Helen and Helena

I just finished reading Julie and Julia, the book that was the basis for the movie of the same name, and have something embarrassingly awful to admit. I’m jealous!

Here this Julie Powell person comes up with this cooking-her-way-through-Julia-Child idea and suddenly she’s a full-time writer. So I figured there’s only one thing to do. Imitate!

Thus, the title of today’s blog. Except I haven’t found a Helena that I can emulate. There’s Helena Rubenstein, a famous name in cosmetics, but being a lipstick-only lady I have absolutely no interest in spending a year, or even a week, trying out all her different eye shadows and foundation creams.

There’s Saint Helena, also known as Helena of Constantinople, who died about 1600 years ago. According to you-know-what informational website, she “was the consort of Emperor Constantius, and the mother of Emperor Constantine I. She is traditionally credited with finding the relics of the True Cross.” Admirable, but definitely not accomplishments I can repeat. Or even understand very well, starting life as I did in the bosom of an eastern European Jewish family.

There’s Helena, Montana, which happens to be the capital of that state. I know this for a fact because when my seventh grade teacher called out “Montana” and I didn’t immediately raise my hand with the answer, she made a very big point of staring at me and emphatically pronouncing my name to make sure I’d get it. I got it. And I’ll never forget it.

And it’s absolutely certain that I could never love cooking the way both Julie and Julia do, or in Julia’s case, did. Nor would I ever willingly work my way through 524 recipes. The culinary highlights of my life make a pretty short list. And since you all know how much I love lists, here it is.

Liver. Yep, you read that correctly. Liver. In my pre-vegan days I adored the stuff. All kinds. Calves liver, chicken liver, chopped liver. Cold liver sandwiches for lunch. (Truth!) I cooked calves liver the way my mother did, dipped in egg, breaded and fried, and now and then daring people have told me that was the only liver they ever enjoyed eating. Not a lot of people Some people. One or two. Maybe only one.

Blintzes. That’s another recipe I learned from my mother. If you don’t know what a blintz is, think crepe and you’ll be close. I used to love watching Mom make blintzes, it was such a major production. First she would cover our big dining room table with a white tablecloth, then she’d mix up a bowl of egg batter and a batch of dry cottage cheese mixture. Next step was heating a small iron skillet – actually, I think she had a couple of them going at the same time – and pouring in some of the egg mixture, then pouring most of it back into the bowl, leaving a very thin skin to quickly solidify. She would dump each circle of cooked egg crepe on the table and head back to the stove for more until the whole table was covered with rows of yellow circles about, oh, I guess about 3 or 4 inches around.

Using an ice cream scoop Mom would plop a mound of the cottage cheese stuff into the middle of each little pancake, and when that step was completed, she would fold each pancake to make a sort of cheese-mixture-filled envelope. And finally most of the blintzes would get piled on a plate and put into the refrigerator for frying at a later time. By now I was visibly panting and salivating, because the wonderful conclusion of this whole project was getting to eat a few of the blintzes that she fried right away

When I tried duplicating this process, some 20 years later, a lot of my egg pancakes were too thin and tore when I tried to fold them, and others were the right consistency but my folding skills were sadly lacking, so I ended up with a bunch of mostly odd shaped and falling apart blintzes. And some of them completely disintegrated during the frying stage. Didn’t matter, though. They tasted just fine.

Mac & Cheese and canned spaghetti. Yep, you read that correctly, too. I used to think that one of the best dinners in the whole world was to make a batch of Kraft macaroni and cheese and combine it with the contents of a can of spaghetti and heat up the whole mess together. And when I say “used to” I don’t mean “used to” as in “when I was a kid.” I’m talking sophisticated grown-up cuisine here.

Banana bread. There was a period of a few years when I was kind of into baking, and one of the two or three items that I made back then was banana bread. I used a recipe that was in the Settlement House Cookbook, the resource my mother had relied on for everything. An easy recipe, except it called for a half-cup of buttermilk. I hated buttermilk, and neither my husband nor daughter seemed to ever want the stuff, either, so it wasn’t something we usually had on hand, whereas all the other ingredients called for were items I kept in stock. One day when I was lamenting to a friend about having to run out for buttermilk whenever one of these baking fits came over me, she told me that I could substitute a solution of half milk and half vinegar. I tried it and sure ‘nuff, it worked. Until the day I decided to double the recipe and make two loaves. In my mathematically deficient brain, I figured out that creating a cup of faux buttermilk required a whole cup EACH of milk and vinegar. Those were strange tasting loaves of banana bread, as you can well imagine.

Vegan chili. So with this kind of illustrious history as a cook, it really tickles my tootsies to have such great success with my chili. Especially since calling it a recipe, or even characterizing what I do as cooking, is really a stretch. I’ve been making the stuff for years, and all it amounts to is opening a bunch of cans and emptying them into a crock pot. Really. Not exaggerating. I put in canned chili beans, canned tomato sauce, and canned diced tomatoes. Swish some water around in the cans after they are empty and pour that into the pot. Add onions. In the old days, before it became vegan chili, I used to add cooked ground turkey. Now I use textured vegetable protein, which ends up looking somewhat like ground meat. Beans and sauce and tomatoes and onions and TVP cook on low in the crock pot for eight to ten hours and voila, chili. Very popular chili that almost always gets completely devoured at potluck dinners, even though I’m often the only vegetarian in attendance, and almost certainly the only vegan. I figure crock pot slow cooking is the secret ingredient.

However, since it isn’t likely I can find a way to turn completely un-gourmet chili into a path to fame and fortune, looks like I’ll just have to be satisfied with being just plain Helen and skip the search for Helena.

Or maybe, if I moved to Montana ….

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