The series of picture books about Carl the Dog are fun yet vaguely unsettling at the same time. What kind of crazy parent would leave their baby in the care of a dog?? But the dog obviously takes good care of that baby, and Carl has such an endearing personality, and the pictures are so lush, so we keep reading the books despite that teeny tiny doubt about the deeper message. Plus he’s a rottweiler, so he can fend off any bad guys that might wander into the story!

What was even harder for me was ‘reading’ these books, since the baby was unnamed. (I put ‘reading’ in quotes because the earliest ones don’t even have words, so you have to make up the narration on the spot. As a result, it’s hard to watch someone else read the books - they do it wrong! Similar problem with Good Night Gorilla…)

So I gave her a name. She looked like a baby we knew, so I called her Emily. I’m not sure Emily’s parents agreed with the resemblance, but it worked for me.

So imagine my shock today when I started flipping through Carl’s Sleepy Afternoon and discovered she has a name - and it’s NOT Emily! It’s Madeleine! I’m not sure how to move forward with this new piece of information. Do I change the way I read Carl’s Afternoon in the Park? Will the T-boy even let me at this point??

Maybe Emily grew up and has a younger sister, this Madeleine girl. But there’s another thing, the mother looks different too - and I don’t think it’s just a new haircut… Maybe I can pretend - in the name of avoiding cognitive dissonance - that Carl moved in with a new family, into Madelaine’s family! I’m sure Emily will miss him, but she’s probably old enough at this point to be willing to share.

I love the “hot chocolate� candy bar from Choxie - it’s deeply infused with a cinnamon flavor, and quite different from typical candy bar fare. Sadly, they never seem to be in stock at my Target. So when I came across a spiced truffle recipe from the Dec 2005 Food & Wine (recipe only available to subscribers) over at Something in Season, I knew I had to try it. They have four different spiced coatings to roll the truffles in, but I was primarily interested in the cinnamon one. While their other exotic spice pairings are intriguing, and may be all the rage in the high-end confectionaries, they didn’t appeal to me at this time.

I bought chunks of Callebaut chocolate from a local bulk store. Unfortunately, I didn’t remember all the details on that shopping trip and was making my truffles at midnight, so I couldn’t recreate the spice mixtures exactly. For example, the spiced cinnamon sugar calls for chipotle powder and ancho powder, but I only had chipotle. And since I didn’t have any five spice powder to mix with the cocoa, I used dried orange peel + a touch of fresh orange zest. (I think I discarded an old enormous bottle of five spice powder during the May kitchen-remodel purge, and haven’t replaced it. Next trip!)

Unfortunately, the results didn’t live up to my ideal. Although the Choxie bar has some chile powder in the ingredients, I can’t really taste it. With the F&W directions, I can taste the chile, and I don’t like how it overwhelms the cinnamon. The orange version was too subtle - I can’t taste orange at all. I was just winging it on how much to include, but I guess I didn’t add enough.

For my next attempt, I think I’m going to put some cinnamon into the ganache (instead of just adding some as a coating). Maybe I’ll also roll it in plain cinnamon, instead of cinnamon sugar. And re-reading Brendon’s description, maybe I need to get some five spice powder and try that version…

The Meal, created for participation in the Brand Spankin’ New Paper Chef #14: Sauteed Chicken, served with Three Babies Quinoa with Cashews and Yogurt.

By the way, do you pronounce the nut as [CASH-oo] or [cuh-SHOO]?? Inquiring minds want to know whether or not my in-laws are the only people in the world to use the latter…

The short form:

1. Prepare spice infusion (boil garlic & spices in water). Rinse quinoa. Prepare chiffonade of spinach.
2. Cook quinoa in a mixture of spice-infused water and pureed sweet potatoes. (Reserve some infusion to soak baby corn.) Start roasting some unsalted cashews in the toaster oven (350F to begin, turn up to 400 at the end).
3. Saute chicken, seasoned heartily with Tia Rita’s green chile salt blend.
4. When chicken is done, deglaze pan with orange muscat champagne vinegar. Reduce until it looks right and pour over chicken on serving platter. (Reserve some ‘plain’ chicken for boys with sensitive taste buds!)
5. Film pan with a touch of oil, briefly saute baby corn and wilt the spinach, and steam for a few minutes in a few tablespoons of reserved-for-corn infusion water.
6. Plop quinoa into half of serving bowl, put vegetables in other half. Top with chopped toasted cashews.
7. Serve [with hastily remembered plain yogurt!]

The Back Story:

Quinoa. Cashews. Yoghurt. A “baby” food. Well that’s easy - cook quinoa, stir in a “baby” food, top with cashews and yoghurt! Borrrrrring…

So what might be exciting, or at least potentially unique and innovative? I keep trying to convince the boys that quinoa is just another rice, so rice pudding popped to mind. Maybe I could make quinoa pudding! Except I don’t think I’ve ever even had rice pudding and certainly don’t know how to make it. Forget that idea! I spent more time toying with the dessert idea, though. Maybe something like a crisp, only using quinoa for the topping. Quinoa and cashews, that is, and with a nice yogurt for a topping. But how would I prepare the quinoa? Should it be raw (raw but thoroughly rinsed, that is), or should I cook it first? Cook partially, perhaps? (No quinoa flour in this house!) And one more thing - where’s the baby ingredient? I suppose I could use rich and creamy YoBaby for the topping and cover both bases. But all our YoBaby is months old, from when T-boy decided he was tired of eating “Baby” and wanted those same brightly colored yogurt cups as his big brothers, and is probably too sour to make a delightful dessert topping.

In the end, I made: “Three Babies Quinoa with Cashews and Yoghurt” and served it with sauteed chicken. Yeah, yeah, I’m uninspired, but at least I got this far… Do I get points for having a few interesting ideas along the way?

Why Three Babies? Because I used baby leaf spinach, baby corn, and a jar of baby food. (And yes, it’s supposed to make you think of “Three Sisters”!) (I almost just used the baby food, but didn’t want to incur the wrath of Kitty Kaga.)

Although “baby corn” typically connotes “oriental food” (and Tom Hanks in Big), corn is a new world crop just like quinoa. Quinoa is the seed of a plant related to spinach - or is that amaranth? [Vague memories of decades-old Organic Gardening magazine stories...] Besides, when unloading my groceries on Saturday, I noticed that the spinach I’d bought was officially “baby leaf” spinach. And the jar of baby food - pureed Earth’s Best organic sweet potatoes, officially labelled weird by Mrs D - well, it’s been in our pantry for over a year and since I spent most of the day moving everything from the temp pantry into the new pantry, I didn’t want to squeeze an odd jar of baby food into the organization scheme!

To be honest, I almost forgot about the yogurt, but when my husband saw the serving bowl, he said “this dish looks like it’s begging for some plain yogurt. Do we have any in fridge?” “Great idea!” I responded, and retrieved a container of plain fat free yogurt. (Note: As far as I know he is completely unaware of this Paper Chef event.)

To cook the quinoa, I took some inspiration from Crescent Dragonwagon’s book The Passionate Vegetarian. She writes that one way to imbue grains with flavor is to create an infusion of spices, then use that as cooking liquid. Her infusion tends towards the curry end, but I was still thinking South American (which is completely conflated in my mind with Mexican, which I know is false, but hey, it’s my mind!) and thus replaced her {cinnamon stick, anise, and cloves} with cumin. [Bring to a boil: 2.5 cups water mixed with 4 cloves garlic, a dozen colorful peppercorns (black, white, green, pink - Trader Joe's blend), 4 bay leaves, 1/2 tsp cumin seeds, and some 'Better Bouillon' [vegetable] powder. In retrospect, I realize there wasn’t much in that mix to add a big flavor punch.]

The End Result:
The chicken was great (green chile salt and that orange vinegar does the trick every time!), the three babies quinoa was pretty good. The sweet potato suffused a very nice color throughout the quinoa, while the darkly roasted cashews added a nice richness to the dish. I’m not sure the infusion did much (except when I bit into peppercorns that didn’t strain out!), but then again, I probably overwhelmed it with the sweet potato…

And for dessert? We had Baby Ruth candy bars, of course. Just kidding!! We’re not that weird. We also found an unopened bag of Oreos while moving the pantry, so handed those out.
[Possible reputation-saving-disclaimer: We rarely fed our boys jarred baby food. The one exception was jarred carrots, because Dr Sears book makes some claim that carrots take up naturally occuring nitrates (nitrites?) in the soil, something that doesn't affect most people but might babies, so baby food manufacturers get theirs from safe sources. So why did I have a jar of sweet potatoes? All I can figure is that I bought it by color and didn't get carrots, or I bought it summer 2004 when T-boy was going through feeding therapy to learn to swallow.]

Update: Paper Chef is now finished, and the roundup of all the amazingly creative entries is available at Belly-Timber.

I checked with my mom. She is familiar with these caramels, and even has a friend who occasionally makes them for her! She also remembers reading about the fund-raiser sale ‘back in the day.’ She told me the recipe (or one similar) appears on page 289 in my “Savoring the Southwest” cookbook (a product of the Roswell Symphony Guild).

So I checked my copy and sure enough, there’s a recipe for “Sally’s Fours” in the middle of the page, sandwiched between peanut brittle and apricot balls. Roll Twilight Zone music: I even had a bookmark stuck in that page, because a few summers ago I used the last recipe on the page to make those apricot balls! (and my derivative, dried cherry balls rolled in cocoa powder - sadly, dried cherries really gum up a kitchenaid food grinder attachment so it’s best to stick with the apricots!)

Anyway, Baggett explains how the recipe is known as fours in Roswell because of four ingredients with equal amounts. Note that neither one has four ingredients with identical amounts! (unless they mean weight, not volume…) This version is not identical to Ms Baggett’s recipe, so I feel a taste test coming on… I wonder where I can find an inexpensive source for whipping cream?

(For the record, Baggett’s instructions are much more detailed and precise, which comes in handy when making candy. My mom told me “they’re supposed to be hard to make” - and given the brevity of the recipe in Savoring, I’m not surprised they have that reputation. Maybe that was so the altar guild women could protect their fundraiser profits, since this cookbook was published while they were still doing their annual sales. :^)

Some weeks ago, Matthew heard an interview on the Diane Rhem show with Nancy Baggett, the author of The All-American Dessert Book. She was talking about the “famous” Roswell caramels: “Roswell is known for UFOs, but it should be known for these caramels instead!” So he asked me about them, but I’d never heard of them. Nevertheless, he gave me the book for Christmas.

The caramels seem to be mentioned in every promotional piece I’ve seen, probably because they’re highlighted on the inside cover. The story is, the women’s group at the Episcopal church made these as an annual fund-raiser for decades, finally ending in the 90s. In other words, while I lived there. The thing is, even after reading the story (not just Matthew’s retelling), I can’t remember that I’ve ever encountered these caramels! I asked Paulene about it when I saw her on the 26th, and she didn’t know about them either. Perhaps Erin would have, since his father was a doctor and perhaps more likely to have traveled in those circles. I still need to ask my parents about it (although we might have discussed it over Thanksgiving).

So while we have all this free-time and extra kid-entertainment at the grandparents’ house, I decided to make them. They came out pretty good, although they were a bit too sweet and the taste was not quite complex enough. Perhaps we should toast the pecans? Use dark brown sugar instead of the specified light brown? More butter? Cook it longer? Welsh smoked sea salt on the top? (just kidding) We plan to make this part of our holiday gift repertoire, so we’ll need to perfect it. (I’m thinking of all these references to ‘caramelizing’ when roasting vegetables or cooking onions, and here I am trying to make actual caramels and I can’t get that depth of caramel essence. Sigh.)

The next day, I dipped slightly more than half in chocolate. Tip: when you’re in a small town and don’t know the sources for gourmet ingredients, Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips are a good stand-in for high-end chocolate. I even found Guittard chocolate chips, but they were semi-sweet and I was trying to tone down the sweetness, so I stuck with bittersweet. (Aside: I did a taste-test comparison of Guittard and Nestle semi-sweet and there is definitely a difference.)

Z-boy claimed that he couldn’t taste the caramel any more with the chocolate dip. I’m not sure I agree, but I made two which were half-dipped to test it out. However, those were eaten before I had a chance to sample. I suppose I could eat half the chocolate off of one to see if it makes a difference. C-boy claims he hates dark chocolate (the main reason we didn’t dip ALL of them), but it hasn’t been enough to keep him from these.

The cookbook also has directions for “maple snow candy” - apparently the trick is to boil the syrup beforehand. We’ve tried variants on this but now that I know the real method we’ll have to do it again, next big snowfall.