The Most Adorable (and Tasty) Star Trek Tribute EVER!

We interrupt our regular educational programming with the following announcement:

CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT TODAY IS THE 45TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST STAR TREK EPISODE!!!!!!

Yikes!  I watched Star Trek as a child, and granted, that was 45 years ago, but still, somehow, it seems shocking....

But I've always loved Star Trek, especially the original series in all its cheesy and earnest glory.  My husband was more of a "Second Generation" guy (and, admittedly, the Borg is a great concept), but those characters never captured my heart the way James T. Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Uhuru, Sulu, and Chekov did.

Which is why I am so enraptured by this:

from Darla at Bakingdom.com, one of my new favorite blogs.

Can you believe she made the entire cast into cookies?  You can see them all up close on her post, along with details about her recipes and techniques involved in recreating everyone in flour, sugar, and butter.

Her entire site is filled with similarly creative pastries and other goodies.  Truly, her stuff is incredible.  I like to use food to enhance certain educational ideas and subject, like our Presidential Palate series of cooking a meal to represent the US Presidents, but I can't hold a candle to her when it comes to cookie- and cake-based tributes.

However, her tasty Star Trek reminders does make me think about incorporating watching some Star Trek into our 20th century history this year once we get to the 1960's.  The original series had a political agenda; Gene Roddenberry wanted it to support the anti-war, feminist, and pro-Civil Rights positions of the 60's counter culture.  And as I reported in an earlier post, actress Nichelle Nichols has a story of a chance encounter with Martin Luther King Jr., who called himself "the biggest Trekkie on the planet," and claimed that Star Trek gave people a concrete vision of how life could be if we were committed to equality and peace (well, not that there wasn't plenty of fighting in Star Wars, but the goals were always to forward peace).   The show was pretty radical for its time, especially with the racially-mixed crew and television's first scripted inter-racial kiss.

So maybe I can justify revisiting some of my favorite childhood memories for academic purposes!

Presidential Palate 6: Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, and McKinley

Before the week ends, it's time to write about this week's Presidential Palate dinner.  These four presidents are examples of why I am doing this project.  Prior to our Presidential Palate initiative, I could hardly have told you anything about any of these presidents, neither what they did or why they were important.  Now, though, we have at least SOMETHING to celebrate about each one of them.

For example, let's start with Chester Arthur.  Previously, Arthur was just one of those "boring" presidents to me.  Now, however, he is a hero to me.  Why?  Because his administration is the first that I've read about that served a dessert made out of my favorite--CHOCOLATE!  This exemplifies why this project is so interesting, because you forget that everyone didn't always eat what you eat.

In the case of cakes, there had been cakes around since long before George Washington.  However, they were all either white or yellow cakes or fruit cakes.  Back then, chocolate was too expensive to be used in something as trivial as a cake.  So there is no mention of chocolate among presidential meals for almost 100 years.

However, New Yorker Arthur considered himself to be quite the gourmet and kept up on the latest trends in food.  By the mid 19th century, the price of chocolate had dropped, and people had started to serve what they called "chocolate cake"--white/yellow cake with chocolate frosting.  But in Arthur's time, there was a fashionable new recipe for so-called "devil's food cake," which had chocolate in the cake batter.  There is dispute as to the origin of the name, but my guess is that it was considered to be positively sinful to use chocolate in both the cake and the icing.  However, the sources I read say that this is a truly original American recipe, and that Europeans did not start making chocolate batter cakes until well into the 20th century.

So we commemorated President Arthur with a Devil's Food Cake.  We even followed what is said to be the earliest printed version of the recipe, from a cookbook published in 1902 (which is well after Arthur's time, but the earliest known instructions for such a cake).  It is different than modern cakes in that, like the more historical white and angel food cakes, the egg whites are beaten before being added to the batter.  In fact, there was relatively little butter (in our case, margarine) or milk (in our case, coconut milk) compared to the amount of flour, making it quite a thick batter and resulting in a denser cake (more like pound cake) than the chocolate cakes people favor today.  However, it gave my son his first experience in beating eggs using an old-fashioned egg beater:

The old mechanical egg beater still does a great job!

This cake is supposed to be made in layers and covered in a chocolate or white frosting, but we cooked ours in a bundt pan and just sprinkled it with powdered sugar, since cake alone is bad enough for my diabetic husband, let alone all the added sugar in a frosting.

Chester Arthur's Devil's Food Cake

Next came Grover Cleveland.  He is one that I should remember (but to be honest, I didn't) because there is one fact about Cleveland that is not shared with any other American president.  Give up?  Cleveland is the only president who had two non-consecutive terms--so he is the 22nd president and the 24th president.  So I wanted a recipe for him that would cement that fairly significant fact in my brain--and in my son's.

The problem was, Grover Cleveland was not particularly interesting eater.  Here is something we have discovered in our research for this project:  just as during both the Antebellum and Reconstruction eras, there were very few two-term presidents, as the office tended to flip-flop every four years between different parties and politics, so too did the eating habits of the presidents tend to differ dramatically.  So after gourmand Arthur came the more plain-eating Cleveland.

So I kind of abandoned using one of his foods or recipes, and went looking for something "double" or "twice" in the title.  One recipe I found that came highly recommended was "Double-stuffed Chicken Breasts."  However, the "double" referred to inserting two types of cheese into the chicken, and cheese is not good for my dairy-allergic son.

Then the magic happened.

Because what should appear on my friend Siglinde's wonderful Siggy Spice blog but a recipe for Hawaiian Pineapple Chicken.  It looked wonderful, and my son LOOOVES pineapple in his food.  But he almost never gets it because--guess what?--I'm allergic to pineapple (you can see menu planning has its challenges in this household), and so I never cook pineapple stuff.  But it seemed like a sign, because during Cleveland's second term was when the US basically kicked out Hawaii's native leader, Queen Lili'uokalani, and set up the brief Republic of Hawaii, which happened prior to Hawaii first becoming a territory, and then a state, of the US.   Of course, Cleveland was an isolationist and was against US imperialism, but his own party, who was mad at him by this time by his inability to solve an economic depression that was taken place at that time, forced it upon him.  Still, I like tying the beginning of Hawaii to some particular point in mainland American history, and it seems like this is the right place to put it.

So in honor of our 22nd and 24th president, we ended up making two different chicken main dishes:  Double Stuffed Chicken for my husband and me, and Hawaiian Pineapple Chicken for my son.  I stuffed the chicken with artisan New York Cheddar to remind us of Cleveland's New York roots:

Double-Stuffed Chicken for Grover Cleveland

In terms of the Hawaiian Pineapple Chicken, my pictures look pitiful in comparison with the master, so see the luscious-looking photo that Siglinde has posted on her blog.

In between Cleveland's two terms comes Benjamin Harrison, the grandson of the short-lived William Henry Harrison.  It turns out that eating preferences don't ALWAYS alternate with the parties, because the Harrison's seemed to be even plainer eaters than was Cleveland.  However, several places said that the Harrison family, who came from Indiana, were "addicted" to corn in all forms.  So I found a lovely-sounding recipe for "Indiana Corn Chowder," and we made that.  And it was lovely:

Benjamin Harrison and Indiana Corn Chowder

It is not as thick and rich as some corn chowders, and features red potatoes and some zucchini, making it colorful and healthy.  It was also a nice homage to Ben's grandaddy, since we had made "Old Sober" soup as his dish for his Presidential Palate meal.

This brings us to our final president, William McKinley.  McKinley may be most famous for being president during the Spanish American War, which not only brought Hawaii into the Union, but resulted in Puerto Rico and Guam becoming territories and the occupation of Cuba.  So my son wanted to make a Cuban dish to round out the meal.  We ended up deciding to make "Moros Y Christianos," or a Cuban version of black beans and rice.  (The title translates as "Moors and Christians," which brought us back to the Arab occupation of Spain and an explanation of why that title relates to that dish.)

Anyway, here is what my final plate looked like WITH the addition of a mixed greens salad (but not showing the soup or the dessert):

So I think we ended up with a pretty memorable meal based on some fairly unremarkable presidents.

Presidential Palate 5.5: Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant certainly presents a presidential paradox.  At a time when parts of the nation were scraping themselves back together from the ravages of war, Grant ushered in a new era of affluence and opulence among the industrialized North--the so-called Gilded Age.  After years of subsisting on plain Army fare (and supposedly have a personal preference for simple meals), Grant presided over some of the most abundant and over-the-top dinners the White House has ever seen!  As mentioned in yesterday's post, Grant was known for having 29 course banquets, which might cost $2,000 for 36 people (which, according to The Inflation Calculator, would cost over $33,000 in modern dollars, or over $900 per person).

Well, as much as I like to be authentic, there's no way that I'm going to fix 29 courses for a single meal.  But the good news is that after seeing a price tag of $900 per ticket, ANYTHING I serve is going to seem like a tremendous bargain.  Therefore, to represent this Gilded Age meal, I opted for quality over quantity.  So many things I read said that Grant really liked "fillet of beef," so the centerpiece of the meal was individual filet mignon steaks (quite a splurge for us, but, as I said, a real bargain compared to Grant's expenditures...especially because they are on sale at Harris Teeter this week).  The things I do for my son's educational benefit....

Another thing that is special about this meal is that I cooked the steaks in a Griswold cast iron pan.  Griswold is a company that was founded in 1865 (four years before Grant's first presidential term) that makes what some people consider to be the best ever American cast iron cookware (or at least, it used to--the company closed in 1957).  My father-in-law, who died last August, was a real character with all sorts of interests and passions, one of which was collecting Griswold pans.  We got our one Griswold pan from him, so I was thinking of him as we cooked these steaks.  He really enjoyed American history, and I think he would like the idea we were using this historical American cookware to teach his grandson American presidential history.

Anyway, here are the filets of beef, wrapped in bacon:

Ulysses S. Grant Filet of Beef

The dinner descriptions we read mentioned them served with masses of potatoes and mushrooms, so here is my son making the potatoes in the old-fashioned way:

Making Mashed Potatoes the Old-Fashioned Way

along with the mushrooms, which I am allergic to, but are a great favorite of my menfolk:

I made a Merlot Peppercorn sauce to go along with it:

and, of course, added some broccoli, although I don't think they ate that then (but I wanted to add something that was healthy):

Anyway, it was a really special meal, made even more special with the added family history.  So now you will understand if my son says that Grant is his favorite president, since most historians rank him fairly low among the presidents (besides overseeing Reconstruction, which is not really one of the highlights of our national history, and not getting high marks on handling the major economic depression that occurred during his term, his administration was replete with scandal, graft, and corruption).  So, great soldier, probably a good man, maybe not such a great president--but an outstanding meal nonetheless!

Presidential Palate 5: Johnson, Hayes, Garfield

Even though it didn't align with any holiday, we continued eating our way through the presidents with our fifth Presidential Palate dinner.  This meal was centered around the presidencies of Andrew Johnson, Rutherford B. Hayes, and James Garfield.  "But wait!"  surely someone out there will say.  "You forgot about Ulysses S. Grant."

Actually, we haven't.  However, as I've written during some of the previous Presidential Palate meals, we're having a hard time eating these four-course dinners.  And Grant's presidential dinners epitomized the Gilded Age that was blossoming during his terms, often serving 29 courses in the course of one meal.  So we figured we had better do him as a meal in itself.  Stay tuned for that story.

Johnson, Hayes, and Garfield, however, all seemed to have much simpler tastes.  Johnson is believed in our area because he came from North Carolina.  So we made a traditional North Carolina fish stew called Pine Bark Stew that was supposed to be a favorite of his.   No one knows where the name originated, but leading theories include:

• pine bark was used to either flavor or cook the meal
• the stew was thick enough to serve on a piece of pine bark
• it was the color of pine bark

I have no idea how authentic the recipe I used was, but it doesn't support any of those theories, at least in my opinion.  Take a look at it cooking and let me know if you disagree...

Andrew Johnson's Pine Bark Stew

Rutherford B. Hayes was from Ohio, and favored simple meals that reminded him of home.  For his contribution, we used an actual recipe of his wife, Lucy Hayes.  However, being one of those old fashioned recipes, it was kind of short on exact measurements and details about how things were supposed to be done.  So once again, I'm not sure that what we ended up with reflected what the family themselves would have served.

Rutherford B. Hayes Corn Fritters

I'm thinking now that the corn should have been mashed or creamed or something, but the recipe didn't say anything about doing that.  Anyway, I thought they were pretty good, but they didn't go over well among the menfolk in the family.  But the fish stew was good, except a little bland--nothing that some liberal application of our totally non-time-period chipotle hot sauce couldn't cure!

And when I combined it with a green salad (I probably should have done collard greens or something more Southern in honor of Johnson, but I don't know how to cook those properly and I don't like eating them), it made a pretty and colorful meal:

Johnson, Hayes, and Garfield meal

James Garfield was an even more...OK, let's just be honest--BORING eater.  It appears that he rejected fancy European cooking for simple, nutritious meals, with his favorite drink being milk and his favorite foods being bread, potatoes, and the ubiquitous apples.  One of preferred items was soda bread, so we made some of that to go along with the soup.  

James Garfield Soda Bread

One thing Garfield HATED, though, was oatmeal.  So we finished the meal with Oatmeal Cookies in kind of a reverse memory of him.  

And while we didn't have a 29 course banquet, we did make a very special meal for Grant the next day, but I'll save that for tomorrow's blog.

Presidential Palate 4, St. Patrick's Day Edition: Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Lincoln

So we've already made it up to the Civil War in our presidential quartets.  The theme for this meal was determined when I read that Abraham Lincoln ate his first inauguration's luncheon at the beautiful Willard Hotel next to the White House, and that it consisted of Mock Turtle Soup, Corned Beef and Cabbage, Parsley Potatoes, and Blackberry Pie.  Since St. Patrick's Day happened to fall during this week, we decided to kill two birds with one stone and combine our Presidential meal with our St. Patrick's Day celebration.

The combination made sense for reasons other than President Lincoln's predilection for corned beef.  Millard Fillmore was President during the latter half of the great Irish immigration in response to the Irish Potato Famine, and issues related to the hoards of new Irish and German immigrants plagued this entire set of chief executives.  Also, James Buchanan was a first-generation American, since his father had immigrated from Ireland.

Millard Fillmore, who came from a New York farm family, favored plain, simple food, and supposedly consumed a lot of soups and stews.  Therefore, we opened the meal with a soup course in his honor; however, to stay with the St. Patrick's theme, we made a cream and cabbage soup entitled "Pride of the Irish" soup (although we altered the recipe to make it a vegan dish):

Although it might not look too inspiring at first, a couple of minutes with my handy-dandy emersion blender turned it into this smooth, springy-green concoction:

that looked even better when garnished with a little cheese (soy cheese for my son) and chives:

Although James Buchanan was of Irish descent, he grew up in Pennsylvania (the only President from that state so far) and liked Pennsylvania Dutch food.  Pennsylvania Dutch food is not really Dutch, like the area in New York that Van Buren was from; the "Dutch" part was really an American mistranslation when German immigrants explained they were "Deutsch" (the German word for German, pronounced "Doysh").  So for Buchanan, we made a hot German Potato Salad.  However, I left out the traditional bacon (I try to avoid nitrates, and I figured the corned beef would have enough for one meal), and substituted parsley in anticipation of Lincoln's parsley potatoes.  I also swapped leeks for the onions; although I know leeks are primarily associated with Wales, I think the Irish used them a lot as well.

So, in addition to the soup, we had a lovely plate of hot potato salad, peas, and Mr. Lincoln's corned beef:

This was a big hit with the crowd--probably the best-received entire meal of the four Presidential menus we have cooked so far.  It was such a big hit, however, that we didn't have room for dessert, which was the item in honor of Franklin Pierce.  But we decided to celebrate Pierce on a latter occasion.

So tonight I made our St. Patrick's Day/Presidential Palate 4 meal, take 2.   This, ironically enough, is really a more traditionally Irish dish than the one we had on St. Paddy's Day itself.  The thing is, the Irish Irish rarely ate corned beef.  It was a favorite meal for the English, however, as well as the French, the Caribbean, and several other foreign locations.  So by the 19th Century, the English had taken over the Irish lands and turned the island into a major EXPORTER of corned beef.  In fact, it was the foreign love for Irish corned beef that could be blamed for the Irish Potato Famine of the mid 1800s.

What happened was that the English took all the prime agriculture land and turned it into pastures for cows that eventually got exported as corned beef.  They left only the poorest farming land to the Irish people to use to meet their own food needs.  Potatoes were one of the few crops that could grow in such poor soil, so by the middle of the 19th Century, about one third of the Irish were completely dependent on potatoes as their major food source.  So when the potato crop got wiped out, the poor had no other option for a food substitute.  This led to almost one million Irish starving to death, and another million leaving the country, reducing the total population by 20-25% over the course of about five years.

When the Irish got to the US, however, corned beef was relatively cheap.  Because it had been considered such a luxury food back home, the poor Irish immigrants ate as much as they could of it in their new home.  So the whole corned beef thing may make sense for American Irish, but really is a pretty sad story for the native Irish.

Anyway, this week my friend Sieglinde, who writes the FABULOUS Siggy Spice cooking-and-life blog,  posted her recipe for Bangers and Mash.  This traditional pub meal is really more representative of native Irish cooking, since the Irish have always eaten much more pork than beef.  So I followed her delicious recipe (which uses Guiness in the gravy--yum!), and made my mash not just out of potatoes, but also some leftover peas and broccoli I had (making it a healthier dish and turning it a more Irish-themed green than the traditional approach):

My guys LOVED this dish--so much, in fact, that I think this may become our new St. Patrick's Day tradition.  Now that I've realized the connection between corned beef and the Great Famine in Ireland, it doesn't seem like the best dish to celebrate all things Irish.

Then, after dinner, we finally got to eat Frankin Pierce's contribution--Fried Pies, a recipe from the President's Cookbook that was supposed to have been one of Pierce's favorite treats.  That recipe calls for dried apples, but I used fresh ones instead, and I also used maple syrup instead of sugar to reflect Pierce's New Hampshire roots.  These are actually deep fat fried, so we pulled out the iron skillet again:

After they were cooked, we drained them and rolled them in sugar and served while still warm and crispy:

These were another MAJOR hit!  So either we are getting better at all this, or else the antebellum Presidents had taste that was more similar to our family's preferences.

Either way, this project got us covering a lot of 19th Century history in addition to our four featured Presidents, and ended up with some favorite foods as well.

Presidential Palate 3, Mardi Gras Edition: Harrison, Tyler, Polk, and Taylor

Happy Mardi Gras everyone, and laissez les bons temps rouler!  We celebrated the occasion by combining it with our third Presidential Palate meal, which was in honor of William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James Polk, and Zachary Taylor.

Harrison was called the "Hard Cider Candidate," first by his opponents as a slam against his character.  However, Harrison seized upon the term to make him, born to a rich family in Virginia, seem more like a common frontiersman like many in the state of Ohio to which he had moved.  It was also said he plied his many campaign workers with the alcoholic drink and burgoo stew, which is made with squirrel meat.

Since our local Harris Teeter seemed to be all out of squirrel meat, we substituted a traditional soup from New Orleans called Yakamein or Old Sober Soup (said to help the symptoms of a hangover).  This soup was supposed to have originated in the mid 19th century when Chinese immigrants who had been brought over to work on the railroads or the sugar plantations, but found they didn't like the work, settled in New Orleans, already a mixing pot of French, Spanish, African, Caribbean, Native American, and who knows what else transplants.  Apparently 19th Century New Orleans had one of the country's biggest Chinatowns, although it virtually disappeared in the 20th Century.  But here is the soup; can't you see the oriental influence?

Of course, an appetizer is perfect for Harrison, who died only a month into his presidency after falling sick due to having given a two-hour inaugural speech in the cold weather of January.  His vice president, John Tyler of Virginia, was the first to take over from a president who died in office.

Tyler was renowned for having the most children of any presidents (14) between his two wives.  He is famous for enjoying a dessert called Tyler Pudding Pie, which was basically what we call today Coconut Cream Pie.  To accommodate our family's health issues, we tried making a vegan diabetic version of the dish.  No one had any tonight because we were all full, but my son who sampled the filling as he made it thought it tasted delicious:

Next came James Polk, a plain-eating man from North Carolina.  His preferences were represented by a salad that included mustard and turnip greens and some old-fashioned corn pone, made in a special corn pone skillet that I also inherited from my grandmother (?):

The main course was inspired by Zachary Taylor who, although born in Virginia, spent most of his life living in Lousiana.  We made a dish from a recipe that was developed out of a recipe from Antoine's in New Orleans, which bills itself as the oldest family-owned restaurant in the country, since it has been in operation since Taylor's presidency in the 1840's.  Taylor was a great lover of Creole cooking, which was the more French-like cooking of the region (the poorer people's style was called Cajun).  This dish, Chicken Bonne Femme, is chicken served with a heavily-garlic butter sauce and a garnish of diced potatoes, andouille sausage, onions, and mushrooms in a wine sauce.  It was really good, but filling, especially after the soup.

So there you have it--our Mardi Gras-influenced meal for Harrison, Tyler, Polk, and Taylor.  Enjoy the meal!

Presidential Palate 2: Monroe, Quincy Adams, Jackson, and Van Buren

Last night, we made the second of our Presidential Palate dinners.  The next set of four presidents were represented in the appetizer plate alone:

• James Monroe, like the two Virginia presidents that immediately preceded him, had international tastes and was a great lover of French cuisine.  He is represented by the French baguette.
• John Quincy Adams, of the other hand, was like his father in preferring the plain, simple foods of New England.  He is represented by the apples.
• Andrew Jackson was the first president who came from the ranks of the "common man," rather than the well-to-do.  Jackson often invited the public to White House parties, and was famous for one time serving a cheese wheel that weighted 1,400 pounds and was consumed in two hours.  He is represented by the cheddar cheese.
• Martin Van Buren came from New York, and is represented by the Gouda cheese as a testament to his Dutch American ancestry.

Monroe also like traditional Virginia cooking, and his favorite dish was supposed to have been chicken fried with rice.  I couldn't find a specific recipe for it, but I assumed it was fried chicken service on rice.  Now, looking back, I don't think I have ever fried chicken in my life; it's not something I learned as a child, and is one of those dishes that I think is just worth buying (if we're going to have it at all, since we steer away from deep fried food).  But I did have one asset:  the old season black iron skillet that I inherited from either my grandmother or my great-grandmother...I have to check with my father.

But my father's side of the family came from Tennessee, just like Andrew Jackson, so it seemed fitting to pull out the old family skillet for my inaugural attempt at frying chicken:

From the history I read, back then they used to bake rice, rather than boil it on a stove.  So I tried my version of baked rice, based on this recipe for baked brown basmati rice.  It was actually an interesting departure from our typical brown rice dishes.

One of Andrew Jackson's favorite dishes was supposed to have been "Leather Britches," which, it turns out, is dried green beans hung on a string (like you often see done with chili peppers today), then soaked and simmered in water with bacon (in our case, hickory smoked bacon in honor of "Old Hickory").  So we did that for our vegetable, although we had to start with fresh green beans, since this is the first time I had ever heard about drying them.  Maybe next year we can try it again with beans dried from the coming summer.

So with those dishes combined, the main plate looked like this:

John Quincy Adams apparently paid very little attention to food, often eating nothing but crackers and some fruit for his meal.  Since we had already had apples in the appetizer, we decided to use pears, which were another Adams favorite.  Rather than just serve it as fruit, though, I found this recipe for a late winter salad featuring pears.  I'm not a great one for combining sweet with savory, but I thought I would give it a try.  We simplified it, using organic artisan greens, radicchio, pears, and feta cheese with a vinaigrette dressing.  It turned out pretty well, I thought, although fruits in green salads are still not really my thing.

Our dessert was in honor of Martin Van Buren--Dutch Apple Cake.  However, we used a recipe from the old President's Cookbook, which was pretty different from the Dutch Apple Cake that I am used to having.  The cake dough was much thinker, and there was no streusel topping.  So it ended up looking pretty much like our Apple Pan Dowdy from our first Presidential Palate meal, since you can't see that there is a cake underneath the apples, rather than a pie crust:

It wasn't received as well as the Dowdy, so I would stick to the Dowdy for both Adams presidents in the future.

All in all, it was a pretty southern meal, which is appropriate because so many of those early presidents were Southerners.  Although I live in North Carolina, I'm not much of a southern cooker, so this was a good learning experience for me.  And I do think it is helping us keep the presidents from running together into one undifferentiated blur.

Presidential Palate: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison

We had our first Presidential Palate dinner last week honoring the founding fathers of the US Presidency:  George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

Let's start with the meal component celebrating the Father of our Country, George Washington.  We didn't go with a food of that time period, but rather a more recent recipe that relates to one of those interesting facts about our first President.  Did you know that, on top of fathering the nation and winning the war and being the first President and operating a minor plantation at Mt. Vernon, George Washington ran the largest whiskey distillery in the country at that time?  So our main course to remind us of General Washington, was Whiskey Shrimp, which relates both to his whiskey business and the fact that his home was one the Potomac River, from which they caught much seafood (albeit not shrimp) for many a fresh dinner.

I made the dish with a recipe adapted from this one by Brooklyn Plated.  This recipe is particularly exciting because you ignite the whiskey and let it burn -- quite a display for our first President!  But instead of making it an appetizer and serving it on toasted bread rounds, I served it as a main dish over wild rice.  The wild rice paid homage to 3rd President Thomas Jefferson, who was so committed to improving rice cultivation in the Southern states that he smuggled some rice grains out of Italy under penalty of death!  You can read about Jefferson's contribution to American rice crops at this article from the Monticello (Jefferson's home) website.  We also served that with some raw cherry tomatoes, again in honor of Jefferson, who both grew and ate tomatoes although the prevailing thought at the time was that tomatoes were poisonous, given their close relationship to the belladonna, or deadly nightshade plant.

GW Whiskey Shrimp over TJ Wild Rice

We accompanied this dish with Faux Cream of Broccoli soup, our item for the Madison presidency.  Actually, James Madison was not that interested in food.  However, his wife, Dolley, was quite a social entertainer.  She threw many fancy dinner parties at the White House, many of which featured French Cuisine, which was the height of fashion at the time.  We figured Cream of Broccoli could represent that trend, since France was famous for cream soups, and broccoli was not commonly grown in the US until the 20th century.

The thing is, my son is allergic to dairy, which is why we made this a "faux" cream soup.  Julia Child has a technique for dairy-free cream soup, but it involves rice, which my husband's diabetes seems to be particularly sensitive to.  So the secret ingredients in our faux cream soup are (1) potatoes and (2) unsweetened coconut milk, which allowed me to make a remarkably creamy and relatively not-ridiculously-hyperglycemic vegan version of this quite tasty dish.  (Of course, back then, people weren't worrying about diabetes and food allergies and veganism.  But the point of this exercise is to make some meals that will help us to remember the Presidents without sacrificing our health, not necessarily to create authentic dishes from the time period.)

Dolley Madison Faux Cream of Broccoli Soup

We did have a somewhat authentic dish for the Adams presidency.  Our dessert was Apple Pan Dowdy, which was supposed to have been one of John Adam's favorite sweets.  This, again, we simplified (we were running out of time and energy, so we used pre-made pie dough) and adjusted (we left out the molasses to reduce the sugar content for my husband) from this recipe.  But if you don't know, Apple Pan Dowty is basically apple pie cooked in a pan where the top crust is chopped and kind of mixed in with the apple filling.  This part of the meal my son made all by himself (we worked together on most of the other parts), and my husband announced it was one of his favorite desserts ever.

Abigail Adam's Apple Pan Dowdy

So while our first dinner in this series took some research and preparation time, I would say it was a great success.  Now we are working on the next one.  Who can remember the four Presidents who came immediately after James Madison?

Lesson Plan: The Presidential Palate, or Learning US History Through Cooking

Preface:
Before explaining this project, I have to give a shout-out to my homeschooling support group, Cary Homeschoolers.  We are so fortunate to homeschool in Cary, NC, not only because there are so many homeschoolers here that we have lots of programs and resources, but also because we have so many really well-informed parents who are so generous in sharing their expertise with each other.  So, for example, when I want to know what terms to search for on Google to find out more about that human tendency to make sense out of abstract or random pictures or symbols, I know exactly who to ask (it's called "Pareidolia," she informed me).  Or when I'm trying to help my son figure out whether he should display his data as a bar chart or a pie chart or some other statistical analysis, I know who to call.  Or when I want some obscure historical reference on some topic that I don't know that much about, such as the liberation of the serfs in 19th century Russia, I know exactly who can lend me a book on that subject.  I could go on and on about all the people who have helped me to get the information I need to educate my son.   I just want to publicly acknowledge what a gift it is to homeschool within that kind of a community.

However, it is not only the academic knowledge that this community provides.  I have a friend whose social action inspires me to be more involved in political issues.  I have another friend who attends my spiritual community and assists me in my teaching there.  Yet another friend is redoing her kitchen, and helps me see that improving my house is a possibility.

One CHS member who has galvanized me to do some more imaginative cooking for my family is my friend who writes a delightful blog entitled Siggy Spice.  She concentrates on delicious-sounding recipes, but writes about them in a wonderful humorous voice.  She is homeschooling three children, plus parenting another, and yet manages to come up with original meals several times, PLUS she manages to photograph them and blog about them.  Her example has helped me to upgrade my cooking, at least in terms of trying some new recipes and such.

But as I was trying some new recipes--which I really enjoy doing, by the way--it also sparked a new idea for our history studies.  This year we are learning about the US Presidents.  And I don't know about you, but I kind of muddle up a lot of those Presidents in the middle.  I mean, I'm good for the first four to six or so, and I'm solid in terms of Eisenhower on.  Plus, I know the ones around the wars.  But all those guys in the middle--Garfield?  the Harrisons?  Taft?   For me, at least, those guys kind of run together.

I've written on several occasions, perhaps most recently here, about how I think incorporating food into lessons really helps students remember the lesson.  (After all, food is kind of a priority for this age group.)  So I came up with a new approach to learning the US Presidents.  First of all, we are going to "chunk" them into groups of four.  Chunking is an educational theory that we can learn limited amount of information at the same time -- so, for example, we learn our phone numbers as 919 (one chunk), 555 (another chunk), and 1212 (a third chunk).

But in addition to "chunking" them into groups of four, we are going to add an experiential component to each chunk.  We (my son and I) are going to cook a meal of four dishes that represent the four Presidents in that chunk.  We are going to assign one President to main dish, one to vegetable, one to dessert, and then one other to some other side dish.  We plan to combine dishes that were authentic to the time period to modern dishes that relate to outstanding facts about that President.

My intention is to combine research and learning about American Presidents with an interest of my son (cooking), along with teaching him cooking skills, which I think are lifelong competencies.  I think this way of approaching the Presidential timeline might help him at least place those less renowned Presidents in the right framework for their time.

We cooked out first Presidential Palate meal this week as part of our Presidents Day celebration.  So I plan to post specifics about our Washington-Adams-Jefferson-Madison meal tomorrow.