Edible Antics - Having Fun With Food: Gifts of the Garden: Flowers, Spices, and Beer for a Happy Mother's Day!

With spring comes Mother's Day! Two weeks before Mother's Day is when we start thinking about what to send my husband's mother in Rhode Island. She is an avid gardener so a garden-related gift is always appreciated - except if it's a gardening tool; she already has lots of those.

My mom also loved gardening. In fact, when I was a kid, her standard Mother's Day gift from my brother and me was one day's labor in the garden. We raked out the flower beds and did the early weeding. I don't remember doing it as joy but rather as a duty. Of course, our one day's labor was really only a half day. Mom always let us off after a couple of hours.

When I got my own home, our Mother's Day gift arrangement changed. On or near Mother's Day, Mom and I would go together to a garden center. I would buy her a flowering plant for Mother's Day, and she would buy me flowering plants for my birthday. Notice that her gift to me was in the plural. Mothers are like that.

Regarding special Mother's Day foods that we fixed Mom, I only remember the comical 'breakfasts in bed' we tried to serve her when we we very young. She would express effusive appreciation and try to conceal her worry that we were about to spill coffee and juice all over her bed.

On our birthdays, Mom would let us choose the dinner menu. I can tell you the favorites she fixed me, my brother, and my dad. But, honesty, I don't recall what she ate on her birthday. I guess we went out, but I don't remember what she ordered.

Last spring, Mom passed away from cancer. And now I sit wondering what she would eat on Mother's Day. The only foods I can come up with are Chinese food and foods containing lemons. I'm not much of a chef in Chinese cuisine. But I've got this great recipe for ginger bread with lemon sauce, which I figure could be more than an acceptable compromise. In addition, both the bread and the sauce call for a cup of beer, - so now we're talking celebrating Mother's Day Wisconsin style!

I'm posting the recipe on the side page MORE recipes with brats, beer, and cheese! But click for more below, and I'll tell you my little improvisation on Ginger Bread and Lemon Sauce.

I got this recipe from the cookbook Drink Your Beer and Eat It Too! In every recipe, beer is an essential ingredient! The fun part is selecting which beer to use. On each page, the author, Joanie Steckart, writes a fun fact about beer, but she never dictates which style of beer to use in any recipe. That's where the cook's own creativity and taste get to play with flavors.

To select a beer, I went to the super-sized liquor department of Woodman's Grocery and stood before the giant selection of Wisconsin microbrews. A cooler, half the length of the store, was filled with beers and ales made in Wisconsin! After some consideration of the accompanying ingredients in the ginger bread, such as cinnamon, ginger, molasses, and brown sugar, I decided I wanted to go further with deep, rich flavors, and so I chose a stout.

The stout gave the bread an incredibly complex flavor: tastes of bitter and sweet mixed, resembling chocolate, but instead was full of ginger. Definitely the most robust, full-flavored ginger bread I've ever eaten. Unfortunately, I made the bread at 8:00 in the morning. I had a half a cup of stout left over, but was still riding my coffee buzz and didn't want to drink it. However, I'm too frugal to pour out GOOD beer. So I made a decision which for a while I regretted. I used the stout to make the lemon sauce. Of course, no matter how much yellow food coloring I could ever dump into the sauce, no amount would ever turn it yellow. This wasn't going to be pretty. Briefly I considered abandoning the lemon sauce in favor of whipped cream. But I am glad I didn't. The sauce would have looked better with a lager, - all nice and yellow,-but with the stout and 1/3 cup extra sugar and a 1/4 cup extra water, the sauce was simultaneously tart, sweet, and bitter. It sweetened the ginger bread and the whole thing was a crazy taste sensation. Definitely a cake to bake to impress the jaded palette!

If you are cruising the web looking for Mother's Day gift ideas, here are some colorful gifts that will brighten Mom's spirits:

Mother's Day Sugar Cookie Assortment