In the spirit of that, I’ll be transferring the BlogOfParadox to another undisclosed location. I’m in no rush to vacate my digital nest: I’m currently working on a few very cool projects while I’m between full-time employment, including

• unf&$%ing my life with Transmogrifier Rhiannon Llewellyn,
• editing a dear friend’s book,
• putting together a complete communications plan for the Unitarian Universalist Church of Jackson for a very interesting year,
• mulling over going back to school,
• mulling over whether the time is right to start working on a story I want to tell, and where I’d find an artist who could execute it,
• catching up on my comics,
• scheduling daily dance parties with thanks to this playlist based on a forthcoming comic book WHICH YOU SHOULD PRE-ORDER
• approaching food preparation as The Hot Makeout attack.

(originally published in the Jackson Free Press, December, 2009)

My mother spoiled me with books, and my prized possession was a gilded copy of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” which I pored over with all the twisted earnestness of Wednesday Addams. The details never lost their punch between readings: the revelation of the wolf’s fearsome maw beneath granny’s spectacles, the quiver of schadenfreude at Cinderella’s feathered friends blinding her bullying step sisters, and the unfettered glee when wicked tricksters fall to their ruin.

Most importantly, bad children might be rescued in some versions, but they were always punished. While Disney weather was in full effect in my childhood home in Miami, the treacherous forests of German fairy tales served as cautionary tales to a curious child tempted to stray from her path.

Hansel and Gretel is not my favorite fairy tale, but once upon a time, I was a hungry child lost in a gingerbread forest. My grandparents took me to a Christmas event at Walt Disney World, filled with extravagant Christmas decorations, parades, caroling and gorgeous exhibitions, including a wealth of gingerbread architecture covered in candies and delicately piped icing.

These houses and storybook castles were the epitome of my Grimm-fueled fantasies. Consequences were forgotten, and my hand shot forward and claimed a piece of siding. As my dismayed grandparents turned in horror, I jammed the contraband into my mouth. Bad children are always punished. The disappointment at the flavorless pressboard confection was far worse than my grandfather’s spanking.

Despite my initial letdown, I remained enchanted with gingerbread throughout my childhood. I chomped the heads of ginger men with gusto, leaving hundreds of little ginger widows in my wake. When I was deemed fit to partake in civilized functions again, my grandmother took me to high tea, where I had my first fat square of ginger tea bread. With the first bite, I finally understood why Hansel and Gretel were so sorely tempted. Chewy, dense and chocolate colored, this was closer to the fabled gingerbread of my imagination. As I began to bake for myself, I tried many gingerbread recipes, but none satisfied. No longer afraid of wolves and conniving fairies, I stepped off the path.

Beware, reader: There are always consequences, and this time, they’re delightful. This is no mild-mannered, blond ginger spice cake; this is dangerous, original Grimm’s gingerbread—fragrant, dark and fudgy. This is the sort of inescapable temptation that lures Hansel and his sister into harm’s way, the sort of treacle confection Monsieur Wolf scents as he lopes through a deeply greening wood. Do not be afraid of the half cup of spices involved in this recipe, because all wonderful adventures take a feat of daring.

GINGERBREAD FOR GRETEL

1 cup vegetable oil, plus extra for the pan
1 cup cane sugar
1 cup robust or blackstrap molasses
2-4 tablespoons crystallized ginger, minced
2 large eggs, at room temperature, lightly beaten with a fork
3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons ground ginger
1 tablespoon fresh ginger root, peeled and grated
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon fine salt
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 greedy pinch of freshly ground black pepper
1 cup water
1 tablespoon baking soda
Several handfuls of blanched almond slivers
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Even if you’re using silicone bakeware, generously oil your favorite bundt mold, muffin tins or brownie tin. This is perilously sticky batter. Sprinkle almonds into the bottom of the pan. You want a goodly amount, but not full coverage. Imagine fallen logs littering the Black Forest’s floor.

Set your water to boil in a small saucepan, so it’s ready to use when you need it.

Combine the oil, sugar, molasses and crystallized ginger. Add the eggs and whisk until smooth.

Sift together the flour, spices and salt. Add wet mixture to the dry ingredients slowly until evenly combined.

Remove boiling water from heat and add baking soda. Brace for the foam. Rapidly incorporate this solution to the batter, and pour into pans.

Bake in the center of the oven until a toothpick inserted at the center comes out clean; a full pan will bake for 30-40 minutes, while muffins will run you anywhere from 15-20 minutes. Almonds will be perfectly toasted inside your batter.

Some people choose to top their gingerbread with whipped cream, ice cream, more candied ginger, lemon curd or even marmalade, but this fairy tale gingerbread requires no embellishment.

Feast for St. Brigidt’s

Makes 12 8 4 servings, if no one goes all reality tv devious while you’ve looked away.

• 1 1/2 cups buttermilk
• 1/2 cup Irish steel-cut oats (McCann’s is straight from County Kildare!)
• 1/2 cup oat flour
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon celtic sea salt
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons honey or golden syrup (I like Lyle’s)
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 tablespoon Irish whiskey
• 1 large egg
• Baker’s Joy

Preparation
Combine buttermilk and oats; cover and refrigerate 8 hours. GAH!

Preheat oven to 375° F.

Lightly spoon flours into a dry measuring cup; level with a blade.

Combine flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, stirring with a whisk.

Place sugar, honey/syrup and oil in a large bowl; add vanilla, Jameson’s and egg; mix until well blended. Stir in oat mixture; stir until well blended. Add flour mixture, beating just until moist.

Scrape batter into a deep baking pan coated with cooking spray. Bake at 375° F for 30 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes in pan on a wire rack. Devour with local honey and Irish butter.

My dear husband is a scientist at heart. He does not understand how I can bear to cook without thoroughly documenting results, but I often do. It’s not that I set out to intentionally leave no trace of my exploits, but that I’m so immersed in the experience I don’t want to pull back and analyze the components.

I don’t ever measure anything but the grains and liquid when making risotto, pearled barley or otherwise. I usually use a 1:4 ratio between grain and liquid, because it gives the rice or barley more time to realize its creamiest potential. I use about 1/4 cup of grains per person I’m feeding, and 1/3 cup for folks who don’t eat many vegetables. Everything else is subject to the contents in my pantry, the people who are going to eat it and my mood.

I’m also a risotto heretic: I’m one of those people who will employ a rice cooker if I’m not thrilled by the idea of stirring a pot continuously for 20 minutes or more.  You can even soften onions and garlic in the bottom of a rice cooker,  then steam vegetables or meat on top if you have a steamer insert. Fortune favors the bold.

Use olive oil, butter or your favorite fat to coat the pan’s bottom.

Add a handful of finely chopped aromatics (onions, shallots, leeks, spicy seeds,  garlic) and let them fizzle in the oil until soft. Add barley and stir.

Let the mixture toast for a minute or two, because it imparts a subtle flavor to the dish.

Add your liquid. You can add a little wine to your stock if you like. Some are sticklers and insist you have to be a slave to the pot, adding liquid as it goes. If I want a moving meditation, I do that, but if I’m just damned hungry and want some creamy grains, I just pour all the liquid into the rice cooker and walk away to work on the accompaniments.

I chopped a large fennel bulb into small pleasing shapes and sauteed it with just a scant bit of olive oil. Toward the end, I added fennel seed to toast in the pan. You can do this with any vegetable, though: I love pumpkin or a similar squash, carmelized with sage. Shredded Brussels Sprouts in bacon grease would be an excellent choice as well.

Your grains will be ready for plating when they’re tender and resemble a thick porridge. It’s best not to rely on the rice cooker (because it will try and cook away all the liquid), but if you lose track of time, you can just add a bit more stock and keep an eye on it. If you like your risotto extra creamy, you can stir in a little cream, sour cream, creme fraiche, ricotta  or yogurt at this point.

Finishing elements are important, and transform risotto from a gruel-like deceiver to a elegant dinner party. I commonly stir in nutmeg, cracked pepper and parmesan cheese, though I’ll often use brewer’s yeast as a parm replacement if I have a vegan guest. Lemon zest is a gorgeous topper, as well. If I’m feeling very lazy, I stir in spinach or arugula so I don’t have to fuss with a salad.

I make a bed of vegetables for the risotto, then pile it on.  I’ll often top with toasted nuts, more cheese and nutmeg. Last night, I chopped fennel fronds to feather across the top, providing beauty and an anise bite.

Tony's Tamales never skimps on the spice.

It’s 6 o’clock on a Wednesday evening, and a steady stream of cars is queued at the drive-up window at Tony’s Tamales. Robert Mosley is leaning over a microphone, running the register and taking customers’ orders in rapid-fire. His wife, Pat, is eavesdropping and already in motion, packing the orders faster than he can call them back.

“I love to run him into the ground,” she tells me in an exaggerated whisper, her face splitting into a mischievous grin. Robert shakes his head as he takes the bag, his eyes twinkling. He barely has time to take the bag before the bell chimes again, signaling another customer’s arrival.

It’s been 28 years since Robert made his first batch of tamales—around 15 dozen—in the Mosley’s home kitchen. The Greenville native was out of work, and turned to his hometown favorite method of pulling in cash: tamales.

“This trade is self-taught,” he says.

While he did turn to life-long friend and Greenville native Arthur Rankin for initial advice, he honed his skills and recipe through trial and error. He made the first tamales by hand in the Mosley home kitchen, plying friends and neighbors with tamales in exchange for feedback. He opened his first tamale stand, hauling tamales to the appropriately named Delta Drive (now Medgar Evers Boulevard). He named the business after his brother Tony because “Robert’s Tamales” didn’t roll off the tongue.

As the business grew, Tony’s expanded by necessity to a location with its own kitchen on Livingston Road: The Mosley home kitchens appliances had worn out, giving their lives in service to hungry Jacksonians. Eventually, Pat left her career in the medical profession to join Robert in the kitchen.

Mosley’s recipe changed with the times, but there are some things Robert wasn’t willing to sacrifice. “We started out with beef, but from day one, we always wanted to make a healthy product. A lot more people are health conscious now, and the turkey’s a clean meat, not a lot of fat. What we don’t do is cut back on the spices and seasoning. When you make tamales, you know what’s missing. We’ve never cut back on the spices, never tried to cut corners on ingredients. Once you get to cutting here, cutting there; you lose the original flavor.”

Today, they have two locations in Jackson: 230 West Woodrow Wilson Ave. and 228 E. Capitol St. They get a great many mail orders for tamales—especially around the holidays when folks are homesick—and are hoping to expand into wholesale ventures. On the weeks they roll tamales, they produce 600 to 800 dozen, freezing them until they’re needed. Pat insists the freezing process allows the tamales to stay as fresh as possible while allowing the flavors to mature.

“If you can’t eat them here, buy them frozen and steam them at home: it’s as close to fresh as you’ll get,” she says. When she opens the freezer to show me their stores, the heavenly aroma causes my knees to buckle. For a fleeting moment, I want to curl up inside a working deep-freeze.

I confess I’d never eaten a tamale before moving to Mississippi, and Tony’s are my first love. Tony’s Tamales is a Jackson institution, and some of our favorite tamales, on or off the trail. In addition to their mightily spiced tamales, they also have a beautifully balanced gumbo, excellent dumplings and homemade cakes.

Tony’s began making vegetarian black-bean tamales in 2002, and Robert is investigating making a tamale with soy or other textured vegetable protein. For those of you who eat strictly local/organic meat or hunt for the meat you eat, don’t despair. Robert will gladly make tamales out of your processed meat. He’s made tamales out of duck, black bear, elk and venison meat, and wants the world to know he’s interested in making some wild boar tamales one day.

While Robert is wry and understated, Pat is obviously the public-relations end of the partnership. She is tireless, chatting up customers and dispensing advice at the drive-through window. In between customers, she tells me: “I didn’t know what a tamale was until I met him, he’s the tamale man. But now, I can tell you almost everything there is to know about tamales.”

I tell Pat a little about what I learned about traditional Mexican tamales before this endeavor. When I tell her about the Mexican superstition that says tamales need music or they won’t cook to fluffy perfection, she breaks in with great authority: “Well, I don’t know what kind of music those Mexican grannies play, but here in Mississippi we play the blues for our tamales.”

My first food column ran yesterday in the Jackson Free Press. It’s called Salad Days: Avoiding Lettuce Burnout, and includes recipes for a deconstructed pesto salad and a cookout-friendly Grilled Caesar.

If you’re so inclined, please login and leave feedback!

• Anusara Immersion: Bhagavad Gita studies, plus Tattvas next time around.
• Square Foot Garden: commence! I have 21 plots of forthcoming tastiness, including lots of basil, tomatoes, and chili peppers. Basils, tomatoes and chili peppers rule my summery world. I recently purchased some lovely heirloom tomatoes for eating, and I hoarded the seeds. Since I don’t know the varieties, I named them for fun: Rhumba Panties! Tangerine Coinpurse! Sneaky Stoplight!! I have crazy happy Rainbow Lights Chard, spicy Mesclun mix and wintry squash seeds for later. Loving husband wandered endlessly around stores at my whim, and then braved the sun while using power tools. Yay, loving husband!!
• Friday was fixed on, er, Friday. She has been extraordinarily sweet-natured to us since.
• Teaching Yoga: I taught my first studio class in a million years last Thursday. I’ve been meaning to post about it thoroughly, but I’m facing the sudden and pressing reality that I am teaching THREE classes in the first week of June. If you were coming to my class, what would you want to do?
• My sister‘s tenth birthday is in a week. We’re trying to make it pretty special for her. She’ll be spending the summer in Florida, and I hope it’ll be completely awesome.

Bad Stuff

• Steroid shot for crazy flare. Steroid + weekly immune suppressants = double suck.
• The dogs fought last Saturday, and Matthew and I were caught in the crossfire. M. got bitten once, and I got two nasty puncture wounds. We went ballistic and tried to cleanse the wounds of the contagion. Matthew’s was great!
• My left hand swelled up like a balloon. No, seriously. It was so bad that when I was sitting in the doctor’s office, I was quietly chanting Don’t pop… Don’t pop… Don’t pop…
• Antibiotics that make me delirious and sweaty + Antibiotic Shot + steroid shot + weekly immune suppressants = Ridiculous crazy quadruple suck.
• Friday has Evil Tail Syndrome.  Seriously.  I wish I was kidding, but for the last few months, at least daily, she freaks out, attacks her tail viciously, screams in pain and does it again.  It’s very disturbing. Anyone else out there with a completely neurotic animal who thinks its tail is out to do them harm?
• Yoga really sucks when you are having to hold awesome ever-improving alignment without using the two outer left ball mounts/fingers.

Sleep now.

I’ll be taking a baker’s dozen to the Ink Spot this evening.  We’ll be working on the rose and the poppy this time, which will round out the largest components of the design.  The rose is a Handel, one of my mother’s favorite flowers.  She grew one next to our front door, untrellised, and the carnivorous beast used to demand blood toll from nearly every visitor.  I can’t tell you how many times that damned rose stabbed me in the left arm growing up, so this seems like fitting tribute.  I planted poppies in our garden when we were still considering a backyard wedding, hoping for a sea of orange and red.  They were a prominent motif on our wedblog (along with ginkgo), and I used them in my bouquet for our cheesy awesome Vegas wedding.

All of these pieces of my life are beautiful, especially together.

I wandered around in sensory overload, numbed by Easter Egg radishes, blown away that they, too, thought there were greens other than Collards fit for eating.

Soon, we’d walked past the bakery and gelato, and Matthew (with an understated flourish) gestured towards the cheese section. To be fair, our local Kroger has a surprisingly kick-ass cheese station, but there are a few things pointedly missing from their assortment.

That’s when I saw it. Directly behind my dear husband’s hand, there was a huge wheel with a particularly distinctive font decorating its rind.

Locatelli.

I could lie and say I was excited.

To be entirely honest, I jumped up and down, flapped my hands and squawked in such an unseemly fashion, people must have thought Matthew proposed to me with a gigantic wheel of cheese. Lottery Jackpot winners comport themselves with more dignity and grace. Matthew, bless him, did not suddenly pretend I was some cheese-fetishizing maniac stranger.

When I am gone from this world, I hope I am remembered as the girl who’d turn somersaults for a fine wheel of cheese.

WARNING: If you have rivet-goggles, swimmer’s goggles, or any sort of protective eyewear that will spare you the sensation of being maced in the face, I suggest you wear them. I wear German Welder’s goggles:  friends can attest to this. I am totally not kidding.

WARNING: This recipe had a hand in driving an overdue baby to vacate to more roomy, less Capsaicin-drenched quarters within 24 hours of its consumption.

Ingredients

15-30 small Thai chilies. FIFTEEN to THIRTY. I like them at 17-20.
10 cloves garlic (I usually double this, because I am a garlic fiend)
1 package rice noodles: prepared, drained
2 Tbs veg. oil
2 Tbs Thai fish sauce
1 tsp white pepper
3 Tbs sweet black soy (this is the unctuous molasses-based soy)
1 Tbs Oyster sauce
1 1/2 Tbs sugar
1 1/2 cu holy basil leaves, or 3/4 cu each of mint and basil leaves.

Optional but highly recommended
sliced chicken breasts, quorn or cubed med. hard tofu
egg omelet (best with creamy fresh duck eggs)
bamboo shoots

Instructions

PUT ON YOUR GOGGLES.
Pulverize 1 Tb oil, garlic and chilies in food processor together. Heat other Tb oil in med-hot wok while you do this.
Turn on your cooktop vent. Take a deep breath. Dump the chili mixture into your wok and stir vigorously for about 15 seconds. Exhale. Proceed to laugh at anyone not wearing goggles who adamantly refused to leave the room.
Add tofu or Chicken; stir-fry for about a minute.
Add fish sauce.
Add noodles and stir rapidly for another 30 seconds.
Add pepper and sweet black soy. Stir, and marvel at the beautiful mahogany color the soy turns the noodles.
Add Oyster sauce, sugar, bamboo shoots and/or duck omelet; stir-fry for a minute.
Turn off the heat. Stir in the herbs and let them wilt.
Remove goggles.
Serve immediately.

For dessert, I recommend sweetened coconut milk “ice cream” on warm sticky rice, or red grapefruit + orange segments steeped in rosewater syrup.

This dish will give your guests the exciting sensation of a string of firecrackers exploding in their mouths, and then rapidly dropping to a much more bearable level. You take a bite, wince, and then immediately fall victim to the spice’s dangerous wiles. You keep eating. You can’t help yourself.