oven-candied tomatoes

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 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

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

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

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.