The Reindeer Keeper

With the last few days being below zero I went to my survival kit for help. There are no hand warmers or candles or blankets or hot tea in that kit. There's actually no kit. But there are memories of my grandmother's Johnny Cake recipe and my mother's recipe for a soup that came to be known as her Witch's Brew. Both recipes warm a below zero string of days and nights. So yesterday I got busy. A main ingredient in the Witch's Brew is acini d'pepe. Those tiny little balls of macaroni are what my kids most remember and most enjoyed. That's probably because, to them, those little balls resembled little eyeballs in the Witch's Brew. They were eating eyeballs! Lucky for me I had a few boxes of the eyeballs in the cupboard so out they came along with whatever else I needed. With the soup in the works, I brought out the cornmeal for the Johnny Cake which I turned into little muffins. As the wind howled and the furnace went nonstop and the music played and the Wi...

This time of the year brings back memories of sitting at my grandmother's kitchen table enjoying more than a few slices of her freshly baked johnnycake. Most times it'd still be nice and warm. The aroma of that favorite cake often eaten with meals like bread filled her home. When you walked through the front door and caught the scent of johnnycake, it was as if you'd discovered a little bit of heaven. Actually, my cousin and I did. It was always heaven being around our grandmother whose johnnycake was made from scratch without any need to look up a recipe in a cookbook or go searching in a drawer for a piece of paper with the recipe scribbled on it. She knew that recipe by heart. The Quaker Corn Meal packaged in its distinctive box was a staple in her home. She used corn meal for many things. But johnnycake was the main event. As we sat around the kitchen table indulging ourselves with a slice or two, we'd sometimes hear about how when they-meaning my grandparents and t...