The Quaker Oats Guy Can Bite Me

Filed under: No good deed goes unpunished...

Two weeks ago I got an e-mail about a corporate fund raiser event.  The company I work for has an admirable track record for supporting worthy causes and there is always a run or a walk or a gift basket raffle that you can participate in and/or donate to.  Me?  I'm more often a donor rather than a runner because,  sweating next to your co-workers? Ew.  But this particular email looked like something that I could actually contribute to in more than just a financial capacity.  The company was holding a bake sale!  Now we're talking!

Immediately I looked away from my work and began imagining what grandiose delights I could whip up for public consumption.  Pinterest and Instagram were being flooded with pastel colored goodies for Easter and Spring and there were more rainbow sprinkles and glitter than a dressing room at DragCon.  Besotted with more ideas than I could ever execute, I tucked a few favorite ideas away and decided that I would choose my treat closer to the day of the sale.

Fast-forward to shopping day on the weekend before the sale and my thoughts turned back to the my potential baked good.  As I started to imagine how I would bake and package some of the treats in the little black baking book in my head, the sexier options started to fall away. The treat needed to be sturdy, single serving, easy to transport (anything with icing was out) and it needed to have mass appeal.  The goal here was to raise money for charity, not to bake a hazelnut dacquoise masterpiece, dusted with icing sugar and garnished with a brown butter coconut tuille (which hello, you had me at brown butter).  So what did I decide on? A chocolate chip cookie. I know, I know not interesting and there would be so many at the sale that they could potentially go un-touched.  Nevertheless, I remained un-deterred and thought about how I might differentiate.

I know that when I reach for a chocolate chip cookie, I have certain criteria.  First off, I like a cookie that's the size of a dinner plate.  If it doesn't look like I am biting into a planet, then why bother?  The cookie needs to be brown around the edges and bottom and soft (but not raw) in the middle and the taste of the butter and chocolate need to make my knees buckle.  That is the cookie that I set out to make; big, brown, buttery and dripping with rich chocolate.

The packaging needed consideration as well, because these people would be porting treats back to their desks and that thought of an exposed cookie sitting on a napkin set my germophobia alight to the tune of a five alarm blaze.  I had purchased beautiful glassine bags at the Paper Source a while back, anticipating just such an occasion and decided that I would put them into play.  I purchased gold stickers and a teal colored Sharpie to write on them and had my packaging all set. Simple, chic and most of all, hygienic.

This morning, I awoke with the intent of organizing my bagged and tagged cookies for transport and display.  Because my dog is a 70 lb behemoth with 3 foot long legs (no lie, they are as long as baseball bats), I had constructed a wall of boxes and cartons to block him from getting at the cookies that were laid out on the counter.  I began  to pack all the boxes of mac and cheese and tall cartons of chicken stock back into my pantry.  The last item I picked up was a carton of steel cut oats, you know the kind with the Barbara Bush look-alike wearing a Boy George hat?  Well, I guess I did not grab it carefully and the top came off and the oats went FLYING. I emphasize the word "flying" because they had to have wings to have reached the distant places in my kitchen and den that they landed.  I now know the true definition of "far and wide".  I spent 30 minutes vacuuming and moving furniture to get all the little oats that were clearly poised and ready for this jailbreak.

Luckily, the little oat accident did not impact my cookies and they made it to the bake sale and sold briskly, which is what is really important.  Not the fact that I trashed my kitchen or the fact that I went with a basic cookie.  But really, f#@k a steel cut oat.

Channeling my Inner Nonna

You ever have one of those days where everything aches for no reason and you walk slow, deliberate and a little like you have a poop in your pants?  Think Fred Sanford, but less elegant.  No? Just me?

OK, whatever.

When I have those kind of days, I think of it as coming down with a case of "The Grandmas".  When you get a case of The Grandmas, everything aches, it takes forever to walk from one side of the house to the other and you forget how to use all your electronic devices.

But sometimes, instead of a case of The Grandmas, you get a case of "The Nonnas".  When you get a case of The Nonnas, you become an elderly superwoman.  You put on your housecoat, cook all day and all night, wash and fold 40 loads of laundry and pick vegetables from your beautiful backyard garden (even if you have neither a back yard or a vegetable garden, when you get The Nonna's they magically appear).

Last weekend, I got a wicked case of The Christmas Nonnas.  I was posessed by the impulse to make Struffoli.  For those of you that don't know what Struffoli are, they are little round balls of fried dough, soaked in a honey syrup and covered with non-pareils.  If you grew up with at least one Italian grandmother, you know what they are and you have warm memories of being shooed away from pots of hot oil, being covered in honey from head to toe and not being able to put anything down after you pick it up because everything sticks to your fingers.

My Nonna did not leave me a recipe for these delightful treats and honestly, I have not ever wanted to make them before because I hate frying.  I hate the smell it leaves in the house, I hate the mess and I hate spatter burns.  But, when the spirit of Christmas mixes with the spirit of Nonna, the compulsion for struffoli can outrun my more neurotic, Felix Unger-type tendencies. Being that I did not have a recipe from my own Nonna, I did what any red blooded Italian Grandmother would do...I used the Internet.

What I found is that there are no shortage of recipes for Struffoli.  Everyone who calls themself an Italian cook has a version - Giada DeLarentiis, Lidia Bastianich, Mario Batali.  They all look pretty good and the recipes are similar...flour, eggs, a splash of alcohol, honey, etc.  But since I was overcome with the spirit of Nonna, I went to the source, Cooking with Nonna.

If you have not seen this adorable series, a young Italian American woman, Rossella Rago, cooks traditional Italian and Italian American recipes with grandmothers.  Yours, hers, any Italian nonna that will sit still long enough to teach her a recipe.  It's quite charming and sweet and it spreads the joy of having an Italian grandmother to everyone.  The recipe that I used, along with a "how to" video can be found here.  Enjoy and Buon Natale!