Cinnamon Walnut Brownies

Or, the dangers of biking in Philadelphia.

What do you do when you’re upset? I’ve tried a lot of things in my life, although I do not typically go for the stereotypical “eat a gallon of ice cream” approach. I prefer to bake enough for a small continent.

I’ve gotten used to the idea that biking in Philadelphia is fraught with hazards. Drivers barely follow even the most basic rules of the road (like, stopping at stop lights that are actually red), and when you throw 150 lbs of human and bike into the mix, the results are frequently very bad.

One time my student runners and I tried to list all of the things that are usually in the bike lane OTHER than the bicycles. Here’s what we came up with:

• The bus. Oh my god. The bus. Bus drivers have their own separate set of spatial realities whereby them being present in the bike lane negates my actual existence. “If I just DRIVE here, the bicyclist will disappear.” Very true, it turns out.
• And the people getting in and out of the bus.
• Parked cars
• Moving cars
• Cars that claim to be parked but are in fact moving
• Car doors, suddenly and unexpectedly, often accompanied by a person
• Merging vehicles (mostly taxis, who seem cheerfully oblivious to my existence or the extra 3 feet of space allotted to me in the road, although my first experience with vehicle-bicycle contact was when a large van merged through the bike lane and clipped me with his rear view mirrors.)
• Moving trucks
• The movers in possession of the moving trucks
• The food cart
• The food cart’s generator
• A backhoe
• Gravel piles
• Construction materials
• The remnants of someone’s driver’s side window
• A hubcap
• A man in a wheelchair driving the wrong direction (I’d do it too if I were him: some of the sidewalks could classify for an equestrian dressage course).
• Pedestrians, runners, and other bipeds (sidewalk excuse does not apply)
• Potholes, potholes, and more potholes.
• And the usual assortment of nails, screws, and other random object spelling imminent doom for my poor bike tires.

For all of you who feel rage when you see bikers anywhere but the bike lane, I would like to point out the obvious: there’s not much room left for us in the bike lane.

The other things cars around here don’t really do is stop. For anything. Stop signs, yellow lights, pedestrians, and certainly not bikes. Where I grew up, the rule for a stop sign is that you stop, and then you take turns. The lady who almost t-boned me (six inches from catastrophe) this evening on my way home apparently operates by the rule: “as soon as the person in front of me goes I floor it, even if there is someone actually IN the intersection.” (That person in the intersection was me. I waited my turn. I assumed she would wait hers. Whoops.)

Reaction part one: I scream “Oh my f***ing god!” as I veer violently to the left in my effort to avoid getting hit.

Reaction part two: burst into tears. Full on sobbing. Not that this is exactly a rare occurrence with me, but this was special.

Reaction part three: joke with the nice ladies who came to check on me when they saw me sitting on my bike sobbing about the level of profanity that comes out of my mouth when someone nearly hits me. They were lovely. I wish I had gotten their names so I could bring them some of the brownies I’m about to make.

My zen moment:

As I said, when I’m upset, I like to bake. Nothing fancy. Just the kind of thing that makes me think of my mom, snowstorms as a five year old, and being tucked into bed with a cup of tea.

This is based on another favorite from the Joy of Cooking. I’m a big fan because they basically give you permission to play around with the amount of chocolate and butter. Upset me says, “More butter!”

As with most of their recipes, in the book, this one appears with the ingredients interspersed with the directions and special tips. I'm going to break with that tradition here (although I love it), because I have my own comments about the ingredients.

Cinnamon Walnut Brownies (inspired by the near disaster, the Joy of Cooking, and the movie Chocolat. . . I know, how ridiculous).

Ingredients:

1. Chocolate and butter. In this recipe, they say that the proportions are negotiable. I took them seriously. If you like to follow the rules, you need 1/2 cup butter and 4 oz unsweetened baking chocolate. I added a little bit more of both.
2. 4 eggs at room temperature. Or as close to that as you are patient enough to get. 
3. 1/2 teaspoon salt
4. 2 cups sugar
5. 1 teaspoon vanilla
6. 1 cup sifted all-purpose flour. Maybe you don't have to sift, but if you're going to go to all the trouble to get your eggs nice and foamy (more about that later), you might as well sift. Plus, it's only one cup. In this case, sift first, then measure.
7. 1 cup walnuts (I like these better than the recommended pecans) and 1 cup chocolate chips (not at all part of the original recipe. What can I say. I had a bad day.)
8. Cinnamon. I didn't measure. I just started sprinkling. Irresponsible? Yes. Delicious? Duh.

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. 
2. Melt the chocolate and butter in a double boiler. In my case, that means a pot with boiling water and a pyrex bowl balanced on top. Let this cool. Go do something else for a while, especially if your eggs are still cold.
3. Beat the eggs and salt with a hand mixer until they are light and foamy. Literally, the volume should increase, and it should look like light yellow egg froth. 
4. Gradually beat in the sugar and vanilla. By the end of this, you should have a very thick, foamy substance that looks like it could be turned into some delicious meringue-like substance. After you are done with this, put the beater away.
5. Partially fold in the chocolate-butter mix with "a few swift strokes." When not-quite-blended, do the same with the flour. Before the flour is fully mixed in, add the extras (walnuts, chocolate chips, liberal sprinkling of cinnamon).
6. It is possible that there is a better time to add the cinnamon. I don't know what it is. 
7. Pour into a pan (9x9, 13x9, something close to that), and bake for 25 minutes. Or something like that. My experience with brownies says that you don't really want to do overdo the cooking because dry brownies are gross. Better to take it out a bit early than a bit late. Especially since they'll be sitting in the pan until cool and therefore continuing to bake a bit.

I’m now going to go stuff my face with warm brownies and go do yoga with the lovely and talented Tanya. And perhaps not get back on my bike for a while. Although I sure do feel better now.

p.s. why have I never had cinnamon in brownies before? 

Zucchini Peach Spice Bread

            I’m writing this on a Sunday. Sundays are challenging for me. I find myself tormented by the debate of exactly how much work I should do. . . Enough to make this the most amazing week of my teaching career? Enough so that I’m decently prepared tomorrow? Do I work on revising long term plans, try to design one amazing lesson (emphasis on try), or just settle for doing the same thing I did last year? (insert horrified gasp here.) Or should I just relax and pretend that sleep is the only thing I really need to be a good teacher? I’m sure you can guess which one sounds most appealing on Sunday afternoon.

            For all of you non-teachers, I would like to take this opportunity to discuss what the beginning of the school year is like for me. As a student, I remember thinking that the students were the only ones for whom the new school year brought new and interesting things, the feelings of anticipation and uncertainty. After all, teachers just do the same thing every year, so after a while, it probably loses the novelty, right? Adults are always in control of everything that happens in the classroom, right? Once you’ve planned a great lesson, you can assume students will learn according to plan, right? HA!

I start having back to school nightmares before school is even out for the summer. Not because I don’t love my job. My job is sweet: I work with great people, have a fascinating and compelling diversity of students, and am the sole determiner of what we do in the class. I have nightmares about the kind of stupid stuff that would never actually happen in real life (“Oh no! I only have 29 notecards and I have 33 students! The students are going to revolt!”) Things that would never in a million years bother me in real life become epic battles in my subconscious ("What?!? You're wearing green shoes? That's outrageous!"). I wake up convinced that I have definitively ruined the lives of countless teenagers before the end of the first week of school. So much for summer being restful.

            I spend the whole summer dreaming about how this year is going to be even better than the last, trying to synthesize everything I have learned from workshops and teaching during the last year into a new and amazing version of my curriculum. I write down millions of ideas on random scraps of paper (I am still finding them. . . ), send myself emails, have 17 different conversations with ten different people about how to design an effective grading system, agonize over how to make a curriculum that is challenging and accessible for everyone. It took me an entire week to decide what I was going to do on the first day of school and what I wanted to say in my syllabus. I really enjoyed the first day of school this year. In the end, it looked a lot like this: we tried, we failed, we ate marshmallows. But then the pressure is on: now that I’ve set the tone, students are going to expect every day to be like this. How do I keep them believing in themselves and me long enough to learn some cool stuff?

            And when I approach nervous breakdown and borderline panic about the potential for heretofore unseen success (at least within my own minimal experience) or complete disaster in my classroom, I take a break to wreak havoc on my kitchen. Seem totally impractical when in the throes of planning for a new school year? Perhaps. Somehow, it makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, and that helps me refocus on practical issues like, “What am I teaching tomorrow?” Which triggers another downward spiral of, “How does this fit into my grand plan for my students? Can I make this lesson better? What if I totally change it so that students are more engaged? HOW DO I DO THAT?”

            On to delicious things:

I’m fairly sure that when my mom made this when we were little, she thought she was pulling a fast one on us by putting vegetables in the baked goods. Fortunately for her, I think she fed us this wonderful bread before we were old enough to understand the concept of a zucchini apart from the bread, and so the first time I had a zucchini not in the bread, I was almost certainly very disappointed. VERY. But the association with this bread convinced me that it must be delicious, somehow. While I am now enthusiastic in my zucchini eating, including but not limited to various vegetable casseroles, grilled vegetable sandwiches, and one fascinating recipe in which you replace pasta with zucchini strips (which was the original destination for this zucchini, until I realized that I no longer own a vegetable peeler), baking with zucchini remains at the top of my all time favorite uses.

Have I mentioned that I love James Beard?

            I recently moved to a new apartment with an oven that is smaller than the old one and electric. I was afraid to turn it on in my un-airconditioned living space until the temperature actually dropped below 70 degrees. As fall has apparently arrived with gusto, the baking experiments can recommence. This recipe was inspired by (a) the aforementioned infatuation with James Beard and (b) my new passion for “garbage-disposal baking”. Since I am living by myself for the first time, I am realizing that it is up to me to actually deal with all of the stuff in my refrigerator, and sometimes it gets a little dire. . . At which point I just starting putting it all in the same pan. Very, very exciting, people.

            I am going to bring this to my teacher class tomorrow so we can talk about how to do everything I described above calmly and effectively. And if you know a first year teacher, please give them a hug. Because learning how to teach is still the best example I know of “trial by fire.” I’ll also be sharing it with my adorable new advisees since I apparently still haven’t learned to plan things out and ended up grating 1.5 times as much zucchini as required.

Zucchini Peach Spice Bread

Adapted from “Carl Gohs’ Zucchini Bread” in James Beards’ Beard on Bread

I used hazelnuts (aka filberts) in this case because I have an advisee with a walnut allergy. And I had some left over from another recipe. How convenient. Normally, I’m a walnut person (that’s the maternal influence right there), but while we’re experimenting, why not try a new nut.

Ingredients (the correct ones, if you know how to measure things out ahead of time, unlike me):

3 eggs

2 cups granulated sugar (or get crazy with some brown sugar. . .)

1 cup vegetable oil

2 cups grated, peeled raw zucchini

1+ very ripe peaches, cut into tiny chunks

3 teaspoons vanilla extract

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon double-acting baking powder

3 teaspoons ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground ginger

¼ teaspoon ground cloves

1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1 cup coarsely chopped filberts (hazelnuts) or walnuts

What to do:

            Preheat your oven to 350° F. It is important not to overdo it on the temperature, because you don’t want to burn the outside of the bread while the inside is still gooey, which can easily happen with dense mixtures like this.

            This follows the fairly traditional approach of: mix the wet ingredients, mix the dry ingredients, mix them together, then fold in the nuts. Surprise!

            Eggs first. Beat until nice and foamy. Or as close as you can get. I didn’t try very hard on this part because I wasn’t seeing a lot of progress. No disaster. Add the sugar, oil, zucchini, peaches, and vanilla. Mix. (This whole part is really easy if you have a stand mixer, but the grand tradition of hand stirring will certainly work just as well.)

            Mix together all of the dry ingredients. If you want to stop with the spice after cinnamon, you should feel free to do so. I like the spice. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir until blended. Stir in the nuts.

            Spoon/pour the batter into well-buttered 9x5x3 inch loaf pans. Seriously on the buttering. Very important. This recipe takes a solid hour to cook. I made dinner while I was waiting. I felt very good about my multi-tasking. Especially when I didn’t forget that there was something in the oven, which has happened on more than one occasion recently. (That’s the other thing that happens at the beginning of the school year).

Things I learned:

1. The Cuisinart heavy duty food processor is one of the most delightful pieces of machinery in the history of cooking implements. Seriously. Three zucchinis grated in under 30 seconds. I am not lazy. I just enjoy nice machinery.
2. My new oven is really small. Three loaf pans is pushing it. This could make for a very exciting year for baking.
3.  Small oven means it is really easy to burn the bottom of the loaves. Whoops.
4. A paring knife is really not adequate for chopping hazelnuts. Duh.
5. Different pan sizes = different baking times (okay, I already knew that, but I was reminded of it here.)

Off to plan tomorrow’s lesson!