Food, Not Rocket Science

cabbage and bacon

2012-02-02T19:32:00.001-05:00

Cabbage burned (or browned) in butter (or any fat) is just downright delicious, especially in the winter! In what follows I use bacon but you can use butter or olive oil if you are vegetarian or vegan and it works well.

Try out 1/4 pound (or less) bacon, cut into tiny bits. Remove the crispy bacon to a bowl, but leave in the fat. Throw in a chopped onion and cook until soft. Add a half a cabbage, cut into small pieces. Stir it all up with lots of pepper and some salt and leave it there on medium heat until it starts to burn in the fat. Don't stir until it starts to really burn! Turn it once and let it start to burn again.

Now you have options: You can add cooked, drained pasta, a bit of cream, some grated parmesan cheese, and the bacon bits to make "cavolo pasta". You can add all of the above except the pasta to make a cabbage-as-pasta non-pasta dish. You can just mix in the bacon and serve it as a side with anything (like latkes or sausages). Another improvisation that worked well was apples, sautéed with the cabbage.

sweet and sour meatballs

2011-08-08T19:16:00.004-04:00

As I was walking around the grocery store yesterday, a pound of ground veal whispered "meatballs" to me. I was thinking Swedish, but ended up making this, which was a huge hit with all: 1 lb ground beef 1 lb ground veal 1 cup bread crumbs 2 eggs 1.5 tsp salt 1 tsp pepper 1/2 cup very finely chopped onions I made small (1") meatballs of this mixture and browned them in a 12" pan (they all fit with a little jiggle room). In a large saucepan, I made the sweet-and-sour sauce with the following: 1 cup rice vinegar 3/4 cup brown sugar 2 tbsp ketchup 1 tbsp soy sauce Juice from 14 oz can of pineapple chunks 4 tsp corn starch in a slurry with 1/4 cup water I added the meatballs to this and kept it all simmering. Sauteed a green pepper and a red pepper in the frypan and added this and the pineapple chunks to the sauce. Served over white rice. This hits both the sweet and the sour buttons very hard.

caramelizing onions overnight

2011-04-17T21:40:00.009-04:00

At Dstn's place, we put about 2 lb of sliced onions, 1/4 lb butter, and 1 tsp salt into an oven-proof pot. We heated it up on the stove enough to melt the butter, soften the onions a tiny bit, and make it possible to mix it all up. We then put it, covered, into a 200 F (90 C) oven for 10 hours. Bingo, caramelized onions! They went great with a Dutch cheese selected by the 'fuzz.

Chicken Tagine with chickpeas, apricots and almonds

2011-04-07T20:26:00.002-04:00

I made this without a net and it was a hit with the fam' tonight.

olive oil
1 large onion, sliced
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp coriander
6 deboned chicken thighs
3 cups cooked chick peas
1/2 c dried apricots, cut in large pieces
1 c raw almonds, chopped coarsely

Fry onion in olive oil until edges brown. Add garlic and cook until fragrant. Pour into tagine. Mix spices. Dredge chicken in spice mixture and fry briefly to toast spices and give chicken a bit of colour. Place chicken on onions. Add 1/2 cup water to pan, scrape pan and pour liquid over chicken. Add chickpeas and apricots to tagine. Cook about 2.5 hours at 300F. Fry almonds and pour over chicken and chickpeas.

I served it with cousous and a carrot and orange salad.

corned beef hash

2011-03-20T11:09:00.014-04:00

corned beef and cabbage

2011-03-17T21:51:00.006-04:00

(The secret ingredient is pickling spice.)

tuna pasta

2011-03-05T19:06:00.007-05:00

Here's a crowd-pleaser in high rotation chez Hogg: While pasta (1/2 to 3/4 lb) is boiling, put together a few minced (or pressed) garlic cloves, one finely chopped shallot (or most of an onion or most of a leek), and a can of oil-packed tuna in some additional olive oil (enough for the pasta). Heat it up until it gets fragrant and then turn off the heat. Add salt, pepper, lemon juice, chopped parsley, and chopped, oil-cured olives. Maybe also pine nuts, capers, lemon rind, be creative!. Mix cooked pasta with tuna mixture. Serves 3 1/2 (that is, less than 4) but it is easy to double.

winter vegetable stew

2011-01-25T20:55:00.004-05:00

Try out cut-up bacon with olive oil. Soften onions, garlic, carrots, and celery, chopped coarsely. Add some wine (red or white), white beans, canned tomatoes, vegetable stock (or water I am sure would work), thyme, salt, and pepper. Simmer for half an hour. Meanwhile, blanch chard, drain, chop, and add for the last few minutes of simmering.

Serve with hard cheese and crusty bread. This stew looks beautiful at every stage of cooking and pleased the 'fuzz. Apologies to PMC that I didn't take a photo.

lasagne

2011-01-19T19:53:00.009-05:00

I have repeatedly found, checked (by experiment), stopped believing, and then re-checked (by more experiments) the obvious and yet completely unknown fact that you don't have to pre-boil lasagne noodles before making a lasagne in the oven! Here's my dumb recipe, which sure ain't rocket science:

Fill an oven-proof pan with various layers. For this one, I did a bottom layer of chopped onions and carrots, olive oil and a tiny bit of crushed tomatoes, then a layer of raw, rigid noodles, then a layer of crushed tomato with some cheese, then noodles, then an enormous layer of raw baby spinach with some hard cheese, then noodles, then a layer of tomato and cheese, then a layer of noodles, and then a top layer of tomato, mozzarella, and hard cheese. It was mounded up in the pan like this:

After one hour in a 400 F (200 C) oven, it looked like this:

All noodles cooked. Adjustments for next time: Put more cheese in the layers; add garlic to the bottom layer; salt and pepper each layer. Remember: Pre-boiling is for suckers. And no, I didn't use the "pre-boiled" or "oven-ready" noodles either (those are fine though, I hate to admit).

bean "gravy" for roast chicken

2010-05-19T19:45:00.003-04:00

PMC, in his infinite wisdom, dumped two cans of white beans (we could have used dry beans boiled in water until tender), a few sprigs of rosemary, and some roasted garlic into the pan in which we were roasting two small chickens. This, in the last half-hour of roasting, turned into a bean gravy that went beautifully with the chicken and mashed potatoes. All the awesome of gravy, more food value than gravy, and none of the effort of gravy! (Note: We skimmed off no fat, so this was pretty damned rich!) Well done, PMC.

"vegan" mashed parsnips

2010-03-22T12:15:00.006-04:00

As our loyal reader knows, we love to mash vegetables here in the F,NRS NYC office. Recently, parsnips have come under the masher, to good effect. I only post it here because we mash these babies for Liz and Lisa, who eat kosher and therefore can't have milk or butter in the mash (if it is to be eaten with chicken, as it so often is), and Liz needs the recipe. These mashed are vegan so that we can all eat meat, if you know what I mean.

Before starting, if you want them garlicky, put many peeled cloves of garlic into a dish with many tablespoons of olive oil and put it into a low oven (say 300 F) to soften and sweeten. Then cut up—no need to peel, as far as I am concerned—parsnips, potatoes, and carrots into substantial chunks for boiling. I usually go something like four parsnips for every potato and carrot, but mix it up! Boil the parsnips for 30 minutes and the carrots and potatoes for 20. That is, you want the parsnips very done. Save some of the cooking water (remember, no milk will be permitted). Mash it all with the garlic and olive oil from the oven (or just plain olive oil if you don't want to go garlicky), insane amounts of salt and some pepper, and just enough cooking water (not much) to get them mushy.

These mashed parsnips are so sweet, you can't help asking: Parsnips, where have you been all my life?

Moroccan-style chicken stew

2010-03-15T20:30:00.007-04:00

These days, in high rotation at home, and inspired by our friend Ness, I have been making this ultra-simple crowd pleaser: Heat up a dutch oven and put in as many pieces of chicken as people (double up if you are serving Marines). Once the chicken gets to releasing some fat, throw in about as much chunky chopped leeks, carrots, and celery (if you have it) you can stand to cut up, and anything else you like. Add one chopped preserved lemon for every five or six people, and about the same volume of salty olives (like Kalamatas for example, pitted if your crowd is liable to break teeth). Add a mixture of red wine and water (or just water if you are out of wine) to nearly cover, and obscene amounts of salt, some pepper and a bit of harissa (maybe half a teaspoon per four people), and simmer for enough time to give the chicken a total start-to-finish cooking time of 35 minutes. Don't over-cook!

Serve with couscous and extra harissa for the heat-lovers. You can extend this with chick peas if you are short of chicken or heating up leftovers. As you can imagine, it is even better the next day.

sweet popcorn

2009-09-17T22:04:00.003-04:00

After V asked for popcorn for dessert, I had to improvise. This worked well—not too sweet but definitely dessert: Heat an oil-butter mixture (I used a generous tbsp of each) in a saucepan over medium heat until a few test kernels of popcorn start to pop. Then pour in about 4 tbsp of unpopped popcorn kernels, about 2 tbsp of sugar, and a few shakes of salt. Agitate while the popcorn pops. Enjoy! (Caution: Contents may be hot.)

hot pot

2009-09-16T19:33:00.003-04:00

The Tragintyres—who have adopted the customs of their home country the Netherlands—taught us this one this summer: Cut up a few potatoes and similar vegetables (tonight we used carrots and cauliflower, but you could use beets or turnips or parsnips or cabbage, of course) and boil them to tender. Meanwhile, saute bacon, then onions, and then finely chopped greens (we used kale that had been blanched). Mash the boiled vegetables with cream, butter, salt and pepper; then add the sauteed part and mix it up. Serve.

This is meat-as-garnish, kid-friendly, hearty, simple, and delicious.

hand-chopped pesto

2009-09-06T16:56:00.004-04:00

At the suggestion of the 'fuzz, I took a small handful of pine nuts, a small handful of hazelnuts, a few cloves of garlic, a large bunch of fresh basil leaves, a small hunk of hard cheese, a bit of salt, and chopped and chopped and chopped. Then I mixed it with enough olive oil (home-made, thanks Kate and Yanni!) to make a solid mass of pesto. We mixed this with spaghetti and ate it with a side of fresh tomato and mozzarella to make a surprisingly awesome late-summer dinner.

(rhubarb strawberry) crisp

2009-07-05T16:12:00.005-04:00

Working from this recipe, I made a rhubarb strawberry crisp today. For the fruit, you proceed as for pie. In this case, about 6 cups of sliced rhubarb and strawberries were tossed with about a cup of sugar, a few tablespoons of corn starch and a big pinch of cinnamon. I used a 9x13 pan, which I did not butter (although the recipe calls for buttering). Other crisps/crumbles that I'd made recently had a topping that was too starchy; I was using flour and rolled oats but too little sugar and rubbing cold butter into the dry. For today's crisp, I used

1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup rolled oats (I like large flake)
3/4 packed brown sugar
a pinch of salt

and here's the surprise

1/2 cup melted butter

The dry ingredients are mixed and then drizzled with the melted butter and everything is tossed to combine. The resulting mixture does not hold together but is rather more like dark brown pebbles. This is spread over the fruit and the dish is baked at 375 for about 30 minutes until the topping is browned (I would say "browner"). This was a delicious crisp, and the topping was awesome. As soon as I find my copy of the "The Best Recipe" (we're still unpacking), I want to cross-check with their approach.

strawberry shortcake

2009-06-27T12:02:00.003-04:00

Pie season has returned; I have baked an apple pie and there is a red currant tart in the oven right now. But a few days ago I finally got strawberry shortcake to work:

Before starting, cut up as many strawberries as you can, and mix them with a bit of sugar. Let them stand, the longer the better; the syrop that emerges from them is the key. Make one large, thin biscuit (I made it with 1 cup of flour), but add to the recipe 1/4 cup sugar for every cup of flour. You could go even sweeter. When the biscuit is done, let it cool a bit, and split it carefully into two thin layers. On the bottom layer put all the strawberries, and all the syrop from them. Add some whipped cream, and then replace the top layer. "Ice" the shortcake with more whipped cream and some leftover strawberries.

waffles and pancakes

2009-06-11T10:42:00.005-04:00

I have been remiss in posting, despite having learned many useful things in the last few months. Here is one:

When making waffles or pancakes, you do much better to separate the whites from the yolks of the eggs and beat the whites separately till they are stiff (or close). Make the batter with the yolks and then fold the beaten egg whites into the batter. Fluffy, light waffles!

One thing I am interested in is whether you could replace all rising agents with this technique. After all, how did they make pancakes before there was easily available double-acting baking powder?

meat loaf

2009-03-07T19:26:00.005-05:00

G-ma2005 (otherwise known as Grandma Jan) came by a few weeks ago and taught me the ancient secrets of meatloaf. I very slightly modified it into this ridiculously simple recipe:

Mix equal volumes of ground beef and crushed saltine crackers, plus a significant amount of chopped onions, plenty of salt and pepper, and enough eggs to make it stick together (roughly 1/2 lb meat, one egg, one onion, and half a sleeve of crackers). Form this into a loaf an put it into a 375 F (190 C) oven.

After about 10 min, pull out the loaf and cover it with a mixture of ketchup, brown sugar, and worchestershire, mixed to your liking (comparable quantities of each does well, although G-ma2005 prefers a larger fraction of ketchup). Continue baking for another 30 min or so. It is hard to over-cook it.

Fuzzmama notes that this is not meat as garnish. It is transcendant the next day in a sandwich.

latkes

2007-12-23T19:31:00.000-05:00

I love potato pancakes. It turns out their preparation does not involve rocket science. Grate four potatoes and one onion (prepare to cry). Mix with two eggs, a few tbsp of flour, and a whole heck of a lot of salt and pepper. Fry large, flattened spoonfuls of the mixture in plenty of hot olive oil until very dark brown, turn, and make the other side dark brown too. Serve with sour cream and smoked fish, or apple sauce. These quantities make about twelve pancakes (serves about four).

As you proceed with the frying (with two pans doing two or three at a time), you can preserve the cooked pancakes on paper towels in a 170 F (80 C) oven.

An expert variation is to drain the shredded potato, let the starch settle out of the drained liquid, and mix it back in, but that may qualify as rocket science. One night we added shredded celery root, to good effect.

mirepoix

2007-12-15T06:46:00.000-05:00

A mirepoix is a mix of chopped vegetables used to build the foundational flavours of many dishes. In classic French cooking, the mirepoix consists of two parts cooking or yellow onions to one part each of carrot and celery. If that sounds like rocket science, if I wanted for example one cup of mirepoix, I would use half a cup of onion, a quarter cup of carrot and a quarter of celery.

Other cuisines have their own take on mirepoix. The function is always the same: build a solid base or backdrop of flavour against which to highlight the goodness of the main ingredients.

Indian: the highly aromatic "wet masala" of onions, garlic and ginger
Cajun/Creole: the "holy trinity" of onions, celery and green pepper

lentil soup

2007-12-15T06:45:00.000-05:00

This was great for lunch with a crusty baguette (we tried the new "La Tradi" from Eric Borderon's artisinal bakery in Quebec City).

in a heavy-bottomed pan, sweat a cup of classic mirepoix in a bit of olive oil (covered at medium-low heat)
add half a cup of small green lentils, a small handful each of red-skinned potato, rutabaga and zuccini and a sprig of thyme
all the veg should be chopped or diced medium (the size of a green pea)
add eight cups of water, bring to a boil and simmer for about half an hour
season with salt (about two teaspoons) and pepper when the lentils are tender

water-based soups

2007-12-15T06:11:00.000-05:00

Almost all of the soup-related entries here at F,NRS call for chicken stock. Sometimes, however, I don't have any stock on hand. This entry is meant to be an on-going record of soups that don't seem to suffer for lack of chicken stock and those that do or might.

Good with water:

cauliflower soup using the pureed vegetable soup algorithm replacing stock with water
lentil soup
leek and potato, but I oversalted it (Dec. 2008)
(Hogg say:) carrot-ginger: a bunch of carrots, a cubic inch of ginger (boil carrots and ginger with salt and blend), orange juice and cream

Bad with just water:

chicken noodle (just kidding)
Tuscan white bean soup, probably

pork rillettes

2007-10-16T21:56:00.000-04:00

I've been wanting to make this ever since I bought Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook over a year ago. Finally got around to it last weekend. I served it with toasted baguette and sour cornichon pickles as a starter for Valerie and Roger. Of the five kids also eating, four loved it and the one who didn't doesn't like anything. It's ridiculously easy to make (as advertised) and insanely good. Even better than...get this... cretons.

Cut into 2 inch chunks and put into a heavy-bottomed pot (still lovin' that Creuset I got for my 30th birthday) the following:

1 lb. pork shoulder
2 lb. fresh pork belly (this cut is used to make both bacon and salt pork, but you want neither of those things; for me, getting this requires a trip to a good butcher, as it isn't the kind of thing supermarkets stock)
4 cups of water
1 bouquet garni (spigs of parsley and thyme and a bay leaf tied together)

Simmer for six hours, stirring from time to time. When it's done, there will be no water, an abundance of beautiful, golden brown liquid fat and chunks of meat that readily fall apart into shreds and some of which has browned a bit in the hot fat. You add a teaspoon of salt to this and pull the meat apart with forks. Pour everything into a terrine-like dish. Bourdain covers with thinly sliced pork fat, but I didn't have that so I just used plastic wrap. It's supposed to be better if you let it age for three days before you eat it, but I can't say I've noticed a difference between the taste the day after making it and today, which is three days after. So damn good!

sausage, squash, and apple

2007-10-02T21:19:00.000-04:00

PMC came down to the fuzz compound for the weekend, and we threw sweet pork sausages, peeled and cubed butternut squash, and large apple chunks into the oven for 30 or 40 min at 400 F (200 C). The apple was over-cooked into a kind of thick apple sauce, but the squash caramelized on the cast-iron pan and the combination of the three ingredients was great! Everything had been tossed with olive oil, but to PMC's astonishment, it didn't need any salt or pepper.

macaroni and cheese

2007-09-09T21:17:00.001-04:00

I took PMC's statement that it was impossible to make macaroni and cheese without pre-boiling the noodles as a challenge, and produced the following. I love it, but it won't satisfy those who identify the dish with creaminess. Cheesiness, more like it!

Put 8 oz macaroni in a lot of hot tap water for 30 min while the oven pre-heats to 400 F (200 C). Cut cubes of swiss and cheddar cheese until you have two or three cups. Drain the macaroni and mix with the cubes of cheese. Butter a cast-iron pan with as much butter as you can stand to use, pour in the macaroni and cheese, fill with milk until more-than-covered, and generously salt and pepper. Bake for 45 min.

Serves four. Double the recipe, make it in a big oven dish, and serve eight.

Spätzle

2007-07-29T07:04:00.000-04:00

Hans-Walter Rix (Director of the MPIA) made this German classic for me, in preparation for an attempt on Käsespätzle I plan to make later this week.

Get some water boiling on the stove and salt it. Mix 200 g flour (about 1.5 cups) and plenty of salt with 2 eggs until smooth. Add water (the word is that soda water works better than flat water, but we did not perform any comparison) a bit at a time and stir until you get a dough that is slightly foamy and flows, but which is not fully liquid.

Pour the dough onto a small cutting board and fling small bits of it into the boiling water with a flexible knife. Boil for a few minutes until the noodles are solid. Drain and then either serve with butter, or else sauté with butter and serve with salt, pepper, and cheese.

If you make the dough too liquid, the noodles become too small and water-logged. Interestingly, the liquid can be replaced with broth or puréed spinach to vary the taste. Top Spätzle makers have a large ricer that looks like an enormous garlic press to make consistent noodles from the dough. I think PMC may have one of these?

ch-ch-cherry pie

2007-07-23T21:30:00.001-04:00

Or rather "ch-ch-cherry soup" as Ben likes to say. After losing any fruit our Evans sour cherry tree had set to plum curculio two years running, I resolved last year to treat the tree systematically with insecticide in the spring rather than just hoping that nature would sort things out in my favour. As a result, we were able to harvest about 10 pints of cherries (a little more than half a peck, as in "a peck of pickled peppers") from our tree during this weekend's visit from the Fabulous Nerissa. Marie-Lou, Ness, Ben and I pitted those babies in record time and I set out to make the sour cherry pie filling described in Steingarten's piece "Pies From Paradise" in The Man Who Ate Everything.

Both Steingarten and the editors of Cook's Illustrated recommend tapioca for thickening cherry pie. The fruit flavour is reported to be "brighter" and the filling clearer. Corn starch, they say, produces a muddier taste. Steingarten instructs us to blend instant tapioca into a powder before using it, but no matter how long I let it whir around in there it wouldn't get much smaller than large grains of sand. I used it in that form and since the tapioca only dissolves partially when cooked, there were a multitude of little jelly specks in my filling, which was nonetheless absolutely delicious. I let it cool on the counter and then for several hours in the 'fridge before making my pies, as recommended. When the filling remained quite runny even when well chilled, I should have been more concerned than I was. I figured it might thicken more when I baked the pie.

It didn't. Two pies were made. We cut into the first only an hour after taking it from the oven, which I knew was going to be a mistake but it was too compelling. It was still very warm and the filling was like soup (sound familiar). The crust was also underbaked, a consequence of the cold filling throwing off my usual timing. The second pie spent the night in the refridgerator and cut much more nicely the following day; the above picture is of this pie. So that was that for this year's cherries, but I have found a nearby source of good frozen pie cherries and will press on. I have to find tapioca flour and increase the amount and see if that helps. I'll also bake it until the pastry is well and truly brown on top next time. Stay tuned for further developments.

tomato sauce with anchovy

2007-07-19T21:29:00.000-04:00

No rocket science for this quick and tasty treat: Soften up 1 or 2 thinly sliced or chopped onions and 4 to 8 anchovies in a substantial amount of butter. Add canned crushed tomatoes (or whole). Salt generously. Simmer for 10 to 30 min or until thick. Adjust salt.

We ate this tonight with supermarket tortellini.

chicken pot pie

2007-07-13T03:48:00.000-04:00

I don't know for sure, but a "pot pie" might be a pie in which the pot forms the bottom, but there is a top crust of pastry. For my fourth pie of the summer I tested this assumption by making a chicken stew, adding a pie crust pastry top, and then baking it until the top was crispy. It came out like chicken and dumplings but with crispy, flaky dumpling-like servings of pie crust!

For the stew, I put two chicken legs and some chopped green onions in a covered pot, cooked them hot for about 15 min, added water to half-cover and a lot of salt, simmered it for about 30 min, pulled the chicken off the bones, chopped the chicken, tossed the bones, added peas and carrots, stirred in flour to thicken it (yes, cheating, I should have made a roux and it would have been better), and simmered it for about 30 min more.

I put on the pastry top and threw it in a 375 F (200 C) oven for another 30 min.

herring and potato salad

2007-07-07T09:11:00.000-04:00

For lunch today, the 'fuzz made a salad of boiled new potatoes, smoked herring, and fresh arugula. She dressed it with lemon juice, olive oil, shallot, salt, and pepper. That was a beautiful use of our Heidelberg farmers' market fare.

tarte au citron

2007-07-07T08:59:00.000-04:00

After a long phonecall with PMC, I decided that my third pie-baking attempt this summer would be tarte au citron. For the shell I used a sweetened version of PMC's pie crust (with butter as the fat), and pre-baked it (in two small pie plates) for 15 minutes at 375 F (200 C) with pie weights (euro pennies on a sheet of baking parchment in this case).

For the filling, I mixed two whole eggs, six egg yolks, one cup sugar, a few tbsp butter and about a tsp of salt with the grated rind and juice of three lemons. I heated it up on the stove until it was starting to emit steam (nowhere near boiling), then strained it into a few tbsp of milk (I was out of cream).

I poured the filling into the shells and baked it at 375 F (200 C) for about 10 minutes. I let the tartes cool, and then served them with blueberries, raspberries, and creme fraiche. Awesome!

The above story leaves out numerous mistakes and failures, like using a not-properly-preheated oven, baking at the wrong temperature (so I had to bake longer). But it worked well nonetheless. A mark of food that ain't rocket science: You can mess up and recover.

sour cherry pie

2007-06-30T17:00:00.000-04:00

I made this for a party today, the same way as my rhubarb pie, but (a) I made the crust with German-supermarket margarine instead of butter, (b) I used sour cherries instead of rhubarb, (c) I cut the sugar a bit, and (d) I baked it for one hour only.

It looks great. I will report on how it tastes (in the comments) after the party.

rhubarb pie

2007-06-14T12:51:00.000-04:00

I vowed to make ten pies during my summer in Germany. I made the first yesterday. It would have come out better if I had baked it normally and not in "broil" mode, but I couldn't understand the icons on my damned European oven!

I put into PMC's pie crust (made with butter so it tasted good but was not super flaky) three cups of cut-up rhubarb and one cup of sugar. I put on the top crust, put it in a 200 C (400 F) oven for 20 min and then turned it down to 175 C (350 F) for another hour.

The pie was delicious but as I implied I was a bit disappointed with the crust. PMC, can you make a flaky crust with butter? If so, how? I have an intuition that you might be able to if you rolled it with flour, folded it, rolled it, and repeated many times?

lasagne

2007-03-08T10:04:00.000-05:00

I was very pleased to discover this month that lasange does not require pre-cooking of the noodles (which, if you count water-boiling time, almost doubles the preparation time). I just soaked the lasagne noodles in tap water while I heated up some pasta sauce (which I made earlier in the week by frying onions and cut-up sausage in a whole lot of butter and then simmering with a large can of crushed tomatoes and a lot of salt). I layered the noodles and sauce with soft and hard cheese and raw spinach. I reserved a lot of cheese for the top. I put it in a 350 F oven for an hour, let stand for 20 min, and then ate it! Warning: A big pan requires a double order of sauce.

It is clear that if you are in a real hurry, you could just layer unsoaked, uncooked noodles with raw spinach, unheated crushed tomatoes, cheese, salt, and pepper, and cook it for a bit longer and it would work just fine; I have yet to try this, though.

It is also clear that it will be possible to make macaroni and cheese with no pre-oven preparation: That's tonight's experiment!

"The Most Delicious Fruit Sorbet in the World"

2007-01-26T10:22:00.000-05:00

Today we have a guest, my son Ben, who you know, dear Readers, as the star of Ants on a Log. I am acting as his scribe: "First I weighed 400 g of frozen strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. Then I put them into a food processor and blended them for a little bit. Then I added two handfuls of sugar and blended a little bit longer. Then I realized that it was just dark so I added a spoonful of vanilla yoghurt and then blended it again until it was all mixed together. Then I put it into a container, tasted it and put it into the freezer."

two pies

2007-01-01T10:48:00.000-05:00

Emboldened by the simplicity of PMC's pie crust, I made two pies this week. One was filled with sautéed mushrooms and leftover boeuf bourguignon. The other was filled with huge apple chunks and a 1/2 c sugar. Both were assembled (quickly) in a pre-heated (ouch, ouch) cast-iron pan (yes, my old faithful). Both were baked for about an hour at about 400 F. Both came out great! Who knew? Pie baking is not rocket science.

pie crust

2006-12-30T17:31:00.001-05:00

This came in email form to me from PMC. I am posting it because if I don't I won't ever be able to find it when I need it!

I [PMC] learned how to make crust from the chapter Pies from Paradise in The Man Who Ate Everything.

Here are the broad strokes:

Put 1 c flour and a big pinch of salt in a big mixing bowl. Drop in 1/2 c of shortening (can be vegetable shortening, lard, butter or a combination).

Using your hands, rub the fat into the flour. I scoop with my hands, sweep my thumbs once over what I've picked up and let everything fall back into the bowl. This seems to keep the fat from warming up too much. When the biggest chunks of fat are about the size of a pea, pour about 1/3 c of cold water over the mixture and stir with a fork. You should be able to pull the dough together. Many would let the dough rest in the frige half an hour. I usually can't be bothered.

When you roll out the pastry, be liberal when dusting with flour. Sticking is a pain in the ass and you'd have to use A LOT of flour for it to have a discernable impact on your pastry.

When I make quiche, I put the pie in the oven as soon as I add the egg mixture and I put the plate on a cookie sheet that's been in the preheating oven. That seems to help get a good bottom crust.

This was sent in response to a request for a pie crust for quiche. Now if I were baking a fruit pie, PMC, would I bake the crust a bit before adding the filling?

lamb and beans

2006-12-11T23:19:00.000-05:00

It is a crime to post this, because it is covered entirely by the baked beans and stew recipe algorithm posts. But I can't help it, because it came out so good.

Parboil about a pound of dried white beans (I used great northerns) in unsalted water for about 45 min. Pour the beans, a few cloves of garlic, some glugs of olive oil, some sage, and a lamb shank (incredibly cheap if you can find one) into an oven-proof pot. Add enough of the parboiling water to bring it to almost cover (but not quite). Throw it in the oven, covered, for a few hours at 250 F (120 C). Pull the meat off the bone at the end, cut it up and return it to the pot, salt heavily, stir, and serve. I served it with braised cabbage.

Some notes: It takes one heck of a lot of salt, so be prepared to stir it in, taste, and repeat a few times. You also might have to add some water now and then as it cooks, or when you re-heat it the next day. This meal is a trash meal, in the sense that its ingredients are cheap and have little commercial impact. No-one is raising lambs for their shanks! I'm all about that. It is also a meal you can make all winter with locally produced ingredients here in the northeast (except the olive oil, which could be replaced with butter or dropped). Many argue that stew tastes better the next day; I don't disagree.

This has the consistency of cassoulet and is in the same spirit. And it sure ain't rocket science!

P.B. People

2006-12-06T23:06:00.000-05:00

I never cease to be amazed at what a kick kids get out of being allowed to play with their food. Yesterday, I took a few minutes to prepare a bowl with some thinly sliced and julienned carrots and some celery sticks. I used a vegetable peeler to make ribbons of carrot and then stacked these and cut them into threads. In a muffin tin, I also put out some apricots, sunflower seeds and GORP (good old raisins and peanuts). There was sliced whole wheat bread (whole slices and triangles), some apple slices and a big, wide-mouthed jar of peanut butter. I gave each of the boys a big dinner plate and a butter knife and said I'd like them to make a "p.b. person" for lunch, which they could eat as soon as I had taken a picture of their creation. That was both the only instruction and the only constraint (other than the fact that they had to choose from what was already on the table, but that was---apparently---implicit). I never said, "Spread some pb on a piece of bread, and then...." On the other hand, I did make my own PB person at the same time they were making theirs, so they probably took some cues from me. In any event, they ate as they created and had a great time.

This is Ben's PB person. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask the name, occupation and planet of origin of their people.

Here is Nathan's. He happily drew my attention to each facial feature he had eaten: "See, Dad? I ate his nose and one eye and one foot!" Spreading peanut butter is a sticky but fun challenge for a four-year-old. I made sure Nate didn't leave the table before giving his hands, face and shirt a good cleaning with a damp cloth.

braised cabbage pasta

2006-12-03T18:09:00.000-05:00

This recipe was made up by me in an attempt to re-create a wonderful meal made by PMC many years ago in Québec City for the 'fuzz and me. I hereby call out PMC to post the real recipe! I think this is not really a recipe, in fact, but rather a recipe algorithm, which means that you can play arbitrary games with the fat, the meat (including dropping the meat entirely), the onions, the greens, and the liquid.

1/4 lb prosciutto or bacon or bresaola or equivalent
2 leeks or 1 onion or a couple shallots, finely sliced
1 large cabbage or 1 large bunch of collard greens, or a mixture, shredded
1 glass of wine (red or white)
pasta for 4 (what the package says serves 6 or 8)
hard cheese

While the water for pasta is coming to a boil, try out the meat (I used prosciutto) in some olive oil with the shallots or equivalent (I used shallots). If you have a fatty meat, I am sure you don't need any olive oil. Once the meat is starting to get crispy, add the cabbage or equivalent (I used one small cabbage plus a small bunch of collard greens) and the wine (I used white). Mix.

While the pasta cooks, cook the cabbage and wine (and etc) mixture at pretty high heat. Make sure the pan never goes completely dry, because you are effectively "steaming" the cabbage as you sauté it. I think that is what is known as braising (PMC: am I wrong?).

When the pasta is done and the cabbage is done, mix it all in a big, oven-warmed bowl along with lots and lots of grated cheese. Season with plenty of salt and pepper.

ratatouille

2006-08-28T18:33:00.001-04:00

Here's what I did (with some help from the 'fuzz) to make the simplest possible ratatouille with all our farmer's-market late-summer vegetables:

2 onions, sliced
6 small eggplants (or 2-3 huge supermarket-style ones), diced
3 zucchini, diced
a few sweet peppers, seeded and diced
3 large tomatoes, diced
a few tbsp fresh basil, chopped
salt, pepper, olive oil

Soften the onions (and maybe some garlic) in a lot of olive oil. Add eggplant and cook until it starts to soften. Add zucchini and peppers and cook until the zucchini starts to soften. Add tomatoes and basil and a fair bit of salt and pepper and simmer until the whole thing turns into ratatouille (about an hour, maybe less). Fix seasoning at the end. Serve with crusty bread, and then freeze some for the coming winter.

chicken and dumplings

2006-06-04T20:01:00.000-04:00

Today I put chicken, onions, carrots, and celery in a pot with salt and pepper and covered it all (not quite) with water. I simmered it for two hours (checking seasoning now and then). I finished by dropping on top large spoonfuls of my my biscuit dough, as suggested by PMC in the comments of that post. It took less than 10 min for the dumplings to cook, at which point we had chicken and dumplings!

biscuits

2006-03-29T11:55:00.001-05:00

Whew! Many cups of flour were harmed in the creation of this recipe, despite its incredible simplicity. But that's just because I didn't keep a log book! You would think I don't know how to do research.

Pre-heat the oven and a pan of some kind (I use cast iron as always!) to 400 F (200 C). Cut 3 tbsp butter into 1 cup of flour, 1.5 tsp double acting baking powder, and a large pinch each of sugar and salt. Mix in milk, a bit at a time, until the ball of dough just barely cleans the sides of the bowl. Knead the dough a few times on a floured board or counter.

Cut the dough into six parts (I roll the dough into a 5-inch-long cylinder and cut it into six slices, but it is traditional to roll the dough flat and cut it with a cookie cutter—is that rocket science?). Bake in the pan for about 25 or 30 mins or until starting to brown on top.

skillet cornbread

2006-03-15T23:00:00.000-05:00

Put an iron skillet holding 1 tbsp butter in the oven and pre-heat to 350 F (175 C). Cut about 1 tbsp butter into 1 cup of cornmeal, 1 heaping tsp of double-acting baking powder, and 1/4 to 1/2 tsp salt. Break an egg into a 1 cup measure, and fill up to the 1 cup level with milk or buttermilk. Five minutes before you expect the oven to be ready, mix the wet and dry ingredients. When the oven is ready, tilt the skillet to spread the butter, and then pour in the batter. Bake for about 30 min or until lightly browned or until an inserted knife comes out clean. Serves four.

pot roast

2006-03-14T20:21:00.000-05:00

Now this is not rocket science:

few tbsp fat (I used rendered bacon fat)
few lbs beef (I used the cheapest chuck the 'fuzz could find)
few onions, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, etc
salt, pepper, water

Sauté one chopped onion and the beef in the fat, turning occasionally, until the beef is brown. Then salt and pepper it very generously, add some water (I used less than 1 cup), and put in a 300 F (150 C) oven. After 2 h add vegetables, maybe peeled and quartered. Cook for another 1.5 h for a total of 3.5 h. Drain and serve with sautéed greens or equivalent, with some of the pot liquor as a sauce. Serves at least two per lb of meat.

Some would have you thicken the sauce to a gravy; I bet PMC would! Next time I might use cubed salt pork as the fat.

baked beans

2005-12-04T11:06:00.000-05:00

I previously promised that I would figure out baked beans. I did, this Thanksgiving, making one of our five easy sides. Over the next little while I will post all the Thanksgiving recipes (if PMC doesn't beat me to it).

1 lb dry beans (yellow eye or soldier or jacob's cattle or white navy; it is hard to find any bean variety outside of Maine and maritime Canada)
1/4 lb fat, salt pork or bacon or butter (yes, butter!)
1/2 cup molasses (nice sweet molasses you are willing to eat straight)

Par-boil the beans in unsalted (yes, this is important, I learned the hard way) water in an oven-proof pot for 20 to 30 min, until the skins start to peel when you breathe on the beans. Pour off and reserve the pot liquor (PMC's word). Mix into the beans the fat and molasses, and enough pot liquor to not-quite cover them. Bake them, covered, at 250 F for 4 to 6 hours, checking every hour for doneness, stirring, and adding pot liquor as necessary. Never let the liquid in the pot get to the top of the top layer of beans.

At the end, stir in salt and pepper to taste. If they seem dry to you, add a bit more water to thin them. The important thing, whether you like to eat them soupy or dry, is that they cook without too much liquid in the pot.

Experiment with different kinds of fat, maple syrup instead of molasses (or a mixture), with mustard, rum, onions, or whatever strikes your fancy. You won't go bankrupt in the process!

eggs baked in sauce

2005-11-15T20:47:00.000-05:00

build a thick, chunky sauce in an ovenproof frypan
make a few holes in the sauce into which you crack some eggs
season with salt, pepper and grated cheese
bake in a hot oven until the eggs are set
serve over hot, buttered toast

"Thick, chunky sauce"? This is a method of, technique for, approach to cooking eggs and not a recipe per se. I can bash out a sauce that fits the bill in 10 minutes, so this is on the table in 15, baby. Here's tonight's sauce:

chop a large onion and cook in some olive oil until the edges start to brown
add chopped spinach and allow to wilt
add some minced garlic, stir a bit
add a volume of chopped tomato about equal to everything that's already in the pan
cook over medium heat for a few minutes to let some of that liquid fry off
season with salt and pepper

You could go all arrabiata on those eggs' ass by skipping the spinach and adding some chili pepper flakes or any hot sauce on hand. Hash, anyone? That's onion, cooked potato and leftover corned beef (not really a sauce, but...yum). By the way, add some beets to that hash and you've got "flannel". Of course, there's always puttanesca. You get the idea.

pumpkin...stew

2005-11-07T11:57:00.000-05:00

Hallowe'en has come and gone. The boys were matching Incredibles this year, thanks to ML's handiwork, and brought in a fine haul of candy. For almost a month now, the front of our home has been decorated with, among other things, a bale of hay, a large and nasty looking fake rat and many pumpkins. Before the snow gets here (probably next week!), I thought we might eat our way through some of the decorations. No amount of stewing would make the hay or the rat palatable, but one of the smaller pumpkins (seeded, peeled and cut in chunks) made a delicious and rather pretty stew with the addition of the following:

two leeks (mostly white part) and one medium onion, thinly sliced and braised in butter
red and white kidney beans (the latter had been cooked with sage)
frozen corn
salt, pepper, fennel seeds, turmeric and paprika (mostly for colour)
water to just cover

I brought this to a simmer and left if for about an hour. This is excellent (and totally veg) as is, but some sauteed merguez sausage is a wonderful addition just before serving

(Everything but the pumpkin and the seasoning had been kicking around the upstairs freezer for some time. Yes, I had a surfeit of leeks earlier this fall and already had a lot of soup in the fridge, so leek and potato was not an option at the time. I braised them and froze for later.)

stew, wonderful (generic) stew

2005-11-07T10:22:00.000-05:00

Our love affair with stew continues with this basic recipe. The starting point of any meat stew is, naturally, meat. Take your pick of beef, pork or lamb (or venison or raccoon or ...). Shoulder, neck and shank (foreleg) are the choice cuts for stewing (beef shoulder is called chuck, BTW). For every pound of meat, you want

a tablespoon of fat
an onion the size of your fist, chopped coarsely
a minced clove of garlic
a cup or two of veggies coarsely chopped or beans
a cup of liquid
a tablespoon of flour
seasonings

The technique is straightforward. Brown the chunks of meat all over in the fat in a heavy, ovenproof pan (I use a Dutch oven). Add the onions and stir until softened. Add the garlic and cook just until you can smell it. Add the flour and stir. Add the liquid and bring to a boil while scraping the bottom of the pot. Cover and put in a 250 degree oven for 2-3 hours until meat falls apart when you prod it with a fork. Root veggies (carrots, parsnips, spuds) are added about an hour into cooking and anything else about 15 minutes before you take the stew out of the oven. Canned beans or chickpeas are also added around then. I like to use beans to stretch my stew when possible. Some traditional stews, however, like boeuf bourguignon, just wouldn't seem right with this addition.

Unless you're making enough for an army, it takes about 30 minutes to get the stew ready to go in the oven. At this point you could opt instead for a slowcooker. On the low setting, most stews take 8-12 hours in the "mijoteuse". There is less evaporative loss, so cut the liquid and flour in half.

Now for the infinite variations. For fat, bacon or salt pork are popular choices. Try out the fat over medium heat before adding the chunks of meat. Of course, these fats add a strong (delicious) flavour to the stew. Butter, duck fat or olive oil are other yummy options. The liquid is usually some combination of stock and wine, but beer, fruit and vegetable juices and, heck, even water also work. If you're making a beef or veal stew and have real veal stock on hand (or some demiglace), then this is the way to go. For seasonings, I usually start with 1/2 tsp of salt and 1/4 tsp of pepper per pound of meat.

With beef, I like thyme and bay. Sage and rosemary are good with lamb or pork and white kidney beans. Cumin, turmeric, cinnamon and cardamom (Persian seasonings) are great with lamb and chickpeas. Mustard, thyme and brandy soaked prunes are great (and traditionally French) with pork (finish the stew with heavy cream). A heaping tbsp of chopped fresh parsley is a nice finish to any stew.

I serve stew either with bread alone (whatever I can find that most closely approximates the Sullivan Street filone) or with boiled potatoes or buttered egg noodles. I prefer to serve "mush", like mashed potatoes or polenta, with things less saucy, like roast chicken or pot roast or braised lamb or veal shanks (osso bucco).

boeuf bourguignon

2005-11-04T22:21:00.000-05:00

1 lb bacon, chopped coarsely
1.5 lb onion, chopped coarsely
2 cloves garlic
2 lb cheap beef, cubed
0.5 lb cheap mushrooms, sliced and sautéed
wine, salt, pepper, bay leaf, etc

Try out the bacon and sautée the onions and garlic in the fat in an oven-proof pot. Remove the onions and bacon and reserve, making room to brown the beef in the rendered fat. Once the beef is brown, put the onions and bacon back in, and cover with a 3:1 mix of wine and water. Add about 1 tsp salt, a few (I used 8) peppercorns, a bay leaf, and maybe thyme or marjoram. Leave in a 300 F oven for 2 hr or more. Add sautéed mushrooms and put back in the oven for another 0.5 hr. Salt to taste.

I served this with sautéed spinach and PMC's favorite, Sullivan Street filone. I love this. It might be even better if either (a) I marinated the beef overnight in the wine, or (b) I put in only enough wine to cover the beef, and left the onions and bacon out until the last hour or so (so as to make a thicker sauce). But I ain't complaining.

basic risotto

2005-10-30T20:25:00.000-05:00

Weather's gettin' cold, so let's bust out the carbs, baby! Saucy rice is easy:

Sweat some finely chopped onion or French shallots in butter.
Add about two cups of short grain rice (Arborio or sushi rice are likely candidates) and stir to coat with butter
Add a cup of weak chicken stock (2:1 water:concentrate) and a cup of white wine and simmer while stirring gently
When liquid is absorbed, add more stock about a half cup at a time and continue stirring
Repeat until rice is tender but still firm (al dente)
Add more stock to adjust consistency, as the rice should spread easily on the plate (a gluey mound is bad). A total of about 6 cups of stock will go into the pot
Season with good, finely grated parmesan cheese, salt, pepper, perhaps some fresh thyme and a splash of wine

Some favoured variations on this are wild mushroom risotto and roasted squash risotto. For the former, some of the stock is replaced with the soaking liquor (filtered to remove grit?) of a package of dried porcinis or morels, which are also added towards the end. A garnish of fresh wild mushrooms sauteed in butter is nice, if you can get them. The latter... add chunks of squash at the end. Duh. Sage is a nice seasoning to add to this one, with brown butter drizzled on top.

I recently tried parcooking my risotto for a dinner party, i.e. taking to 3/4 completion (after about 4-5 cups of liquid) earlier that day and then cooling it on a cookie sheet. That evening I dropped the cooled mixture into a few cups of simmering stock, brought everything back to a simmer, added the seasoning and was ready to serve on warmed plates in five minutes. Nice trick with a great result.

leftover risotto soup

2005-10-30T20:14:00.000-05:00

I had some leftover risotto kicking around in the freezer from this summer and an old bag of red lentils that never seemed to get used and were "bothering me". So I

sweat a large onion in some olive oil, added a bit of diced carrot and celery, the washed lentils (about 1.5 cups), some thyme, a pinch of dried ginger and around 6 cups very light chicken stock (1 can + 5 cans of water)
brought this to a boil and simmered until the lentils were tender
stirred in the risotto to make a nicely thicked soup
adjusted seasoning with salt and pepper

Lentils and rice is, of course, a classic combination, but using the leftover risotto gave me all sorts of bonus complexity at no added cost in time. "But PMC," you say, "isn't risotto making a branch of rocket science? Doesn't make this dish unfit for this forum?" Not so, as I think you'll see here.

"ahead of time"

2005-10-23T22:16:00.000-04:00

For ML's birthday supper on the weekend, I made the following for a party of six:

creamy pumpkin soup with fresh apple garnish, accompanied with apple cider "ice wine"
pan roasted duck breast (magret) with blueberry compote and green salad
wild mushroom risotto
fallen chocolate cake with raspberry coulis

This meal was, I have to say, fargin' awesome, not least of all because I didn't have the impression that I spent the entire dinner party in front of the stove. None of these menu items, taken individually, involves rocket science. Banging them out one after another for a group of six with minimal time away from the table, on the other hand, is facilitated by knowledge of at least model rocket science. The solution is, naturally, to do as much as you possibly can well before people start to arrive. Mise (rhymes with "knees") en place, they call it. In this post, I'd like to record elements of my "mise" for the birthday menu. Everything was done the morning of and took a few hours. It was very chill and enjoyable.

make the soup, which then just needs to be reheated just prior to serving
prep the apple garnish---firm apples like Granny Smith with hold peeled and cubed in "acidulated water", i.e. water with a lot of lemon juice, for many hours in the fridge
sear the duck magret, which can then be held in the 'fridge until you pop it into a hot oven to finished cooking (I think parcooking is one of many fine restaurant's dirty little secrets. They want us to believe that everything is prepared "à la minute".)
make the blueberry compote, which can be reheated while the duck is roasting
clean and dry the greens for the salad
make the vinaigrette for the salad
sauté the wild mushroom topping for the risotto
cook the risotto until it is about two thirds done then pour out onto a jelly roll pan and allow to cool---reheat with stock and another splash of wine to finish cooking the rice and get it creamy and top with the mushroom garnish. This idea is blasphemy for some, but the risotto was damn good and most restaurants work this way.
make the coulis and hold in the fridge
make the batter for the cake (which needs to be refridgerated anyway) and prep the muffin tin

With a good "mise", the rest is just timing, i.e. getting all these precooked or parcooked dishes on or in the heat in time to be ready when you are for the next course. Mise en place is also a key part of our yearly Thanksgiving dinner, but let's leave that for another post.

green tomato pickle

2005-10-21T21:02:00.000-04:00

What to do with the several pounds of green beefsteak tomatoes lingering in the garden? They weren't about to ripen (we had our first frost last night), so I thought I'd give pickling a whirl. If food preservation is not an issue, pickling is certainly not rocket science. All I want is something that tastes good now.

In the proverbial nonreactive saucepan (I like enamel, personally), I put about a cup and a half of vinegar and a cup of sugar (half white, half brown), a heaping teaspoon of salt, some whole cloves and peppercorns and a whole clove of garlic. After bringing this to a boil, I added a few pounds of green tomatoes, an onion and a red pepper, all thinly sliced. Everything was simmered for around an hour until the tomatoes were translucent. In the 'fridge, this pickle would keep (I suspect) for many weeks, if not months.

Great with (what else) baked beans!

pasta in a mushroom cream sauce

2005-09-24T21:49:00.000-04:00

The 'fuzz brought back 1 oz of dried porcini mushrooms from her last trip to Italy (that jet-setter). Today we turned them into a mushroom cream sauce that was easy, fast, and exceeded all our expectations. Our only regret is that we did not have some crusty Italian bread to soak up the remaining sauce; I was drinking it from my bowl at the end. This recipe only serves two hungry people.

1 oz dried porcini mushrooms
garlic, olive oil, wine
1/2 cup cream or half-and-half
few tbsp grated parmesan or equivalent
pasta for two (not much!)
fresh flat parsley, chopped a bit

Soak 1 oz dried porcinis in 1 cup boiling-hot water for 20 min. Sauté a clove or two of garlic, minced or pressed, in a few tbsp of olive oil. Add the porcinis (reserving the water they were in) and 1/2 cup of white wine. Keep at a low boil until the wine is fully evaporated. Add in the mushroom liquor—after straining it through a coffee filter to remove grit—and boil it down a bit too. Add cream and cheese and bring back to the boil. Salt (generously) to taste.

If you are clever, your pasta will be on the stove boiling, and just become done at this point; drain it and mix it in. Serve in shallow bowls with a mound of parsley on top, and crusty bread on the side.

country vichyssoise

2005-07-15T11:15:00.000-04:00

I call this vichyssoise country because when you make it in the blender (even multiple passes), you still get a few tiny lumps. Also I use black pepper, not white, so it is not perfect in appearance. This recipe is based on an old edition of my bible, The Joy of Cooking.

Sauté a few sliced leeks (white part) and a sliced onion in a few tbsp of butter. When soft, add four peeled, sliced potatoes and four cups of dilute chicken broth. Simmer until tender. Blend until smooth; I usually pass the whole thing through the blender multiple times; the traditional thing is to force it through a sieve. You want it to be as smooth as possible. Salt and pepper the blended soup until it tastes good.

Chill. Add a cup of cream and wisk till perfectly blended. Serve cold (even ice cold) with chopped chives or green onions.

Vichyssoise is easy to make, but I can't quite figure out how to make it well. Maybe PMC can weigh in on this. The best I have ever had is in Le Café de Paris by the Casino in Monte Carlo. It was rich in taste but also very light in consistency. Perhaps the traditional method of forcing the soup through a fine sieve is better than blending it. That sounds dangerously like rocket science.

cold celery soup

2005-07-10T14:07:00.000-04:00

This is a variation of PMC's soup algorithm, chilled for summer.

Sauté a thinly sliced medium onion in a few tbsp butter until the onion is soft and translucent. Add one whole bunch of celery, chopped and soaked (to remove sand and dirt), and enough diluted chicken broth (home-made or canned) to cover. Simmer for about 30 min. Blend until smooth in a blender, in a food processor, or in the pot with an immersion blender. Taste and adjust salt if necessary. Chill.

When cold, if you wish, mix in a small amount of cream or half-and-half for color and "body"; it's not necessary.

coq au vin

2005-07-07T21:50:00.000-04:00

For all our southern-hemisphere readers, or the northern-hemisphere readers for whom it is a cold summer:

Sauté two sliced carrots, one chopped large onion, and one chopped clove of garlic in a few tbsp of butter and a few strips of bacon, chopped into pieces, in an oven-proof pot. Add chicken (in my case, tonight, four large thighs with skins; they are super-cheap and super-tasty). Sauté the chicken a bit too. Add a tbsp or two of flour (I am not sure this is necessary), a bay leaf, and maybe some marjoram and thyme, about 1 tsp salt, pepper, and (nearly) cover with cheap red wine (about 1.5 or 2 cups).

Let it cook in the oven at 250 F (120 C) for 1 hour, covered. Add 1/2 lb sliced mushrooms and cook for 15 more minutes, maybe on the stove-top. Skim some of the fat if you wish (I usually don't); add salt if necessary (it usually is). Serve in shallow bowls with bread, and maybe also roast or boiled potatoes, and maybe a salad to follow (if you have guests).

Coq au vin: who knew? It's not rocket science.

summer borscht

2005-07-04T23:40:00.000-04:00

This recipe was reconstructed from the 'fuzz's memory, and various unreliable WWW recipes. We wanted a borscht that involved no meat, and that was light and refreshing for summer. Apparently it's not rocket science.

Cut tops from 6 or so beets, scrub clean, and simmer in 1.5 qts water until beets are starting to become fork-tender (maybe 1.25 hr). Remove beets from liquid and let them cool a bit.

Add to the beet water 1 bay leaf, 1 med onion cut up a bit, a quarter of the (washed, coarsely chopped) beet tops, 1 tbsp vinegar, 2 tsp salt, 1 tsp peppercorns, (and maybe 1 tsp sugar or honey) and simmer till you have soup (maybe 1 hr). Strain the soup through a cloth to remove all solids. Add peeled, finely chopped beets back in. (Note how easily cooked beets peel themselves.) You won't necessarily want to add back in all the beets you cooked originally. Simmer a bit more. Near the end, adjust seasoning, and maybe add a bit of honey or sugar if necessary. Remove from heat and chill.

Serve the soup cold with sour cream, and chopped dill, cilantro, and parsley. For added fun, let your guests add their own shredded raw carrots, sliced, hard-boiled eggs, chopped radishes and cucumbers.

agua fresca

2005-06-09T22:34:00.000-04:00

Blend 4 or 5 cups of watermelon chunks (no rind, but seeds are fine) along with a a cup (or less) of water until pulverized. Strain. Add 1/2 tsp (or less) of salt, maybe a tbsp or two of lime juice. Chill. Drink!

roast chicken with potatoes and gravy

2005-06-05T23:06:00.000-04:00

I am starting to sound like a broken record here, with lots of chicken and lots of roast vegetables, but I can't help it. They're good, they're cheap, they're certainly not rocket science, and I'm hungry!

Ingredients:

chicken
potatoes
lemon & onion (good but not necessary)
salt, pepper, butter, & oil

Pre-heat the oven to 450 F. Rinse, pat dry, butter, salt, and pepper a chicken. Put the chicken in some kind of pan in the oven and, a few minutes later, turn the oven down to 350 F. No need to dress or truss! Cook for about 20—25 min per pound, or until a meat thermometer in the thigh reads 180 F (okay, maybe that's rocket science).

Put large, olive-oiled (or buttered or bacon-greased or chicken-fatted) chunks of potatoes into a separate pan in the oven for the last hour of roasting.

While the chicken is in the oven, boil the neck and a bit of onion in a cup or two of water to make weak broth in anticipation of gravy.

When the chicken is done, remove it to a platter and let it stand. Pour the pan juices into a glass and let them separate (clear fat rises to the top). Put a few tbsp of the fat back into the roasting pan and, in the pan on the stove, cook a few tbsp of flour into a brown "roux", stirring constantly. Slowly add in the broth, and maybe the liquid from the platter the chicken's in, and maybe the liquid below the fat in the glass, boiling it on the stove, stirring, and using it to "cook off" the burnt stuff from the bottom of the pan. This, with a tiny bit of lemon juice, vinegar, or wine, and salt to taste, makes beautiful gravy (and cleans the pan).

Carve the chicken and serve with the potatoes, gravy, and a green vegetable or salad. Also try mixing the potatoes with beets, parsnips, turnips, or carrots. Don't forget to save the bones and scraps and table scraps (yes, even the table scraps) for chicken broth, and put the extra skimmed fat in the fridge for roasting vegetables the next time.

chicken broth

2005-05-18T18:10:00.000-04:00

Okay, this is a no-brainer, but since I made it last night and both the 'fuzz and I went ga-ga over it, I have to post it.

Whenever you cook chicken, keep the bones or necks or scraps or whatever in a bag in the freezer. Then, when bored, put it all into a pot, along with a hacked up onion and some celery (including leaves), and "sweat" it for a bit (PMC's terminology). Cover everything with water, add peppercorns and a bay leaf. Simmer for 45 mins or more. Strain and add salt bit-by-bit until it's delicious.

In principle, you can use this, diluted, in the many soup recipes on F,NRS. In practice, it tastes so damn good, you will just eat it all right away.

boule of country bread II

2005-05-18T08:33:00.000-04:00

Bread flour and terra cotta tiles make all the difference. I used about 6 cups of Robin Hood "Best for Bread Homestyle White" bread flour and half a cup of stone ground organic rye from La Milanaise mill in Quebec to 2.3 cups of tap water. (This gives a percentage of water of about 70, normalized to the weight of the flour.) Of this, two cups of bread flour and one cup of water were used, with half a teaspoon of active dry yeast (Fleischman's), to make a "sponge" the night before. This, with the rest of the flour and water and 1 tbsp of sea salt, was used to make the final dough, which was almost pourable, but that apparently is what you're after with this kind of bread.

The first rise took about three hours. I did not punch down the down but rather gingerly scraped it out onto a floured board and gently formed a boule, a disconcertingly flaccid boule. The second rise of about 45 minutes was in a muslin lined colander. Meanwhile, I covered a large jelly roll pan with a double layer of unglazed terra cotta tiles and set it in the oven to preheat at 450 degrees F.

When I put the bread in to bake, I thought, "There's no way this big floppy pancake is going to bake into anything resembling a loaf of bread." But wow! Those big air bubbles I was so careful to preserve hit the heat of the tiles and the surrounding air and up, up, up. The bread tastes great too. Hooray!

cod puttanesca

2005-05-03T09:51:00.000-04:00

Last night's supper was fish baked in sauce, but what a sauce!

Sauté 4–5 cloves of garlic, minced, in about 5 tbsp of good olive oil until just turning golden.
Add a 28 oz can of diced tomatoes packed in juice and bring to a simmer.
While simmering, drain and rinse a small can of anchovies and fire those into the sauce. Then add about 20 pitted black olives (Kalamata, baby) and a heaping tbsp of capers. Add a pinch of crushed chiles or some harissa, sambal olek, etc.. Do not add any salt to this sauce.
If your sauté pan isn't oven proof, pour the sauce into a baking dish. Lay fresh cod filets on sauce (we also had some ocean perch or "sebaste" in French, which is damn cheap and very good) and bake in a medium oven (around 350) for 10 minutes. Sprinke with fresh parsley and tuck in.

We ate this with basil mashed potatoes (russets + olive oil and butter + milk + fresh chopped basil + salt and pepper) and garlicky, lemony sautéed red Swiss chard. The sauce is potent, so I opened a fairly big wine, a 2002 Vacqueyras, to go with it.

The kids powered back the fish, so I'm afraid there were no left overs for bloggers seeking adoption in our household. On a related note, if "Kurt" could be persuaded to come east for a visit this summer, I would gladly make the trip as well to ply him with sourdough buckwheats and sage sausage in exchange for his insight on classroom management

boule of country bread

2005-05-03T08:47:00.000-04:00

If there is one food true to the spirit of F,NRS, it is bread. Few ingredients: flour, water, yeast, salt. In fact, these all fall into the category of staples and so hardly even count as ingredients in the way it is meant here. But simple procedures? Well, yes and no. It comes down to technique and knowing what things should feel, look, sound and smell like at each stage of the process. For me, making a fruit pie is now a simple procedure, but I've made dozens of them in the past few years. I have a fairly good idea of the tolerances on the procedure, where I can cut corners and where I have to take my time and do it right to get a certain quality of finished product. That's a place I'd like to be in bread baking. Yesterday's effort—a boule of "pain de campagne" or rustic country bread—has a nicely crackled thick crust and good colour and is very moist but the crumb is way too tight and uniform. Also, the salt didn't distribute properly through the dough, so there are some quite salty bites in there.

The Best Recipe by the editors of Cook's Illustrated is my main reference, but my inspiration is a chapter in Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything. There are several loaves I'd like to reproduce: the NYC's Sullivan Street Bakery filone, the "pain aux céréales" from Eric Borderon's in Quebec City and his boule of "pain de campagne". This last loaf has a cracked, blistered deep honey-brown crust with a moist, chewy crumb full of air pockets large and small. I'll post updates from time to time.

sourdough buckwheats and sage sausage

2005-05-01T21:36:00.000-04:00

I took the leap and made sourdough buckwheat pancakes for the family this morning, without a net. Frequent readers of F,NRS will recall that while my crew are all devoted pancake eaters, I feared this more agressive cousin would turn them off. Well, never underestimate kids who prefer roquefort to processed singles! Here's how John Thorne makes these in Serious Pig:

At T minus 24 hours, make the sponge. Put 3 tbsp all-purpose flour, 3 tbsp buckwheat flour, 6 tbsp warm water and 1/4 tsp active dry yeast in a small bowl. Stir, cover with plastic wrap and leave on the counter.
At T minus 12 hours, mix 3/4 cup all-purpose flour and 3/4 cup buckwheat flour in a larger bowl. Whisk in 3/2 cups of warm water followed by the sponge. Cover with plastic wrap and leave out overnight.
At T minus 2 minutes, add 3/2 tbsp molasses, 1/2 tsp baking soda and 1/4 tsp salt to the batter, stir and let rest while heating up a griddle. Lightly grease the griddle (bacon drippings, anyone?) initially and between batches.
Cook the sourdough buckwheats and serve with maple syrup and butter or molasses or sorghum or...

Thorne mentions sage breakfast sausage as a great foil for the grassy, earthy taste of these cakes. I have no idea where one would buy such a creature, so I made some, following Daniel Pinard's guidelines in Encore des pinardises: Recettes et propos culinaires:

Mix a pound of lean ground pork with a generous tsp each of fine sea salt, chile pepper flakes and dried sage (or a tbsp of finely chopped fresh) and 1/4 cup of white wine.
Form into patties (long, fairly flat ovals are nice).
If you have the time, leave in the 'fridge for a few hours to let the flavours marry and the salt and wine work on the protein in the meat.
Heat a frying pan over medium heat (no need to grease it) and fry up those sausages.

These aren't in casings, but who cares? I don't want to hang them for smoking or drying, which is the main purpose of such packaging; I want to devour them posthaste. By the way, pork, salt and wine in the same proportions plus:

1 tbsp each fennel seeds and chopped fresh parsley, 1/2 tsp ground black pepper and 1/2 tsp chile pepper flakes gives you Sicilian sausage
2 cloves of garlic minced, 1 tbsp Hungarian paprika, 1 tsp cayenne pepper, a big pinch of ground cumin and one of ground coriander gives you chorizo (replace the pork with lamb and the coriander with ground cinnamon andcloves and you've got merguez)

(In the same chapter: Eat a raw oyster on the half shell, followed by a bite of warm homemade thyme sausage, then a bite of buttered bread and a big sip of white wine (preferably graves, otherwise muscadet, chablis or sancerre). Repeat twelve times in the company of good friends. Know then what it means to be happy. Raw oysters, you say? I guess this form of happiness will have to wait a few months, right friends?) What a wonderful brunch! The only thing missing was baked beans...

making a salad of wilted bitter greens

2005-04-29T09:35:00.000-04:00

Spring is here and that means dandelion greens coming up...in our backyard. Picked a few handfuls of the youngest, tenderest leaves, washed them very thoroughly and made this salad inspired by the recipe for "frisee lardons" in Bourgain's Les Halles Cookbook, the chapter on dandelion greens in Serious Pig, and a recipe in Kasper's The Italian Country Table.

Put clean, dry bitter greens in a bowl: dandelion, cress, curly endive ("frisee"), arugula, or the like. Allow a very generous handful per person (pp).
Fry pieces of smokey bacon ("lardons") or pancetta in some olive oil until crisp, about 2 oz pp. Set aside the bacon and pour off (and save!) all but about 1 tbsp of bacon fat + olive oil pp.
Add some minced garlic and a fair amount of thinly sliced French shallot or red onion to the pan and saute until softened. The shallot/onion plays an important role in this salad because it holds a lot of heat, which helps wilt the greens. The subtle sweetness also offsets the bitterness of the greens.
Add about 1 tbsp red wine vinegar pp to the hot pan, stir and pour everything over the greens. Toss in the bacon and season with salt and pepper.

salad of wilted greens

2005-04-29T09:04:00.000-04:00

Salad of wilted greens and bacon lardons with baby dandelion greens from our backyard

poached pears in wine... with chocolate

2005-04-17T21:01:00.000-04:00

The clearance cart came through again, this time with a dozen ripe Bosc pears.

Cut off the bottom so they'll stand up, peel and core with a melon baller/teaspoon/paring knife.
In a nonreactive pan, place the pears in 2-3 cups of wine (I used white), 1 cup sugar, (a big strip of lemon zest, a few whole cloves, a cinnamon stick, orange juice,...) and add water to just cover the pears. Bring to a simmer and poach the fruit for about 20 minutes.
Remove the fruit and allow to cool. Reduce the poaching liquid to a nice syrupy consistency (remember that it thickens as it cools). This takes a while.

Now, the pears are great at this point. Just eat them with that syrup. Or...

Melt a few ounces of good chocolate.
Stir in mascarpone cheese, some liqueur (Amaretto last night), a tiny pinch of salt and sugar to taste.
Stuff the pears with this just before serving.

You could also make a ganache using heavy cream instead of the cheese or make it more "chocolate cheesecakey" by using cream cheese.

fish finger "fantasia" sandwich

2005-03-23T12:21:00.000-05:00

J has been lowering the bar with this little number recently:

fish fingers, baked according to package instructions
cheese, preferably sharp cheddar
bread, preferably wheat (J likes it untoasted, I am more of a toaster)
generous amounts of mayo, preferably Kewpie
lime pickle or mango pickle or marmite or other hot/spicy condiment

Assemble sandwich (J likes perfect planar symmetry, I like chaos and large-scale heterogeneity).

baked potatoes

2005-03-16T20:08:00.000-05:00

Here's tonight's main course. Sure wasn't rocket science, but it sure was good!

Put large russets into the oven at 400 F for about an hour; check for doneness with a fork. Eat with butter, sour cream, grated cheese, salt, pepper, olive oil, or etc., and add a green vegetable (and maybe some leftovers) for balance.

soup with white beans and kale

2005-03-14T22:09:00.000-05:00

The festival of beans continues. This is from the article on the "subsistence diet" in Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything and is credited to Daniel Boulod. I couldn't believe how good this was. Of course, I was famished and in need of comfort after supply teaching grade 1 gym (!) and grade 4 homeroom today. I had left a pound of white kidneys out to soak almost 24 hours earlier.

cut up and fry off a few strips of bacon in a soup pot
chop a large onion and sweat in the bacon and bacon fat
add one or two cloves of garlic minced, stir, then add 8 cups of light chicken stock and the presoaked beans
bring to a boil and simmer for about 45 minutes until the beans are tender
add a pound of chopped kale or Swiss chard (ribs removed), S&P (and some nutmeg). cook for another 15 minutes

Serve topped with a cheese crouton (thin slice of good bread—O Sullivan Street filone, how I long for thee—spread with ricotta or fresh goat's milk cheese and sprinked with grated parmesan and pepper then broil). Very, very satisfying.

fish stew

2005-03-14T21:39:00.000-05:00

I wanted to make bouillabaise the other day, but couldn't get my hands on the fish heads, racks and/or whitebait or other small fish to make the base, so I went with a sort of bouillabaise-inspired veggie potage with poached fish. It was pretty good—isn't everything when you slather on the aioli?—but didn't have the depth or (ahem) mouth-feel of the real thing.

sweat chopped onion, celery and fennel bulb in olive oil
add minced garlic and, after about a minute, canned chopped tomato
add water to cover, bay leaf, a big piece of orange peel, (some saffron), S&P
simmer for 30–40 minutes then adjust seasoning with S&P and lemon juice (Add a splash of Pernod, pastis, ouzo, sambucca,... you get the idea). Fish out the bay leaf and orange peel and then mash or blend the rest. Immersion blender, I love you. Adjust the body with more water. Everything up to this point could be done "before the show", even frozen.
cook some big chunks of potato is this soup.
20 minutes before you want to eat and when the potatoes are almost tender, throw some big hunks of fish in to poach. I used cut up fillets of monkfish, cod and red snapper, allowing about 300 g per person. These fish are firm and mild flavoured; I wouldn't use salmon here, for instance, because it would fall apart and overpower the other flavours.

You eat this with slices of baguette brushed with olive oil and toasted in a hot oven and garlic mayonaise: mayo + about 1/8 tsp of garlic puree per tablespoon of mayo, (a few strands of saffron), S&P.

chili

2005-03-10T21:05:00.000-05:00

Again inspired by Serious Pig, I tried a Texas-style meat-only chili, adapted from Thorne's simple recipe to:

a 1.5 lb flank steak (I wanted to go even cheaper and nastier, but it's a long story) cut into smallish pieces
about 2/3 lb bacon, cut into smallish pieces
1 large-ish onion
3 tbsp chili powder
salt and hot pepper flakes?

I seared the meat and bacon until it was cooked all over the outside, and then some. I added the chili powder and onion and cooked it until the onions got translucent. I added some salt and a pinch of hot pepper flakes and enough water to cover it. I simmered it (covered) in a 250 F oven for a couple hours (the meat got super-tender). Then I roughed it up a bit (to make the meat fall apart) on the stove and reduced it down a bit (and added more salt to taste).

Delicious with cornbread and beer! Thorne suggests boiling beans separately and then mixing them when you serve. The chili is so rich, it can be the minority ingredient in your meal. When we eat leftovers we will use it as the filling for Sloppy Joes.

It warms you up, gives you indigestion, and makes you feel like you live in a Texas prison; I love it!

baked beans

2005-03-08T06:15:00.000-05:00

I have long had a fantasy that I would be a bean baker. After PMC (bless him) gave me a copy of Thorne's Serious Pig, my fantasy had a chance of becoming a reality.

Of course, despite the fact that Thorne's recipe had only five ingredients and three steps, I felt that—in the spirit of F,NRS—I had to simplify. After all, Thorne recommends pre-soaking the beans, but then mentions that he finds no evidence that it helps. He also requires par-boiling, but he does it in the bean-soak water, and then uses that bean-soak/par-boil water in the bean pot, so I can't see any reason for doing it in advance of the main bake. Of course my objection is a theoretical one (you ain't throwing off the par-boiling water, so you ain't getting rid of anything, and if it is just boiling them, well they can just boil in the oven, dammit).

Well, I was wrong and a disaster ensued. Will post again when I get a recipe that works.

ants on a log

2005-03-07T13:46:00.000-05:00

Ben recently taught me how to make this excellent snack and now he can teach you in this HUGE video clip (18M, but worth the wait for fans of Ben). You may want to test the waters with the compressed version. Raisins are to ants as celery is to a log, but what about the pb?

B: ... the peanut butter is like the thing who sticks, who's sticky in the tree.
G: The bark?
B: Y'know, the cire...the sear...the seal.
G: The seal?
B: No, it's... I don't know the word, but can I taste this one?...

Growing up in maple syrup country, he's probably talking about sève or sap, because I don't think he's ever heard of résine. Never let language get in the way of enjoying a snack.

oven-candied tomatoes

2005-02-25T10:09:00.000-05:00

Lynne Rossetto Kasper's The Italian Country Table is full of good, simple food like these tomatoes, which the author's source is quoted as calling "money in the bank" in mid-winter. The idea is to simulate the effect of several hours in a cooling bread oven on these babies. Ever go to a farmers' market and see those beautiful, ripe plum tomatoes and wish you had an excuse for picking up a bushel? Now you do.

Cut the tomatoes in half if they're Italian Plum or into chunks about that size for other varieties.
Place skin side down in a roasting pan, sprinkle with a bit of salt and drizzle good olive oil over the lot. Throw a few crushed whole garlic cloves and some bay leaves into the pan it you have them.
Put pan in a 450 degree oven (what is with us and that temperature?!) and decrease the temperature by 50 degrees every half hour until you reach 200-250 and the tomatoes look a bit schrivelled and brown around the edges.
Pour tomatoes, oil and all into a clean jar or whatever. Probably keeps in the fridge for a week or two, put you'll never have them around that long. They freeze very well (with the oil) and keep frozen for, oh, at least eight months.

These are delicious on pasta, with poached or grilled fish, grilled pork chops, fried polenta, on toast,... Recently I layered these, chunks of fresh goat's milk cheese and pitted, coarsely chopped kalamata olives and some dried oregano and pepper in a little ceramic pot and served it as a first course with crusty bread and roasted garlic (slice off the top of the bulb, drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper, wrap in Al foil and roast at 375 for 1 hour). It was insane!!

salmon and vegetables

2005-02-24T20:17:00.000-05:00

Salmon, which is a gloriously fatty fish, takes well to the same treatment as those chicken thighs in "chicken and vegetables".

Rub salmon fillets with olive oil, lay in a sheet pan (roasting pan, big cast iron frypan or what have you) and sprinkle generously with salt and pepper. I allow about 200 g of fish per person, but of course we really like our fish around here. Skin on or off, doesn't matter; this treatment does nothing for the skin (you need pan frying for that).
Nestled in the pan are "the vegetables", ie. anything that will be cooked to your satisfaction in the same time as the fish. See below.
Fire this into a blazing hot oven (say, 450) for about 15 minutes.
Very good with a simple yoghurt sauce: good, thick plain yoghurt, salt, pepper and optionally some ground roasted cumin (this is extremely good) and lemon zest.

I pull the fish out when it's two-thirds done; residual heat does the rest in the five minutes it takes to get things on plates and get kids to the table. "Done" for me would probably be sent back by 1 in 3 customers in a restaurant, although these same people readily eat salmon raw in sushi. Human folly!

As for the vegetables, tonight we had oven-candied tomatoes I still had in the freezer from last summer, thinly sliced red onions and kalamata olives. The onions had time to get soft and a bit brown here and there. I learned to do salmon this way from The Naked Chef, where he used blanched green beans, cherry tomatoes, dry cured olives, torn tender herbs (like basil) and anchovy fillets.

Ideas to try...soon:

sliced potato (1/8") and onion with some thyme
zuccini and red pepper strips
baby beets?

Huck Finn

2005-02-22T17:46:00.000-05:00

On page two (2!) of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck expresses two of my feelings about food, one about its preparation and one about the urgency of its consumption:

When you got to the table you couldn't go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn't really anything the matter with them, — that is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.

chicken and vegetables

2005-02-21T10:49:00.000-05:00

This one-step, one-pan, three-ingredient wonder is the only reason J and I survived the last two winters. Each time we made it, it got simpler till we got it down to this:

chicken thighs (these are so much better than chicken breasts, and they are sold dirt-cheap, even if you buy the schmancy organic ones)
potatoes, cut into pieces
carrots or beets or parsnips or turnips or similar, or not
olive oil, salt, garlic, thyme?

Mix everything in a metal pan so it is coated with olive oil (don't skimp on the oil). Salt the chicken (and rub with garlic and thyme if you are really feeling like going to town). Roast (in that metal pan) at 450 (or hotter; we usually do 500, but PMC thinks our oven is mis-calibrated) for 40 minutes or so, turning the veggies once or twice.

Oh hot, sweet, and crispy quasi-deep-fried, chicken-fat-flavored root vegetables!

If you want a diversified diet (huh?), add, partway through:

brussel sprouts (which come out great but only need 25-30 minutes, not the full 40), or
kale (which becomes crispy and slightly burned in about 15 minutes)

99 cent cauliflower

2005-02-20T00:10:00.000-05:00

I sometimes wonder how supermarkets ever make any money on fresh produce. Maybe they don't. Maybe that whole department is a loss leader so people will come and buy breakfast cereals and Pop Tarts. In winter in Quebec, a cauliflower sells for about 3 bucks, but this week I picked one up for 99 cents because it had developed some brown spots (heavens!). The store can't just trim that stuff off because customers wonder just what unwholesome fungus must have been removed, but I can and did. The rest of it made this:

Chop coarsely and sweat one large cooking onion in about 4 tbsp of butter
Add chopped cauliflower and light chicken broth (I usually use Campbell's but with two cans of water to one of broth) to cover. Simmer until cauliflower is tender.
Blend until smooth (an immersion or dipstick blender makes this very easy).
Adjust body by adding milk. Season to taste (s&p and maybe some nutmeg).

You can stop here and still enjoy this soup; the kids like it this way. A lot of recipes call for this plus grated old cheddar. The tanginess of the cheese works. But just try this base plus chopped fresh coriander. It's unbelievably good. I make a lot of soups along the lines of this one. It's pretty algorithmic:

potato and leek
carrot (add minced ginger and garlic to the onions and some white wine to the stock; hold the milk; hold the nutmeg but add curry powder and lemon juice to seasonings)
parsnip (schmancy option: puree a boiled beet and swirl in some of this for that marbling effect)
potato and watercress/spinach (blanche cress—abundant unsalted boiling water for a couple of minutes followed by shocking in cold water and squeeze out—to reduce bitterness; cook potato in half stock, half milk then blend with cress)

lentils and spinach

2005-02-19T23:25:00.000-05:00

There are about five dishes in my "repertoire" that date from the two years I spent as a vegetarian, a period which sadly coincided with my first trip to France (and ML's only one to date). When I think that I went out of my way to eat...Tibetan veggie! in Paris and that ML not only joined me but agreed to marry me a year later despite my obvious perversion, I see that the gods have truly smiled upon me. I've since rejoined the ranks of the omnivorous and made up for lost time in the Paris bistros, n'est-ce pas? When we tire of the blood pudding and great joints of mutton, like last Thursday night, I still like to make up a batch of L'n'S.

Slice a large cooking onion and fry in olive oil in a pot over medium-high heat until edges start to brown. Add a heaping cup of dry lentils (I like the small DuPuy kind), washed and picked over for stones. Add 2–3 cups of water, bring to a boil and simmer covered for 20–30 minutes until lentils are quite tender. Check once in a while and add water if needed. You want about 1/2 cup of "pot liquor" to remain when the lentils are fully cooked. Add about 10 oz. of chopped fresh spinach (not baby spinach), 1 tsp. ground cumin and 1/2 to 1 tsp of salt. Stir, cover and rest off heat for about 10 minutes. Taste and add more salt (1/4 tsp. at a time) until you think, "Damn! Lentils and spinach, where have you been all my life?" Eat with rice.

By the way, the kids love this. Did I mention this was lentils and spinach?

hot toddy

2005-02-18T06:05:00.000-05:00

any brown alcohol (bourbon, scotch, rum, maybe even cognac?)
any sugar (white, brown, simple syrup, molasses, maple syrup)
boiling water

Put a shot of the alcohol and a pony of the sugar into a teacup and fill with boiling water. Stir.

Add butter to the rum/brown-sugar one to make a hot buttered rum (yes, it is as nasty as it sounds). Add lemon to a whiskey one to make my favorite "cold remedy".

I can't find a hot toddy I don't like. Last night I "invented" the Yankee Toddy: maple syrup, Wild Turkey, and boiling water.

pancakes

2005-02-17T20:10:00.000-05:00

ML was out of town this evening, so I scored major points with the boys by serving flapjacks for supper. ("Breakfast foods" in the evening are a hard sell with her, although we now agree that omlettes are good anytime.) Pancake mix is evil; commit this recipe to memory:

1 cup flour
3 tbsp sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup milk
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla if you've got it
1 tbsp melted butter

(Note the 1 cup—1 cup—1 egg symmetry.) Mix the dry. Add the wet and mix just until combined (the batter will be lumpy). Heat a pan* over medium heat until a drop of water beads and skates around a bit (maybe wipe the pan with some oil or bacon fat first). Spoon batter into pan and cook until bubbles form on top. Flip and finishing cooking: it springs back when poked and feels like an earlobe. This makes just enough for our two adults and two young kids. If you're having trouble memorizing the recipe, try making pancakes every week, sometimes more than once in a given week, for several years. Leaves a lasting impression.

From time to time, I embellish on this recipe. Tonight I added a couple tablespoons of wheat germ—good for the body—and a quarter cup of chocolate chips—good for the soul. Chopped dried fruit, frozen wild blueberries, chunks of apple and cinnamon, ground hazelnuts, you name it. Be a hero.

I once had sourdough pancakes and I like the idea of perpetuating that starter, but for now I just love the chemical levener. I also love buckwheat pancakes with molasses, but it would be a complete waste of time making them for this gang without a backup meal at the ready. The best thing would be to attend the "Festival de la Galette de Sarrasin" (Buckwheat pancake festival) held in Louiseville (a short drive from TR) every October and hope the group will suddenly discover the charms of buckwheat. Did you know that buckwheat was a grass, not a grain. Oh tay!

*I use a 12" (30cm) Farberware Millenium nonstick. Great heavy pan with a riveted, metal handle that cools quickly. If you're ordering one, also pick up a lid that fits (I've been using an inverted metal prep bowl).

beef stew

2005-02-17T18:29:00.000-05:00

To test out the electric crock pot in the house we are renting, I did the following yesterday. This recipe was completely made-up from nothing.

two large potatoes, chopped a bit
three medium onions, chopped a bit
a bag of mini carrots
a few strips of thick bacon, cut into chunks
a cheap and nasty beef shin with a bit of meat on it
cheap red wine, salt, pepper, bay leaf

Put the beef (with bone) at the bottom of the crock pot, then the vegetables, and cover with a 50/50 wine/water mix. Add bay leaf and plenty of salt and pepper. Leave on "high" setting for 6 hours (ie, go to work, work, and come home). Serve.

The meat, potatoes, and carrots came out really well, particularly the meat, which came out like it does in Boeuf Bourguignon. However, the liquid comes out very thin, and I could not bring myself to add cornstarch (as many on-line recipes suggest). I think when I eat the leftovers, I might make a roux with the fat, and turn the liquid into a thin gravy. Will that work?

clam chowder

2005-02-16T19:34:00.000-05:00

I tried to convert PMC's simple oral description of chowder into the most basic possible recipe.

few strips bacon, cut into clam-sized bits
few medium onions, chopped to the size of clams
few large potatoes, cubed the size of clams
two cans clams
half-and-half cream
salt, pepper, bay leaf

Fry the bacon low until much of the fat has been rendered. Add onions and cook until they are translucent. Add potatoes, clams and clam liquid, a bay leaf, enough water to barely cover everything, and enough salt and pepper to make the water taste "good". Simmer until the potatoes are just cooked. Add enough cream to make it creamy and let it sit for ages (a day, in my case). Re-heat, check salt level (salty is good), and serve. Don't let it boil once the cream has been added.

The result was a good, simple, sweet (from the onions, I guess) chowder. One note: I bought high-end canned clams.