September 2007

Jim’s reply

Ha...ha...ha...! I am triumphant. I knew this blog was gonna be good for something! If my tastebuds are correct he used a soft squishy rotted banana and an old withered apple in mine. Delicious!

“Okay, Meg. Here’s the scoop. This recipe is a closely guarded secret of
Toronto Downtown Bed and Breakfast. Many guests have, over the last decade,
asked, yea, begged us for the recipe, and we always managed to (ever so
politely) put them off. It was going to our graves.

The last person who cajoled us for this secret actually went home to Ohio,
found his great grandmother’s secret (and ever so delicious) recipe for
cranberry coffee cake and sent it to us with the statement: “There! You’ve
seen it, you own it, and now you owe us big time. Fork it over!” We couldn’t
continue to be impolite, so we rummaged through our cookbook collection till
I found an English cookery (as they call it) book with a recipe for
blueberry muffins. It was all in pounds and shillings, or grams and googols
or some foreign measurement system, calling for obscure ingredients like
demerara sugar and aubergines or the like, and then to be baked at Heat
Setting 2 or some such indecipherable temperature. I knew that if we sent
him that recipe he would never be able to create a muffin from it, and I
would get him off our scent. Which we did. He thanked us politely and gave
up.

But now, only because you are a Very Special Friend, and because Toronto
Downtown Bed and Breakfast is no longer in the business of impressing new
guests with our culinary excellence (we are only accepting repeat guests now
- and they already know of those excesses) - we will reveal it. But only to
you and the three million readers of your blog (because, if they like you,
they must be special people too):

Preheat oven to 425F. Grease four muffin cups in a six-muffin-cup pan. Set
aside. Rummage through bottom drawer of fridge until you touch something
soft. Take it out carefully and remove all the fuzzy parts, and the pit if
any. If you found more than one, use them both. They needn’t be the same
species. Place in a six-cup mixing bowl. Add one 220g package of Sherriff’s
Added Touch Oatmeal Muffin Mix, an egg, and a third cup of cold water. Stir
gently with a fork until moistened and divide among the muffin cups (the
package says “makes six muffins.” Don’t believe it.). Bake 18 minutes.
Serve. Call it by whatever name the fruit had when it was recognizable.

There! Satisfied? When are you coming back? I think we’ll let you make YOUR
recipe next time, right?

Love,
Jim”

Posted by Meg Tilly on Sunday, September 16, 2007 in Chewing the Fat

I got an email from my friend Rog. They loved browsing my fantabulousah (that’s my word, not theirs) website...except for the blueberry muffins. Apparently his husband Jim is muttering about his muffins. Which, granted, I did say were “the best muffins I’d ever tasted,” and they were. The thing is Jim, that was two years ago and you’ve never made them for me since! Two long years I have slyly flattered, pleaded, practically begged on my hands and knees for the recipe which you so stingily clutch to your greedy little chest. Trying to put me off the scent with a revolting name for those delectable treats ("rotted fruit muffins,” he called them, with a wicked laugh,) Well...after that last email from Rog, I figure all is fair in love and war and muffins, so I’m publicly outing you Jim. Hand over that muffin recipe so I can post it on my Blog. Dig deep into your miserly little heart and put us unfortunate souls who have tasted your muffins out of our misery! Love, Meg

Posted by Meg Tilly on Sunday, September 16, 2007 in Chewing the Fat

coffee cake, apple and otherwise

The wonderful thing about cooking is that nothing is set in stone. Other than the set things like baking soda, baking powder, amounts of flour, and so on, you are really free to play and have fun. Ask yourself the “What does my mouth feel like?” kind of questions. I think many people when faced with a cookbook, get gripped with fear. Like there is a wrong way and a right way and if you don’t do everything exactly so, you’re screwed. Not true.
Take my “Blueberry muffin” recipe. That’s the batter from a coffee cake I like to make. If you feel like delicious coffee cake instead of blueberry muffins this is what you do.

Meg’s Apple Coffee Cake
Heat oven to 375* Grease (with butter of course) an 8 x8 cake pan, or a bunt cake pan, or a bread loaf pan (you see what I mean, you can really do whatever you like)
Use the batter recipe for the Blueberry Muffins, EXCEPT omit the blueberries and add to the flour mixture
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
3-4 dashes of nutmeg
Then cut up:
1 apple peeled and diced into little chunks around the size of your baby fingernail (smaller than your baby fingernail for those of you who have fabulous long ones)
Add the liquid mixture to the flour mixture with the diced apple, (do not over mix, just stir blended and all the flour mixture is mixed) Then scrape into your baking pan.
In a separate bowl cut together:
One handful of flour
two handfuls of brown sugar
one handful of white sugar
around ten shakes of cinnamon
3-5 tablespoons of butter (depending on how big your hands are)
Sprinkle this mixture on top of the cake batter, pop the whole thing in the oven and wait. The cooking time will vary depending on what kind of pan you used, as well as the accuracy of your oven. The coffee cake will be done when a fork, straw, or kebab skewer is poked into the middle of the cake and comes out clean.

To make this in to a regular Pecan Coffee Cake which is sort of the like the original recipe I started making many years ago.
Leave out the cinnamon, nutmeg and apple in the recipe for the batter and mince a cup of pecans and add them to the topping mixture. Serve with pipping hot. Make sure you have butter on the table, because I always like to tuck a little pat of it inside my piece of cake to make it truly decadent!

Posted by Meg Tilly on Saturday, September 15, 2007 in Recipes

Celebrity detox

My husband had a bad dream. Thrashed violently in his sleep. Woke me up. Was trying to hold on to my sleep wave but then I remember Rosie. Her new book. The dabs and bits of gossip coming up on Yahoo News. I’ve been struggling with whether it’s okay to say anything or not. The book isn’t out yet, but the way people are twisting things, trying to peel the skin back wide and pour vinegar on the exposed flesh is hurting my heart. I was lucky enough to read an advanced copy. It is a beautiful book. True. Honest. Brave. There is something so generous about Rosie’s wide open, here I am, warts and all. This is what happened to me, what I felt and experienced. There is no airbrushing and I find myself totally humbled in the beauty of that. It has been written straight from the heart and Rosie lets us see right down into the humaneness that is her. She shares with us, her struggles, her passion, her challenges and fears. There have been tons of books written by celebrities. This is is the first book I’ve read that deals truthfully with fame and what it’s really like being famous.

Posted by Meg Tilly on Saturday, September 15, 2007 in Chewing the Fat

I Have A Blog

Hello. Well, I just sat for around 3 minutes, fingers poised over the keyboard, a big smile on my face. I can’t believe I’ve got a “blog”! Hmm...what to say? Hello. Wow, that’s really articulate. Maybe I should delete the “Chewing the Fat” portion of this website. It wasn’t part of the big scheme. It was me fooling around last week with Travis, a Hop Studios person and he was showing my husband and me all the whistles and bells of the web editing system and I was pretending I was adding a new category and I wrote “Chewing the Fat,” and then decided to leave it for the time being. And now here I am writing on it. (I’m still smiling!) Well, maybe I’ll keep this, maybe not. We’ll see. It’s obviously not going to be for the intellectually minded. (Okay, I just had Don read over this to make sure I wasn’t making a total ass of myself, and it seems that I was. Because “fooling around” is apparently a sexual term now. Maybe it always was but I didn’t know it. Anyway, I checked with my son Will and he concurred, so I suppose I’d better clear this up. I was not doing whatever “fooling around” is supposed to mean nowadays. I was simply having a good time learning about the miracles of the web.)

Posted by Meg Tilly on Friday, September 14, 2007 in Chewing the Fat

Will

Photo of Will

Posted by Meg Tilly on Monday, September 03, 2007 in When They Were Young

Swimsuit

By Meg Tilly

Zoanne had a new swimsuit. A shiny blue two piece with little red fish, happy smiles on their faces and a ruffle around her bottom.

It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. She'd gotten it new, brand new at J.C. Penny's, and I wanted one. Could think of nothing else all through dinner, the clean up. And that night as I lay on my mattress up in the attic with my sisters, instead of Susan making up a story like she usually did at bedtime, I got to tell about my visit to Zoanne's house.

They wanted to know everything. What her Mama wore? Was she pretty? Did I get after an school snack? What was the house like? Did they have carpet? Was it clean? Messy? Did they have pets? Yummy food in the cupboard? Did I get to see in the fridge? We became navigators, explorers, researchers, anthropologists into the way other people, normal people spent their lives. Did her Mama wear nail polish? Did she beehive her hair? Did Zoanne have more than one pair of shoes? How many? Any of them shiny black ones you could see your face in?

And when I told them about the new swimsuit… Well that was something. That was really something. They made me describe it over and over. How it still had the store tags hanging from it. How it was a beautiful, fancy, sapphire blue. Not that any of us had ever seen a real sapphire, only read about them in books, seen pictures of them in the encyclopedias. And actually the sapphires in the encyclopedia were a darker blue. But it sounded so fancy to say "Sapphire blue." So elegant. That and "Brand new from J.C. Penny's!" We bandied these words about, worked ourselves into such a frenzy that finally we made Susan get out of bed and draw a picture of it based on my description. She had to do it three times before she got it just right. And I got to keep the final drawing, cause I was the one who saw the actual swimsuit in real life. I went to sleep with Susan's creation thumb tacked to the sloping ceiling right above my bed.

In the morning when I woke, I saw the picture and it filled my heart with such joy. I went downstairs believing in magic and miracles. And the hope too, that maybe my Mama would buy me a sapphire blue swimming suit with red smiling fish swimming around. Maybe, just maybe.

I waited until after breakfast. Mama was off by herself, out near the creek, doing a charcoal drawing of a pine tree.

I sat down on the ground by her fold up chair. The dirt, dry and thirsty with little prickle balls and sharp edged gravel crumbs poking me through my shorts.

"Hi Mama." I said suddenly shy. And she smiled at me, kind of absent minded. Her charcoal making scratching noises on her white pad of art paper. "That looks pretty Mama."

"Oh no," Mama said, real modestly, face flushed. " I'm only a beginner." But I could tell the compliment pleased her cause her strokes got more artistic, more free flowing and abstract. "Shhht…shht… shht…" with the charcoal, and then rubbing, contouring, smudging with her thumb.

And she seemed so intent, so happy that I thought, this is not the right time. So I got up to go. Didn't think she'd notice me leaving, but she did.

"What did you want sweetheart?" Mama said, head tilted in my direction, eyes still on her tree.

And even though I decided not to, it all came out. Zoanne and her new blue swimming suit from J.C. Penny's. How I need one for swimming in the fishpond. And as I was talking, looking at my dusty bare feet, I felt the hope swelling in my breast, but when I'd finished and looked in Mama's face, I knew my answer, even before she sighed and said, "Oh honey, I wish I could, but we just can't afford it."

"What about the Sally Anne?" I said, words tumbling over hers. "Maybe we can find one at...at the Sally Anne?" Trying to keep calm, but my voice was cracking slightly, giving me away.

"Honey," Mama said, looking tired, the frown line deepening between her eyes, "not even at the Sally Anne. Why don't you swim naked like you always do."

"Mama, I can't swim naked!" My eyes full of frustration cause she just didn't understand. "I'm big now! I'm almost seven! I'm too big to swim naked anymore."

"Oh Anna..." And Mama reached her arms out for me, but I ducked past them. Ran away. Hid in the barn. Didn't answer. Even though I heard her calling.

I stayed there for a long time. Vowing never to come out. But then the heat in my chest subsided, I was left with what I had done. My mother's face, as I avoided her arms, wouldn't leave me. The fact that I asked her for something I knew we could never afford.

Finally, by mid-afternoon, hunger had me creeping out like a mongrel dog. Straw in my hair, face dusty and tear streaked.

I shuffled towards the house slowly, dragging my feet, like I had a limp. Head, eyes, down. But as I got closer, I could hear laughter and a noisy commotion. And then, when I came around an old blackberry bush, I could see my sisters running around in beautiful new swimsuits. I couldn't believe my eyes. My legs started moving faster, didn't want to look like I was running, but it was hard. So excited. My eyes, my brain, trying to sort out what I was seeing. Joy was standing tall, swimsuit, half on. Mama, straddling a chair somebody had brought out from the kitchen, face up close to Joy's belly. Her glasses were off. She was hunched over and squinting. Then Mama turned Joy's body, doing something, couldn't see what, her body was blocking my view.

And then, when I came around, got close, realized, it was too late to backtrack. I was already well into the yard. And there's nothing I could do but keep my face the same. My sisters didn't have new swimsuits. Mama was drawing them on their bodies. Colored markers in her fists, on the chair, tucked up between her thighs, a few, fallen down, scattered in the grass. My sisters, they were just playing make-believe, pretending they had new swimsuits, acting all excited. Running around, giddy-drunk with joy. But they weren't real swimsuits. Just fancy designs drawn on their bodies. They were still naked, running around naked as the day they were born.

And when my Mama straightened up to stretch out her shoulders, she saw me and her face lit up. "New swimsuits!" she called gaily, waving a marker at me. "You're next!"

"Oh goody," I said, in a happy, happy voice. Throat clenched, eyes hot. "Can I have a blue one? Red and blue?" And she nodded, rolled her shoulders once, twice, then pushed back the hair from her sweaty face, returned to finishing up the curlicue black and red design that even continued on over Joy's privates, cause that's what real swimsuits do.

And after Joy, it was my turn, and I didn't run away. Wasn't gonna hurt Mama again. I took off my clothes, underwear too and Mama drew on my swimsuit while the whole family watched. Stood there in the middle of the yard. Tall dried out grass scratching my legs, a smile on my face. Stark naked, my brother, stepbrother, step-daddy laughing their guts out, slapping black flies off their faces up there on the porch. I stood there while Mama drew on my swimsuit and I pretended I liked it.

Posted by Meg Tilly on Monday, September 03, 2007 in Bits and Pieces

Meg’s Blueberry Muffins

The thing I love most about summer is the arrival of the summer fruits. I look forward to this with even more anticipation than the release of my children from school and the gift of long glorious days of unstructured time stretching out in front of us. The ripe juicy peaches and nectarines, which I eat voraciously. The really wonderful ones have to be eaten outside, or over a sink, to catch all the rivulets of that run down the arm and drip off the elbow. The wild blackberries, plucked from the roadside bushes, sweet and tender, still warm from the sun. The cherries. The ten pound flats of plump, taut organic blueberries I buy from Kate when her truck rolls in off the ferry. I have to confess, I never buy just one flat. She only comes once a week and the blueberry season is only a month and a half long. If I'm lucky. I buy three flats each week, four if we have company. And we have a huge enormous bowl out on the table. We toss fistfuls of blueberries into our mouths like popcorn. I refill the bowl several times a day. I'm like "mother bear" in the children's book, Blueberries for Sal, written by Robert McClouskey. "Eat all you-" gulp, "can possibly hold!" swallow. "eat lots of berries and grow big and fat. We must store up food for the long, cold winter." And we do. Then, so that I have the memories and the tastes of summer in the grey winter months, I freeze huge plastic freezer bags of Kate's blueberries. And all winter long, I bring great sackfuls out and we eat frozen blueberries in a cup. I make a blueberry compote that I pour over sponge cake, and dollop big spoonfuls of freshly whipped cream on top. You also can use the compote to put inside crepes, and yes, whipped cream goes well with that as well. Sometimes I add raspberries, strawberries and/or blackberries to the compote. It depends on my mood and what I have in the freezer. I shall share these recipes with you, but not today. Today I'm going to give you my Blueberry Muffin recipe. I made it up. Hope you like it.

Meg's Blueberry Muffins

-Heat oven to 375 degrees. Grease 12 cup muffin tin or place cupcake liners in the muffin tin instead. Place 1/4 cup of butter in a mixing bowl and chop the butter into pieces. Put the plug in the sink and fill the sink with around an inch of hot water. Place the mixing bowl with the butter in the sink so the warm water will soften the butter and when it comes time for mixing, your arms won't get so tired. (Do not sneak use margarine or oil. It doesn't taste nearly as good!)

In separate bowl mix
1 ½ cup flour
(I like organic flour the best. But organic is more expensive and unbleached regular flour is fine too)
1/4 teaspoon of salt
2 teaspoons of baking powder.

Set flour mixture bowl aside.
-When butter is soft, remove from sink and add:

½ to 3/4 a cup of white granulated sugar
(depending on how tart your berries are)

Blend well with butter. Then add to butter mixture:

1 large egg
2/3 cup milk
½ teaspoon of pure vanilla (don't use imitation vanilla, please.)

Add the butter etc. mixture to the flour mixture. Do not over beat. Just turn with fork until moistened. Now add several large handfuls of:

frozen blueberries

Stir in. Add more as needed. I love lots of berries, but some of you might prefer less. I leave it up to the individual. Spoon muffin batter into muffin tin and place in heated oven. Bake until golden brown on top. Give it 25-35 minutes. It all depends on your oven, and how many fistfuls of frozen blueberries you used. The more blueberries, the longer it takes. If you're using fresh blueberries then it won't take as much time to cook as the frozen ones. You can test to see if the muffins are done by either pressing lightly on the top of a muffin with your fingers. If it is done, the muffin will spring back into place. Or you could use a straw, a thin wood skewer, or jab a fork in one. If the implement comes out clean, (berry juice doesn't count, just no dough) then the muffins are done.

Take out of the oven, serve hot with a nice slab of fresh butter. If your family doesn't eat all of them at breakfast, don't worry. These muffins taste good cold too. Leave them out on the table and you can be certain that by lunchtime, they'll all be gone!

And don't worry. If you don't have access to a Kate with a truck full of berries, no problem. Any grocery store worth their salt will have bags of frozen organic blueberries in their frozen food section.

Posted by Meg Tilly on Monday, September 03, 2007 in Recipes