you who don’t know what a sandhill crane is, it is a living dinosaur; a structurally identical sandhill crane fossil from the Miocene dates it as the oldest surviving bird species. Crane fossils in general date from the Eocene, and living cranes are, in many ways, largely unchanged from their ancient ancestors. In the flesh, most species of cranes are startlingly large, and all of them are keen-eyed, resourceful, and intensely aware of being watched. The greater sandhill crane stands about four to five feet high, possesses a wingspan of some six feet, and flies fully extended, its red-topped head reaching forward and its legs stretching behind it in a strong, clean line. A sandhill typically lives 20-25 years in the wild and mates for life. Although a crane colt is vulnerable to avian and mammalian predators, a fully-grown sandhill crane is not usually viewed as a viable option for filling one’s belly, thanks to the crane’s powerful wings, fierce talons, and deadly accuracy with its beak. As one example of their precision: I recently came across a story of a sandhill in captivity which neatly plucked a visitor’s hearing aid without so much as nicking the ear.

The sandhill has a voice at once distinct and difficult to describe, a dry, echoing ga-r-r-r-o-o-o-o which can carry over a mile. Hearing groups of sandhill cranes in a place like Goose Pasture, one of the first things that jumps out is how markedly unique the birds’ voices are even as they all sound so characteristically crane-like. The voice of the sandhill crane is a marble rolling across a wooden floor, a creaky door, a purr, a rattle, an echo of the long-lost past and the voice of a tenuous present. Twelve thousand sandhill cranes calling in Jasper-Pulaski at once is a melancholy and achingly beautiful sound. Their voices are the voices of our marshes and untrodden places, which are far too often disappearing.

The cranes in Wisconsin join thousands of others in the Great Lakes flock every fall and journey south to overwinter in Florida and Georgia. Jasper-Pulaski, a wetland area surrounded by agricultural fields, is one of the few prime spots left for those 10,000-30,000 traveling cranes to stop, socialize, and grow fat on waste grain before continuing their long journey. Migration is a balancing act: stay too long too far north and risk increasingly dangerous temperatures and winter storms before the trip is completed, or hurry south without ensuring sufficient fat stores for the necessary physical exertion, only to risk exhaustion and failure. The cranes pause here as long as they can, dining on the waste grain in nearby fields, but also on tubers, frogs, moles, voles, snakes, insects, worms, and the like. And they socialize. They talk, they dance, and they dine together. Behavioral ecologists are still working to unravel the reasons why these cranes, who live in solitary and territorial family units most of the year, stage in such enormous groups during migration. Whatever the reason, the impressive sight may draw over 200 visitors on a busy day in the period from October through December to Jasper-Pulaski.

This week, we joined those visitors. Yesterday, before the horizon had more than the palest bloom of sunrise, we actually stood alone for a short time in front of that vast field dotted with the gray-and-rust-colored bodies of cranes until the other cold and wide-eyed visitors began trickling in to join us. To see the evidence of migration on that scale, and to see the intensely communal nature of it, is to briefly open a window into another world and a separate reality which just skims the outskirts of our awareness. We know of migration, but most of us experience it as isolated moments of geese calling far overhead, dark silhouettes against a cold, clear sky. This—this crowded, cacophonous, sea of sandhill cranes dancing and calling and circling slowly on thermals—blasts apart that conception. Standing at the edge of Goose Pasture, it is suddenly clear how much we dwell on the edges of their world, so very occasionally glimpsing their existence even though our habitats define the edges of theirs. We drain wetlands, develop wild areas, and continue to spread, pushing the boundaries of their habitats ever-closer.

In the chapter about Wisconsin in A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold devoted a section entitled “A Marshland Elegy” to the sandhill cranes. When he wrote, sandhill cranes teetered on the edge of extinction in Wisconsin, and he believed, like many others, that they would soon vanish from the Wisconsin landscape.

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words. . . .

Their annual return is the ticking of the geologic clock. Upon the place of their return they confer a peculiar distinction. Amid the endless mediocrity of the commonplace, a crane marsh holds a paleontological patent of nobility, won in the march of aeons, and revocable only by shotgun. The sadness discernible in some marshes arises, perhaps, from their once having harbored cranes. Now they stand humbled, adrift in history. . . .

Through a variety of conservation efforts, however, the sandhill crane population has expanded greatly since 1949, when Leopold’s book was first published. Still, Leopold raises some difficult questions when writing his book, one of which is a key issue in conservation attempts: we must see and touch the wild places of the world in order to to treasure them, in order to want to conserve them for what they are. Yet, in the act of knowing them, we may destroy the wilderness we have grown to value. Our ability to strike that balance is one of the most challenging and important tasks facing us in the preservation of the wondrous and increasingly unknown beauty of our world. Currently, it seems the greater problem is that we all are spending more and more time tangled in work, Life in general, and a mind-boggling supply of multimedia engagement. All those things have a place, but when we become too snarled in them, we have less and less time out-of-doors discovering the bright colors of a painted turtle, the bizarre inundations of toads after a summer rain, the sweet flavor of wild hickory nuts, the honey-pineapple-butterscotch scent of a Ponderosa pine, or the delicate gold of a fallen ginkgo leaf.

This world is drenched in beauty and, increasingly, it is slipping past us.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for the uncle who brought me to the cranes six years ago and opened a world to me that still captivates me to this day. I am thankful for a partner who thinks standing in freezing temperatures simply to hear the sound of thousands of cranes calling together is a good idea. I am thankful for the small pockets of wilderness that dot this state: the marshes, sedge meadows, fens, forests, and prairie preserves. I am thankful that I live in a place where the Unicyclist and I can take daily walks and on which we have seen this year alone turtles, woodpeckers, crayfish, owls, hawks, woodchucks, morels, wild blackberries and asparagus, and jack-in-the-pulpits, along with all the more run-of-the-mill flora and fauna. I am grateful for the wealth of beauty that surrounds me. I am thankful for the thoughtfulness and the good in humans that kept the cranes from going extinct in Leopold’s era, and I am thankful for the sound of cranes echoing overhead even here, even now.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Apparently, the granola bars were a huge hit, as my husband came home with nary a granola bar and a heaping pile of requests for the recipe. Of course, when he delivered this news to me, the Unicyclist shook his head ruefully. He knows me and recipes…particularly where a staple like granola is concerned. All this meant, however, was that our household wound up with another batch of granola bars this week, as I had to make and measure in order to pass on instructions! So, without further ado, this one goes out to the hungry grad students. May you have long life and abundant supplies of granola. Wo0t!

Community Tip: For the local grad students, here’s the handy run-down on what to get where. The cheapest place to get oats, agave, and raw cacao nibs is in the bulk section at Willy Street Co-op. You can also get the coconut there for an affordable price. Most affordable natural peanut butter, nuts, and real maple syrup is probably Trader Joe’s or your standard chain grocery, but you can get everything at Willy Street.

Here’s to a nomtastic batch of granola!

And, just for good measure (and because Halloween is coming)…

Something new to digest, as it were.

As a general rule, the purpose of a recipe is to provide a clear-cut set of instructions that anyone can follow to achieve a specific end product.

My recipes don’t really work that way.

My recipes treat cooking as a process and a finished dish as a snapshot in time of the way I did things at a certain point. That’s why you’ll get notes about what happened when I swapped out some applesauce for oil or some barley malt for agave. My cooking is also largely dependent on what’s in the garden, what the CSA provides any particular week, or what produce is on sale at the grocery store. Not surprisingly, while technique may be sacred to me in a particular recipe, ingredients rarely are. I measure when I bake, but I almost never measure when I cook…unless I am tracking it as I prepare it a given day in order to be able to post it here, so you can enjoy in your own kitchen! It’s true: I do all this for you. *MWAH!* In any case, that’s why one of my recipes will often instruct you to add a particular ingredient to taste or mention that you can substitute X, Y, or Z as desired. The only other time I keep careful track of what I’m doing is when I am experimenting with adapting an existing recipe, particularly anything for baked goods. There’s chemistry involved in baking, folks, and you just can’t pull a fast one on science. Science has rules, and we gotta obey its authoritTAY.

Not only do I not write rigid recipes for my own food, I also don’t use other people’s recipes in a particularly rigid way. Maybe the parsnips I get will be less sweet and I will have to compensate, maybe I don’t want quite as much marjoram in my soup, maybe I want to use less garlic (not likely), or maybe I need a diabetic-friendly version so mom can enjoy the finished dish with us. Whatever the case, I adapt like a madwoman. Case in point: the agave-sweetened spiced pumpkin cake started as this recipe for pumpkin cream cheese bars. However, I don’t like cream cheese baked into baked goods, so that got scrapped fast. And I wanted it to be diabetic-friendly so that mom could enjoy some pumpkin goodies, so the sugar had to beat a path on outta there. Then, when I made my first batch, it turned out to be very cake-like and not especially bar- or brownie-like (probably because of my substitutions). I decided to take that direction and follow it, and a few iterations later, a household champion was born. (Cue “Eye of the Tiger.”)

All that said, recipes do have an important place in the kitchen. When I want to make a specific dish that I haven’t made before (think something like moussaka, tamales, or vegetable korma), I leverage the power of the Intertubes to look up several well-rated recipes for that dish. I see what they have in common, how they differ, and I decide what’s most likely to suit my tastes. Then I go for it. If it works, beautiful. If it doesn’t, I try something else another time. Recipes also rock for those adventurous souls who acquired unknown produce from the market and have no idea what to do with Buddha’s fingers or kohlrabi or tat soi. Specific recipes support those with less cooking experience who are still figuring out flavor combinations and cooking techniques. As those folks figure out what recipes they like and don’t, they become better cooks themselves because they can identify what works and doesn’t work for them. I keep a pencil nearby when I cook and make quick notes in my recipe books about alterations and about what I thought of the finished product. Not only do those notes help me remember what worked and what didn’t, but they offer options to anyone who wants to try out one of these recipes as well as suggestions on what I can do if I need to make a dish, say, gluten-free on the fly.

My philosophy is that cooking is about making something wholesome and tasty out of what is readily available at the time. This flexibility means you will generate less waste (yay!) and enjoy the taste and nutritional bang that comes with consuming the freshest ingredients possible (yum!), since you will alter recipes in order to use the flood of red Russian kale or the generous peck of pickled peppers you just picked from the garden or got out of the sale bin at the grocer. Yes, it’s about flavor and taste, but it’s also about the fact that there is not a speck more room in the fridge for another zucchini.  Which reminds me: I need a zucchini dish tomorrow. Our fridge is about 30% zucchini at the moment.

Enough with the long-windedness. The goal was just context. The takeaway is simply this:

Be fearless in the kitchen. When you use recipes, honor your tastes and the guests at your table. Play. Have fun. Try something new. It’s how we all learn.

Guten Apetit!

Despite the summery temperatures of the last couple days here in Wisconsin, autumn has arrived. Even though it’s sunny out, the light has a different quality to it. Filtered through leaves of gold and rust, it’s thinner, paler.

It’s the time of year when steaming bowls of soup seem perfect, and the smell of fresh bread and cinnamon warms you far beyond the ability that another sweater possesses. It’s the time of year when the folks in our household start craving baked squashes and the rich texture of pumpkin in casseroles, risotto, muffins, and cakes. As the sunlight grows loses its muscle and the days shorter, the golden and orange colors grow more and more appealing. Our household is no exception. Specifically, I have been given orders from mum to get going on the pumpkin goods and to keep ‘em coming until I hear otherwise. Based on last year, I might hear otherwise sometime in April.

And I might not.

My mom has diabetes, so finding a way to create pumpkin baked goods that actually taste amazing without causing a crazy blood sugar spike has involved some trial and error. At this point, we have a couple keepers: spiced pumpkin cake and mom’s own agave-sweetened pumpkin pie. Both of them use raw agave nectar instead of sugar. I’ll get to the recipe for this pumpkin cake in a moment, but I figure some of you might like some background on agave nectar first.

What’s the scoop on agave? Agaves are succulents that grow in beautiful rosette shapes. They are native to the Americas and are something of a miracle plant, ethnobotanically-speaking. Agaves are a source of food, fiber, and tools, but I’ll spare you my plant geek-out gush that topic for now. Suffice it to say, I have a special place in my heart for the agave, and I brought a beautiful one with me when I moved back to Wisconsin. I doubt I stand alone on my enthusiasm for the agave, however. Heck, you may also be a unknowing fan of the agave…after all, the blue agave is the source for tequila. Margaritas, anyone?

An agave is sometimes known as a century plant, since it lives for many years (no, not actually a hundred) before sending up a giant flower stalk some 10-30 feet in the air, flowering, then dying. As you can imagine, flowering is officially a Really Big Deal for the agave, and it diverts a lot of energy—literally—for that event. Just before flowering, the heart of the agave contains a great deal of inulin, a sweet carbohydrate which can be converted into sugar through the use of heat and/or enzymes. Some southwestern and Mexican cultures held and sometimes still hold traditional agave harvests, during which the heart of the agave is roasted in an underground pit. The smoky, caramelized results are a sticky treat that I had the opportunity to try while living in Arizona.

In modern processing, however, a speedier heat or enzyme treatment converts the inulin into sugars—mostly fructose, which is not readily absorbed by the body and won’t cause blood glucose levels to spike in the same way that consuming the same amount of glucose will. Because it has a lower impact on blood sugar levels, agave is often recommended as a natural diabetic-friendly sweetener. That said, think practically. If your agave nectar is headed into a cake, that cake will have other carbohydrate sources in it (i.e., flour), so even a diabetic friendly dessert shouldn’t be considered a “free” food; diabetics have to consider the entire carbohydrate load of what they are eating, not just whether or not it contains sugar. Also important to note is that agave contains the same amount of calories that sugar does, so agave-sweetened treats are not weight loss aids. As with most things, a common sense approach is the best bet: sugar in any form, including agave nectar, should be enjoyed in moderation. Choose fruits more than baked goods, and when you do choose baked goods, make sure you add some nutritional punch so you’re not consuming empty calories. Think whole grain flours, nuts, and shredded carrots or apples or zucchini.

Enough about agave…let’s talk pumpkin!

I know I promised a pumpkin bar recipe earlier this week. I got kinda carried away this morning, I guess, and wanted something different. Enter a two-layer pumpkin cake. However, you can use this same batter in a 13 x 9 pan (for fat squares) or a jelly roll pan (for flat squares) and just adjust the cooking time if your geometric aesthetic leans toward something with right angles. If you do use a different pan, to know when it’s done, just watch for your typical key signs: Is the cake pulling away from the edges of the pan? Does it spring back when you gently touch it? Does a toothpick inserted in the center come out clean? If so, congrats. You have achieved YUM.  Pull ‘er out and start making frosting!

I made this recipe (as squares) a couple times this season already, but I made a few small tweaks to my original recipe this time that really made it pop: adding in a couple additional spices, subbing a heaping soup spoonful of barley malt (which has a nice molassesy flavor) for an equal amount of the agave nectar, and adding both a dusting of cinnamon and some chopped roasted pecans to the finished product.

There you have it. This cake, along with hot tea or cider and some good company, make for a great afternoon break. If you can, eat it outdoors under the changing leaves. In fact, I think the Unicyclist and I need another break…

Happy end of the weekend, all.

Some additional notes for those interested in agave nectar as a sweetener:

I have been asked about the “debate” surrounding agave, particularly about its effectiveness as an option for diabetics. The discussion is centered mostly around the fact that agave sourcing and processing techniques vary substantially among companies, and that research on other possible side effects in diabetics is still fairly limited thus far. I typically use dark, raw agave nectar when I cook with agave, which supposedly carries less of a glycemic load (the amount it causes blood sugar levels to rise). In that regard, it seems to work for mom. The other key thing to watch for is to make sure your brand is 100% agave; some companies thin agave nectar with high fructose corn syrup to maximize their profits. (Thank you, Big Food.) Always, always read your labels.

As far as limited testing and the possibility of other health effects, Dr. Weil (my go-to guy) doesn’t currently believe agave is problematic. I am keeping an eye out for reliable research that indicates otherwise, but for the moment, our household definitely does agave. Of course, if your household doesn’t need to monitor blood sugar levels, you may be more comfortable staying with a different sweetener, such as maple syrup or raw honey, until more clinical trials are complete.  For those with diabetes, however, agave nectar, unprocessed stevia, brown rice syrup, and barley malt are the most natural options with the lowest glycemic load. When you really want your occasional bakery treat, one of them may best be the best fit for your needs.

My friend 9to5 Poet at Everything Feeds Process recently asked her Twitter followers to complete this sentence:

I am too _________ to be perfect.

Although I didn’t respond, the one word that has jumped up as the one to fit that sentence is “self-aware.” To some extent, I mean that in the sense of how I overanalyze what I do, but in another sense, it’s just the fact that I know better than to use the word “perfect” as an objective descriptor for anything or anyone, particularly myself. Fortunately, life is pretty good at keeping the size of my head under control with daily reminders in the form of “whoops!” moments. Sometimes those happen on a large scale. More often, fortunately, they happen on a small scale.

For example: I made carrot cupcakes this week. I had been wanting to make these particular carrot cupcakes for quite some time, as I got the recipe from the Willy St. Co-op, whose carrot cupcakes are second only to heroin in their addictive properties. I got the recipe legitimately, by contacting customer service and having a little confessional about my carrot cupcake habit. The very gracious Liz Hawley absolved me of my guilt and hooked me up with the recipe for the full sheet cake version, which I had to hack down to a normal batch of cupcakes. Once that was done, I got busy and started baking on Tuesday.

Despite how much I love these cupcakes, I couldn’t leave them alone. I switched to whole wheat flour, swapped half the sugar for agave nectar, replaced a few tablespoons of oil with applesauce, swapped the walnuts for roasted pecans (since it was all I had on hand), and used my own cream cheese frosting recipe, which contains just neufchatel cheese, heavy cream, vanilla, and agave. All that mucking wasn’t the problem. The cupcakes were delicious, and I enjoyed every last bite.

Except for the bite that was almost entirely baking soda.

You see, step 5 was missing from the recipe. I suspect this is because the recipe is copyrighted by the co-op, so Willy St. could only share it in partial form. Unfortunately, step 5 was almost certainly the step that described how to add the carrots and raisins. Since I was in a hurry, I failed to engage the brain and just dumped them in with the dry ingredients right before I added the wet ingredients. Here’s the thing: raisins are all wrinkly, full of folds and pockets. I dropped them right on top of the flour and leaveners and salt. When I stirred, some raisins grabbed some of the salt and leaveners and hung on for dear life while the batter took shape around them. Perfectly preserved in raisiny pockets, a good-sized lump of baking soda is a heck of a salty shocker that really destroys the delight of nomming on cupcakey goodness.

I got my just desserts on this one, as I do know better and should have added the raisins to the completed batter or to the wet ingredients. I can deal with the unappealing consequences. On the downside—I gave away more than half a dozen of these cupcakes to neighbors and relatives. I didn’t know about the leavener disaster at that time; the first ones we tried were wonderful and delicious, since the issue with the raisins was random, not systemic. This is the embarrassing part, since I prefer not to be identified as the person who pawns off inedible foodstuffs on others. To those neighbors and relatives: If you got a mouthful of baking soda or salt in your particular cupcake, I send you my most sincere apologies. The cupcakes really were delicious, and you can eat them confidently the next time I make them, since I will be using proper technique. If, however, you had a delicious cupcake and have no idea what I’m talking about, I just want to say HA! Just kidding! I totally did everything perfectly and you should forget you ever read this post.

Amen.

The moral of the story is twofold.

One, always add mischievous ingredients like raisins where and when they can do no damage.

Two, stuff happens. Learn from it, but don’t be afraid to keep experimenting, be it in the kitchen or in life in general. This is what it means to be self-aware, which, really, is a much better shake than being perfect.

And, finally, in the interest of lifelong learning, I am attaching the link to a story I saw today that sheds more light on CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) among honeybees, which I have written about before here and here. It’s a story worth following as it continues to unfold. Bees are pretty amazing, and we depend on them to a huge extent for a large number of our food crops.

Thanks to Soulless Machine for the honeybee story!