Dedication
To all the marvelously supportive booksellers who have helped bring Goldy to readers
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Goldilocks’ Gourmet Spinach Soup
1 Appetizers and Soups or How Do I Look? (And Other Stories About Food and Appearance) Holy Moly Guacamole
Nachos Schulz
Bacon-Wrapped Artichokes with Dijon Cream Sauce
Tom’s Layered Mexican Dip
Mexican Egg Rolls with Spicy Guacamole Dipping Sauce Spicy Guacamole Dipping Sauce
Chile Con Queso Dip
Diamond Lovers’ Hot Crab Dip
Handcuff Croissants
Prosciutto Bites
Not-So-Skinny Spinach Dip
Hoisin Turkey with Roasted Pine Nuts in Lettuce Cups
Not-So-Secret Cheese Spread
Low-Fat Chicken Stock
Models’ Mushroom Soup
Homemade Cream of Mushroom Soup
Rainy Season Chicken Soup
2 Eggs and Cheese or My Agent Is Still a Vegetarian Chile Relleno Torta
Crustless Jarlsberg Quiche
Julian’s Cheese Manicotti
Mexican Pizzas
Quiche Me Quick
Tomato-Brie Pie
Provençal Pizza
Doll Show Shrimp and Eggs
Collector’s Camembert Pie
Savory Florentine Cheesecake
Huevos Palacios Boulder Chili
Chuzzlewit Cheese Pie
Asparagus Quiche
Julian’s Summer Frittata
Ferdinanda’s Florentine Quiche
3 Spuds, Salads, Etc. or My Editor Is Also a Vegetarian Jailbreak Potatoes
Slumber Party Potatoes
Penny-Prick Potato Casserole
Prudent Potatoes au Gratin
Party Apples
Goldy’s Marvelous Mayonnaise
Wild Man’s Rice Salad
New Potato Salad
Schulz’s Guacamole Salad
Dijon Pasta Salad
Sugar Snap Pea and Strawberry Salad
Grilled Slapshot Salad
Exhibition Salad with Meringue-Baked Pecans Meringue-Baked Pecans
Mediterranean Orzo Salad
Figgy Salad
Wild Girls’ Grilled Mushroom Salad
Chopping Spree Salad Tangy Lime Dressing
Primavera Pasta Salad Simple Vinaigrette
Stylish Strawberry Salad
Heirloom Tomato Salad
Chilled Curried Chicken Salad
Goldy’s Caprese Salad
Love Potion Salad Love Potion Salad Dressing
4 Meat, Poultry, and Fish or The Heart of the Matter Snowboarders’ Pork Tenderloin
Party Pork Chops
Figgy Piggy
Puerco Cubano
Chinese Beef Stir-Fry with Vegetables
Shakespeare’s Steak Pie Upper-Crust Pastry
Love-Me-Tenderloin Grilled Steaks
Sweethearts’ Swedish Meatballs in Burgundy Sauce Crème Fraîche
Ad Guys’ Roast Beef and Gravy
Anniversary Burgers
The Whole Enchilada Pie
Unorthodox Shepherd’s Pie
Goldy’s Garlic Lamb Chops
Grilled Chicken à l’Orange
André’s Coq au Vin
Trudy’s Mediterranean Chicken
Chicken Piccata Supreme
Portobello Mushroom Stuffed with Grilled Chicken, Pesto, and Sun-Dried Tomatoes
Stir-Fry Chicken with Asparagus
Chicken Divine
Enchiladas Suizas
Sonora Chicken Strudel
Turkey Curry with Raisin Rice
Shrimp on Wheels
Shrimp Risotto with Portobello Mushrooms
Shuttlecock Shrimp Curry
Plantation Pilaf with Shrimp
Chesapeake Crab Cakes with Sauce Gribiche
Chilean Sea Bass with Garlic, Basil, and Vegetables
Power Play Potatoes and Fish
Goalies’ Grilled Tuna
5 Breads or This Is Not Your Low-Carb Chapter Bread Dough Enhancer for Yeast Breads
Dad’s Bread
Galaxy Doughnuts
Monster Cinnamon Rolls
What-to-Do-with-All-the-Egg-Yolks Bread
Julian’s Five-Grain Bread
Got-a-Hunch Brunch Rolls
Chicky Bread
Yolanda’s Cuban Bread
Almond Poppy Seed Muffins
Irish Soda Bread
Piña Colada Muffins
Banana-Pecan Muffins
Cinnamon Griddle Scones
Castle Scones
Grand Marnier Cranberry Muffins
Stained-Glass Sweet Bread
Crunchy Cinnamon Toast
Goldy’s Guava Coffee Cake
6 Desserts or This Is Not Your Low-Carb Chapter, Either Honey-I’m-Home Gingersnaps
Ice-Capped Gingersnaps Icing
Chocolate-Dipped Biscotti
Red ’n’ Whites
Cereal Killer Cookies
Sweetheart Sandwiches
Canterbury Jumbles
Lemon Butter Wafers
Blondes’ Blondies Creamy Citrus Frosting
Keepsake Cookies
Queen of Scots Shortbread
Chocolate Snowcap Cookies
Fatally Flaky Cookies Vanilla Buttercream Frosting
Chocolate Coma Cookies
Chocolate Comfort Cookies
Chocoholic Cookies
Strong-Arm Cookies
Babsie’s Tarts
Goldy’s Nuthouse Cookies
Crunch Time Cookies
Dungeon Bars
Lethal Layers
Bleak House Bars
Got-a-Hot-Date Bars
Scout’s Brownies
Spicy Brownies
Goldy’s Terrific Toffee
Labor Day Flourless Chocolate Cake with Berries, Melba Sauce, and White Chocolate Cream Melba Sauce
White Chocolate Cream
Happy Endings Plum Cake
Chocolate Truffle Cheesecake
Fudge Soufflé
Big Bucks Bread Puddings with Hard Sauce Hard Sauce
Damson-in-Distress Plum Tart
Shoppers’ Chocolate Truffles
Super Spenders’ Strawberry-Rhubarb Cobbler
In-Your-Face Strawberry Pie (I)
In-Your-Face Strawberry Pie (II)
Double-Shot Chocolate Cake
Deep-Dish Cherry Pie
Door-Prize Gingerbread
Dark Torte Sherry Syrup
Whipped Cream Topping
All-American Deep-Dish Apple Pie
Chocolate-Lovers’ Dipped Fruit
Totally Unorthodox Coeur à la Crème Hazelnut Crust
Black-and-White Cake Chocolate Glaze
Breakfast Bread Pudding with Rum Sauce
Sugar-Free Vanilla Gelato
Chocolate Tartufi Diana
7 Enfin! Low-Carb Recipes or How I Lost Thirty Pounds and Kept It Off Fried Pecans
Luscious Arugula Salad
Cauliflower Mash, or How to Get by Without Potatoes
Garlicky Spinach
Green Beans Amandine
Hard-Core Prawn Salad
Chicken Tarragon
Tenderloin of Beef
Berries with Yogurt Cream
Epilogue
Index
About the Author
Also by Diane Mott Davidson
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the f
ollowing people: Jim Davidson; Jeff, Rosa, Ryan, Nick, and Josh Davidson; J. Z. Davidson; Joey Davidson; Sandra Dijkstra, Elise Capron, Andrea Cavallaro, Thao Le, Elisabeth James, and the rest of the superb team at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency; Brian Murray, Michael Morrison, Liate Stehlik, Carolyn Marino, Kaitlyn Kennedy, Tavia Kowalchuk, Joseph Papa, and the entire brilliant team at Morrow; the St. Anne’s-Belfield community in Charlottesville, Virginia, especially Kay Butterfield and Gunda Hiebert, with special remembrance of the passing of our beloved Pamela Malone and Emyl Jenkins; Professor Diana Kleiner of Yale University; Kathy Saideman; Carol Alexander, for testing the recipes and making many valuable suggestions; Jasmine Cresswell; Linda and David Ranz, M.D.; Shirley Carnahan, Ph.D.; Carole Kornreich, M.D.; Julie Kaewert; Dylan Burdick and Tiffany Green; Lyndsay White; Pamela Eaton; J.R. and John Suess; the Reverends Andi Suess Taylor, Jay Rock, David Evans, and John Hall, all of St. Boniface Episcopal Church in Sarasota, Florida; Judith Rock, Nancy Evans, Betsie Danner, Carolyn Walker, and all the parishioners and staff at St. Boniface; Harriët van Elburg and Jason Heckman; the Reverend Nancy Malloy, Bill and Carole Hörger, and all the parishioners at St. Laurence Episcopal Church in Conifer, Colorado; my far-flung family: Adam Mott, Janie Mott Fritz, Lucy Mott Faison, Sally Mott Freeman, and William C. Mott, Jr., plus all their wonderful spouses and dear children, with remembrance again of the passing of our beloved Tom Fritz; John William Schenk and Karen Johnson Kennedy, who taught me how to cater; Marty O’Leary and the staff at Sur La Table in Sarasota, Florida, for numerous helpful suggestions; and thanks forever to Triena Harper and Sergeant Richard Millsapps, now retired from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, Golden, Colorado.
Introduction
In the early 1980s, I started to write about a character named Goldy. She would be a caterer, I decided. At that time, I only knew three things about her: She loved to cook; she had a troubled eleven-year-old son; she was a survivor of domestic abuse. Her ex-husband, whom I named the Jerk, was a wealthy doctor who had repeatedly beaten her. But as I wrote more about Goldy, I realized that she had thrown him out. Her grit, hard work, and ability to find support from friends, church, and her mentor at a Denver restaurant enabled her to put her life back together. She did more than survive. She thrived. She took the lemon that life had given her and made not just lemonade but Lemon Chicken, Lemon Bars, Lemon Cookies, and Lemon Meringue Pie.
By 1987, I had finished writing what became Catering to Nobody. My critique group, to which I often brought cookies, told me I should put some recipes in the book. So I did. In 1988, the wonderful literary agent Sandra Dijkstra took me on. She sold the book to St. Martin’s Press, which published it in 1990. Over the next twenty-plus years, Goldy, her family, and I have continued to grow, and it has been a fabulous journey.
Like Goldy, I enjoy working in the kitchen. This was not always so. The night before I married my husband, Jim (who is nothing like the Jerk; I say this only because people have repeatedly asked), I broke down.
“I can’t marry you!” I cried, as we sat in the front seat of our Chevy Nova (which turned out to be a lemon of a different kind).
Jim asked, “We can’t get married? Why not?”
“I can’t cook!”
Jim said, “We’ll be fine.”
And we were. I learned to have fun cooking. How I decided to write about Goldy is another, parallel story.
But let’s start in the kitchen. I am the oldest of four children. Our mother disliked—despised would not be too strong a word—the necessity of preparing the family’s evening meal. My guess is that this resentment coincided with a mishap with the pressure cooker.
I was nine. My mother had mastered making beef, potatoes, and carrots in her cooker, so that was what we ate almost every night. This would usually be accompanied by leaves of iceberg lettuce dabbed with mayonnaise from a jar. Based on our experiences at friends’ houses, my siblings and I knew that some mothers liked to cook and did it well. But if we dared to complain, we would be sent to our rooms without dinner. So we learned to keep our mouths shut, as they say in the South, right quick.
Occasionally, my mother varied what she served, perhaps out of a sense of duty. She was from New England. On St. Patrick’s Day, she made corned beef and cabbage. Even though we were Protestants, she always served fish sticks on Friday—just in case. We also had the occasional dinner of (canned) Boston baked beans and (canned) New England brown bread. On the weekends, my father worked off stress by making yeast breads, which he kneaded with great vigor. We kids dug into the corned beef and cabbage and pressure-cooked beef, potatoes, and carrots and slathered margarine—all we knew in those days—on Dad’s bread, and things hummed along.
Then she accidentally blew the lid off the pressure cooker. I remember the kerbang. No one was hurt, thank God. But the kitchen ceiling bore a permanent imprint from the lid. The beef, potatoes, and carrots left stains that never came out. (Before they sold the house, my parents scrubbed the ceiling and painted over the stains.)
After the pressure cooker incident, my mother threw in the kitchen towel and pretty much handed the job off to me. She didn’t mind shopping, so I would use the ingredients she bought: packages of chicken pieces, pounds of ground beef, those sticks of margarine, plus more heads of iceberg lettuce, boxes of Shake ’n Bake seasoning, Rice-A-Roni, Betty Crocker Noodles Romanoff, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, instant mashed potatoes, instant mushroom gravy, instant salad dressing mix.
So in fact I had done plenty of “cooking” before Jim and I were due to get married. But I knew it wasn’t real cooking. The mothers of my friends and my siblings’ friends when we were growing up outside Washington, D.C., were great cooks, and they made everything from lasagna to tzimmes with what looked like ease and dedication. When I would plead to have my friends over for a meal, my mother would bake a ham. I made Kraft Macaroni & Cheese to go with it, plus iceberg lettuce mixed with mayonnaise.
During those early years, I also was fortunate enough to witness a real cook in her element. When my siblings and I were young, our parents would go on vacations without us, which was common among middle-class households in the fifties and sixties. An older woman would stay with us. I’m sure she’s passed away, but still: Let’s call her Mrs. Jones.
Mrs. Jones made everything from scratch. As long as I was willing to listen sympathetically to her laments about her son, Jeremiah, I could watch. Mrs. Jones would make luscious chicken pot pies. She cut real butter—never margarine—into flour, sprinkled on iced spring water, and rolled out pie crust while telling me how Jeremiah had been acting up. Mrs. Jones made spice cookies, chocolate cookies, and sugar cookies while bemoaning the fact that Jeremiah was in jail. Mrs. Jones’s real specialty was candy. The problem with Jeremiah, she said as she rolled chocolate into luscious globes, was that he had a chemical imbalance. I listened and nodded, all while recognizing that Mrs. Jones, like the mothers of our friends, was the genuine article in the kitchen.
I had just turned twenty, and Jim had just turned twenty-two, when we were about to get married and I was sobbing and saying that there would not, could not, in fact, be a wedding the next day, because I couldn’t cook. I knew the “Mrs. Jones standard” would be the one by which I would be assessed. Those were the days when women, and only women, were judged—usually harshly—based on their ability to cook. My mother had escaped this judgment, but I knew “the truth,” and that was that we had Instant Everything.
When our parents had cocktail parties, they served frozen egg rolls that my sisters and I heated up. For their rare dinner parties, my father would place a raw egg beside his place and expertly whisk it into a dressing for Caesar salad, which would be served with ham and baked potatoes. Other times, when they needed to entertain guests for a meal, they took them to a restaurant.
So before the pressure cooker exploded, I had enjoyed the beef, potatoes, and carrots, the occasional New England dish, the ham, and fish sticks. Then I’d had my adventures with Shake ’n
Bake and other time-and-effort-saving dishes. When I was twelve, though, I quite unexpectedly received a profound lesson in differing regional cuisines.
That year, I received a scholarship that enabled me to attend a girls’ boarding school, St. Anne’s, in Charlottesville, Virginia. (It is now a coed school called St. Anne’s-Belfield, known by the acronym STAB. When I purchased a pair of sweatpants with STAB embroidered on them, our youngest son thought I’d bought them at a crime writers’ convention.)
At St. Anne’s, I was blessed to have outstanding teachers, one of whom, Emyl Jenkins, told me I should be a writer, a compliment that I held in my back pocket for eighteen years, while going to college, working at other jobs, and raising a family.
In the food department, Charlottesville might as well have been a continent away from Washington. At St. Anne’s, we had real Southern cooking: grits and sausage; biscuits and gravy; perfect fried chicken; black-eyed peas and stewed tomatoes. According to my sisters (they were too young to cook, and my brother was only a year old), our mother resignedly took over making the Shake ’n Bake chicken and Rice-A-Roni. One hundred ten miles away, I thought I’d died and gone to Food Heaven.
Eight years later, when Jim and I were, despite my pre-wedding meltdown, married, we were both full-time scholarship students, this time at Stanford. Jim was a Navy ensign and ensconced in a graduate engineering program. I was finishing my undergraduate degree and had a limited budget to prepare meals. At first, I served Jim Instant Everything. Surprised, he lavished compliments on me.
While relying on Instant Everything—which was expensive but not time-consuming—I read Peg Bracken’s hilarious, wonderful I Hate to Cook Book. It seemed even I could follow her simple instructions. I learned the Art of the Casserole, which usually involved canned creamed soups mixed with a variety of other ingredients.