Baking

Lady Bird Johnson’s Lemon Bundt Cake

February 17, 2009 by Charles 5 Comments

In 1934, a day after meeting her, Lyndon Johnson, a 26-year old congressional aide, asked Lady Bird Taylor to marry him. A few months later, Taylor yielded to Johnson’s pressure, and the two were married. Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House and a long-time friend to Johnson, later told him that marrying Lady Bird was the wisest decision he ever made.

Indeed, Lady Bird Johnson was a quick study. She graduated from high school at the age of 15, and the University of Texas at 20, finishing in the top 10 of her class. She stayed another year at Texas, earning a journalism degree. In 1943, with her husband (now a Congressman) off at war, Johnson used her inheritance to buy a small Austin radio station. In a matter of years, she transformed the debt-ridden radio station into a media empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars. According to one biographer, Lady Bird was the only first lady to have built and sustained a fortune with her own money.

Her business acumen extended into the legislative arena as well. When President Kennedy won Texas in the presidential election, …

Seven-Layer Spinach Lasagna

February 9, 2009 by Charles 4 Comments

Choosing a recipe is a lot like playing the Kevin Bacon game.

The Kevin Bacon game, or Six-Degrees of Kevin Bacon, centers around the small-world principle, or the idea that any two people are linked by a finite number of connections. With Kevin Bacon, the goal is to link him to any other actor using no more than six intermediary actors. For instance, Elvis and Kevin Bacon are separated by only one intermediary – Edward Asner, who appeared with Elvis in Change of Habit, and with Bacon in JFK. At last count, over one million actors can be linked to Bacon in fewer than six steps.

The principle can be applied to any number of disciplines or phenomena – from linking baseball players in various decades, to demonstrating the thought process in choosing a recipe….

Easy Sticky Buns

January 22, 2009 by Charles 5 Comments

As part of my college application, I had to provide the usual information – SAT scores, class schedules, teacher references, and essays. But unlike the common application, my alma mater had a section entitled “Hodgepodge,” which was an effort to gain at least a cursory insight into the applicant’s personality.

The questions in the hodgepodge section ran the gamut – from your favorite songs and television shows, to the books on your mantle. The Office of Admissions also wanted to know your favorite time of day. While the former questions gave me some pause, the latter I knew in an instant: Morning – which for me, meant breakfast.

Breakfast might only have been …

Michelle Obama’s Shortbread Cookies

January 20, 2009 by Charles Leave a Comment

Today, the Nation welcomed its 44th President. Like most, I had to watch the Inauguration from a distance. But since I could not make the trip to Washington, I decided to see how I might otherwise get a taste of this historic event.

In looking for ideas, I read that the Ritz-Carlton Hotels had decided to forgo putting mints on its guests’ pillows. In place of the mints, the Ritz-Carlton catered to its Inauguration visitors by serving them the First Lady’s Shortbread Cookies. These cookies, …

Banana Bread

January 11, 2009 by Charles 4 Comments

The modern banana may be a dying breed.

Unlike apples and oranges, supermarkets only carry a single variety of banana – the Vietnamese Cavendish. And unlike other fruits, domestic production of bananas is virtually nonexistent. Instead, the vast majority of our bananas come from Latin America; Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Colombia represent three of the four largest banana-exporting nations.

The concentration of a single banana variety in a single area helped popularize the banana by creating large economies of scale with respect to harvest periods, and shipping and distribution routes. These economies of scale made the banana the cheapest fruit in the produce section – a modern miracle considering that the banana has traveled thousands of miles, in cooled containers, and has a shelf life of but a few weeks.

This concentration and homogenization may, unfortunately, also lead to the banana’s demise. In the early 1900s, the banana of choice was the Gros Michel – a banana superior in taste, size, and texture to today’s Cavendish. Sadly, the Gros Michel was all but wiped out by Panama disease, a resistant fungus.

Today, the Cavendish is threatened …