Mrs. Wright's Main Courses

As promised, here are some more of Mrs. Wright's recipe cards. I kept only a tiny handful that fall into the category of main courses - a pot roast, some meatballs, a chicken dish, and a thoroughly gross sounding recipe for tuna on biscuits.

Pot roast might be my favorite. This is clearly the recipe of someone who knows how to cook, and just needs an outline. There is no cooking time, there are no instructions. It's really just fling a piece of meat in the crockpot with a package of onion soup mix and bob's your uncle.

Buzzy's meatballs are similarly vague - do you sauté the meatballs, or cook them in the gravy? I guess you sauté them, because the gravy calls for "fat from the meat". And what makes them Swedish anyway? It's not like they've got lingonberry jam on the side. Like the pot roast recipe, this one's gonna be useless to anyone doesn't know how to cook. (And who is Buzzy??)

I would guess that the Chicken Oahu is Hawaiian in that it has pineapple. Interestingly, though, it's the sauce that's called "Oahu sauce" - and the pineapple isn't in the sauce. In short - you brown some chicken, cook it in the crockpot on a bed of stuffing cubes and pineapple, and then spoon an odd sauce over the top. The sauce is celery, onion and green pepper, simmered in a bit of water, and enriched with sour cream and cream of mushroom soup, and seasoned with a bit of soy sauce. To be honest, the whole thing sounds nasty.

But Tuna on Biscuits takes the cake for nasty. Hot tuna, in a milky sauce, with hard boiled eggs. Poor biscuits. What did they do to deserve that?

All About Jello

For years, really, like (counts on fingers) 18 years, I have had an envelope with a little stack of recipe cards in it. I move it from time to time, not wanting to throw the cards out, but not ready to *do* something with them. You see, they were part of a dumpster-dive haul when the lady across the street from my mom got moved to assisted living, and her house was emptied and sold and torn down and replaced with a shitty McMansion. Lots of the cards are in Marian's handwriting, but some aren't and one's typed and finally today I got them scanned.

Five are for jello or jello "salads". I mean, when was the last time you had jello salad or gelatinized anything?

First up - Cucumber Jello salad. It's definitely in the "not a dessert" category, what with the onion. I'm going to guess that you have to chill it again after you stir in the sour cream and cucumber "cut in tiny chunks"?

Next, another "not a dessert" jello: Tomato jello. Raspberry jello and a can of stewed tomatoes. I mean, I think that isn't a dessert - but what the hell is it? A side dish for a roast chicken? I wonder who Louise Reiss is (or more likely, was).

Moving on, we have two things called "salad" but both skew more towards dessert for me.

Jan's Salad is black cherry jello with fruit cocktail and frozen rasperries - with the option of chopped pecans or chopped apples.

And Fruited Nectar Salad mostly kind of sounds dessert-y - with ingredients like apricot nectar, mandarin oranges, seedless grapes and chopped apple. EXCEPT she's got a note to serve it with mayonnaise...so maybe it's not dessert after all.

Finally, we have Dessert. Just that - the card is titled dessert, the name of the recipe is dessert. It sounds a little like a lemon mousse - an egg yolk custard stirred into orange jello and then folded into beaten egg whites. Honestly, it doesn't sound too terrible. If I had some orange jello in the house, I might make it.

Still to come: meat, condiments & dressings, non-jello desserts.

I Have Solved the Buttermilk Problem

You know how you buy a QUART of buttermilk because a recipe needs a little bit, and then the quart sits there in the fridge until it's over the hill and you throw it out, thereby wasting most of the quart? (And then you feel terrible because food waste is actually an enormous problem - the USDA estimates that more than 30% of the food supply gets wasted.)

I have figured it out, or - to be specific - I have found a way to buy one quart of buttermilk and use it all up in two recipes: Whole Grain Pancakes for breakfast, and Buttermilk Brined Chicken for dinner.

The recipe for the pancakes is something I adapted from the New York Times site; I changed up the flours a bit to reduce the carbohydrate load. They are very tender, and complexly flavored. We make up the whole batch and then I freeze what we don't eat for breakfast. They reheat well, in the toaster. In lieu of syrup, I usually blitz a handful of frozen strawberries in the microwave; they kind of fall apart and become a good syrup analog. Feel free to use maple syrup, if that's how you roll.

WHOLE GRAIN PANCAKES (makes about 14 good sized pancakes)

1 cup spelt (or whole wheat flour) 

3/4 cup almond meal 

1/2 cup cornmeal 

1/4 cup rolled oats 

2 teaspoons baking powder 

1 teaspoon kosher salt 

1/2 teaspoon baking soda 

2 1/4 cups buttermilk 

3 eggs 

1/4 cup melted butter

 In a large bowl, mix together spelt, almond meal, cornmeal, oats, baking powder, salt and baking soda. In a medium bowl, mix together buttermilk, eggs, and melted butter. Add the egg mixture to the flour mixture and stir gently until smooth. 

Heat up a griddle over medium heat. Add a little butter to the pan and let it melt. Using a 1/3 cup measure, pour batter onto griddle - make as many as you can at a time. Leave space for pancakes to spread. 

Cook until bubbles form and start to burst, about 3 minutes. Flip and cook until golden on the other side, 2 to 3 minutes. Transfer to a plate as they finish, and serve immediately with butter and maple syrup or melted strawberries. 

Repeat with the remaining batter, until done. 

If you are going to freeze the excess, cool them on a baking rack. When cool, separate with waxed paper or parchment, and stack them into an airtight freezer container.

Once you've finished breakfast, you're going to want to brine the chicken. Back up. You've been roasting chicken for years. You shove a lemon or some herbs in the cavity, fling the bird in a cast iron skillet in a hot oven, and bob's your uncle. Roast chicken gets A LOT of ink, but it's not hard; it's just roast chicken. But. Brining your chicken in buttermilk? It's kind of magic. You think there's nothing new under the sun, and then you decide to make the quart of buttermilk come out even, and yeah. Do it.

Here's the thing: Samin Nosrat tells you to use 2 cups of buttermilk for one chicken in a gallon ziplock bag. BUT 1 3/4 cups is fine too, and 1 3/4 cups is what you have left after you're done making pancakes. Nosrat's recipe is divine and it's on her website. But you should get her book - Salt Fat Acid Heat - because it's good and useful and informative.

And there you have it. Two recipes, one quart of buttermilk, no science experiments with the leftover lurking in the back of the refrigerator.

Cherry Cherry Cherry

The first time I ever encountered a clafoutis was in 8th grade. My friend Debbie and I made two dishes for an 8th grade French class cooking competition - an apple clafoutis, and an onion soup, both from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. We made the onion soup at my house, and the clafoutis at hers - but I had to have my mother supply the rum because her house was a dry house. We also began with a spectacular fail: the pie plate exploded. The recipe called for a portion of the batter to be poured into a glass pie plate and baked in the oven for a few minutes to set it up, so the fruit wouldn't sink to the very bottom of the pan. We thought we'd be clever and set up the batter on the stovetop. Um, yeah - that pie plate got hot, shattered into pieces, and shot across the kitchen. 

 Funnily enough, I have only ever made apple clafoutis - never cherry, though cherry is allegedly the ur-clafoutis. It may be because all the cherry clafoutis recipes I ever see call for sweet cherries - and if you've ever had a cherry pie made from sweet cherries you know that they are curiously insipid baked. 

 This, right now, is sour cherry season - a fleeting moment to seize upon - and yesterday our farmer's market was open and bustling. I brought home a quart of sour cherries, thinking I'd make a pie. But something set me looking in a different direction, and happily a sour cherry clafoutis recipe popped up. Of course, I adapted it; I am pretty incapable of following a recipe to a T. The result was delightful. 

[Rabbit hole: Wander around the house wondering what happened to my copy of The Auberge Of The Flowering Hearth. Light upon the 1984 Larousse gastronomique and look up clafoutis: "a dessert from the Limousin region of France, consisting of black cherries arranged in a buttered dish and covered with fairly thick pancake batter." Dive deeper, into the 1961 first American edition of the Larousse gastronomique: "Clafouti: A homely preparation in Limousin, this is a kind of fruit pastry or thick fruit pancake, made usually with black cherries." Wonder idly why the earlier Larousse doesn't use the final S on clafoutis, but the later one does. Feel both ridiculous and smug for owning two different editions of the Larousse. Google cherry clafoutis. Find excellent discursive piece on the Guardian website: "A particular speciality of the Limousin region, where it's traditionally made with the local griottes, or sour morello cherries..." Pat self on back for thinking that sour cherries would make a good clafoutis.]

Sour Cherry Clafoutis (adapted from Beekman 1802)

Ingredients

1 T.  butter

1 qt. sour cherries, pitted

3 large eggs

1/2 cup spelt flour (or use regular AP flour)

1 cup milk

1/2 cup heavy cream

1/4 cup Swerve (or use granulated sugar)

pinch of salt

2 T. demerara sugar

1 T. kirsch or mirabelle (cherry or plum brandy) or 1 T. vanilla extract

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Butter a 9 or 10" pie plate.

Place the cherries in the pie plate. Beat eggs in a large bowl. Add flour, milk, cream, Swerve (or sugar) and salt, and whisk together until well combined. Pour the batter over the cherries. Sprinkle the top with the demerara asugar and bake for 45 minutes, or until set. Let cool slightly on a rack and serve warm. (The clafoutis will fall as it cools.)

Tabbouleh, variant

My mother's stock in trade dish for the annual Labor Day potluck was always tabbouleh. Bulgur, mint, parsley, olive oil and lots of lemon juice.

Yesterday, I needed a side salad to go with some pork chops. I had a little bit of bulgur, a half a can of chickpeas, and a cucumber, so I whacked together a tabbouleh variant. I posted a picture on Instagram, because it was cheerful, and someone asked for the recipe. There wasn't one. So:

Tabbouleh with Chick Peas

• 1/3 cup of dried bulgur
• 2/3 cup boiling water
• 1/2 can of rinsed chickpeas
• handful of cherry tomatoes, halved
• 1/2 a cucumber, chopped
• 1/2 a sweet red pepper, chopped
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• handful of parsley, chopped
• handful of mint, chopped
• salt
• pepper
• 2-3 T. olive oil
• 2-3 T. white wine vinegar

Put bulgur in a bowl, add boiling water and cover. Let stand for 10-15 minutes. Drain if necessary, and return to bowl. Add all other ingredients, and mix. Taste and season as necessary. If you want to be fancy, chop the onion and soak it in the vinegar while the bulgur is steeping. That'll take some of the bite out of the onion. This is enough for four people as a side dish.

This Is Just To Say...

There are plum cakes other than the plum cake.

Yes, the New York Times published ... yet again ... the plum torte recipe. It's divine. If you haven't ever made it, it's spectacularly easy and absolutely perfect. Tender, buttery, sweetly spicy, laced with tart plum bombs.

But right around the time that plums were coming in, my friend Erika posted a peach/blackberry cake on Instagram:

Bet you can't bake just one. Roden's Plum Tart w/peaches and blackberries instead. #baking

A photo posted by emdbarrie (@emdbarrie) on Aug 22, 2016 at 5:48pm PDT

I was intrigued by the reference to Plum Tart and Roden, so I asked and sure enough, it's a Claudia Roden recipe for a plum tart, even though Erika used peaches and blackberries.

At first glance, the recipes seem similar - a dough with some fruit on top. But the Roden version was different enough that I needed to try it - and it turns out to be more like cookie/pastry/cake under the plums, not sweet tender airy cake.

It is delightful! And even if you are committed to THE plum torte, it's worth trying this one.

Besides, who doesn't love a recipe header that says "It is very simple and easy to make, with pure fresh flavors and a marvelous biscuity base. You must try it. We all love it."

Swetschkenkuchen / Plum Tart
Adapted from Claudia Roden's The Book Of Jewish Food

Ingredients

2/3 cup (125 g) sugar (divided)
1 1/4 cups (175 g) flour
1/2 t. baking powder
3 oz (75 g) cold butter
1 small egg, lightly beaten
1 tablespoon Mirabelle eau de vie (or brandy)
1 1/2 pounds (750 g) Italian prune plums, halved and pitted

Preparation

Preheat oven to 375° F.
Mix half of the sugar with the flour and baking powder.
Cut the cold butter into cubes and rub into the flour and sugar mixture.
Stir in the egg and Mirabelle and mix with your hands until it forms a dough.
If the dough is too sticky, add a little flour.
Press the dough into the bottom of a round 9" tart pan - and up the sides a bit - make a 1/4" lip if you can (you don't need to go all the way to the top).
Arrange the fruit, cut side up and tightly packed, on top of the pastry. Sprinkle the remaining 1/3 cup sugar over the plums.
Bake at 375° F for about 50 minutes or until crust turns golden brown and the plums are soft and juicy.
Serve hot or warm or cold, sprinkled with confectioners sugar. Whipped cream would not be amiss.

In Which California Avocados Meet Moroccan Clementines

In two of the excellent meals we had in San Francisco last week, I ordered an avocado/citrus salad.

At Gialina, it was "blood orange & avocado salad with farro, fennel & goat gouda". [Gialina is low key and serves phenomenally fabulous pizza with a magical perfect crust.] A few days later, it was "california avocado salad with fennel, celery, citrus vinaigrette", at the Presidio Social Club. [PSC is a nostalgic throwback, like an upscale yacht club with great food and a daily Manhattan.] I loved both salads. The avocado provided lushness, the citrus made them sparkle.

Then, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway to Santa Cruz, we found a guy selling fruit out of the back of a truck in a bug out overlooking the ocean. He had boxes of tiny, jewel-toned avocados, each about the size of a kiwi and five for a dollar. Twenty cents for an avocado! I bought five even though I wasn't sure what I was going to do with them, and we were flying back to New York at the crack of dawn the next day.

Yes, reader, those avocados came home with me. A few days on the kitchen counter and they ripened up to a nice black. And I diced them, and added celery and clementines (alas, from Morocco, not California), and a splash of oil and vinegar, and yes. It's a great salad.

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Avocado, Celery, Clementine salad

1 stalk of celery
2 clementines
1 ripe Haas avocado
1 T. olive oil
1 T. mild vinegar (I like the Unió Riesling vinegar, but you could use a champagne vinegar or a cider vinegar)
salt & pepper to taste

Finely slice the celery, less than 1/8" thick. (I know: fussy knife work.) Place in bowl. Peel the clementines. Working over the bowl, do your best to filet them - remove all of the flesh from each segment and drop the flesh in the bowl. (Yes: more fussy knife work. You could just cut each segment in half, if you must.) Peel and pit the avocado, and dice into 1/2" chunks. Add to celery and clementine. Add oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, and toss gently with a big spoon. Serve immediately.

Serves two.

Squash Bread #2

I love this bread. It's lovely toasted, it smells a little like Zwieback (which, unhappily, Nabisco discontinued), and it makes me feel virtuous because it's laced with puréed squash. The original recipe includes walnuts, raisins and cranberries and has a long rise in the fridge. I wanted a more versatile loaf, so I leave out all of the nuts & berries, and I start it in the bread machine, but I bake it in the oven.

Yeasted Squash Bread (adapted from Baking With Julia)

Wet stuff

1 egg
1 cup squash purée
2 T. warm water
5 T. butter (at room temperature)

Dry stuff

2 2/3 cups bread flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 t. cinnamon
½ t. freshly grated nutmeg
½ t. salt
2 t. active dry yeast

1) Preheat oven to 350°F and grease a loaf pan.
2) Add ingredients to the bread machine in the order listed - that is, wet stuff at the bottom, dry on top. Set it for "dough" and come back when it beeps.
3) Sprinkle some flour on your countertop, dump the dough out of the bread machine bowl, squish it into a rectangle and fold it into a log. Seam side down, put it in a greased loaf pan. Cover with a damp cloth and let it rise in a warm spot for a couple of hours.
4) Bake until done - about 45 minutes - I usually take it out of the pan after about 30 minutes and put it back on the oven rack for the last 15 minutes.
5) Cool on a rack.

[If you want to do this by hand, you are on your own - but dumping everything in a bowl, mixing it together, and then turning it out to knead sounds about right.]

Squash Bread #1

There are hundreds of dozens of recipes for pumpkin bread on the web. I'm posting this mostly because I finally tweaked one just so, and I want to remember it, damn it. It's good.

Squash Bread (adapted from Simply Recipes)

Dry stuff

1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup spelt
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. ground ginger
1/2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. freshly ground nutmeg
1/2 t. allspice

Wet stuff

2 eggs
1 cup squash purée*
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup melted coconut oil

Other stuff

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1) Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a normal sized loaf pan.
2) Mix all the dry ingredients together in a good sized bowl.
3) Crack the eggs into a medium bowl, and beat them up with a fork. Or a whisk. Add the squash and the water; stir to mix. Add the melted coconut oil.
4) Add the wet ingredients to the dry, and stir until just combined.
5) Add the walnuts. Oh, fine. Leave them out if you must.
6) Bake in that greased loaf pan until done - about 50 minutes - but check it with a cake tester to make sure it's done in the middle.
7) Cool on a rack for about 10 minutes, then remove from pan to finish cooling.



*I have no interest in eating winter squash, ever. I just don't like it. But I always seem to end up with an acorn squash or three butternuts - they're like the fall version of pass-along zucchini - and I don't like to waste. So I cut them in half, scoop out the seeds, and roast the squash cut side down on a silpat. When it's cool, I scoop the flesh out, buzz it in the food processor, and freeze it in 1 cup portions. It's good for quick breads or muffins, it gives body to a batch of chili, and I use it in a streamlined version of a pumpkin yeast bread from Baking With Julia (in which I leave out all of the crunchy bits and which I think I'll post later in the week).

End of Summer Vacation Tomato Pasta

I'm still digging out from weeks old emails and putting away the hiking boots and sorting through the many many pictures we took (on one camera and three phones), so the vacation re-cap is yet to come.

The day we got home, there was - predictably - nothing to eat. Except that the pantry had dry pasta, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper, and the fridge had a tired but serviceable lemon, and the garden had parsley and basil and tomatoes! And so, dinner was had: Jack Denton Scott's Spaghettini Estivi.

This is a pasta dish that I grew up with - my mother had ripped it out of the New York Times and pasted it into her black notebook of recipes, with a note that it was from The Complete Book of Pasta. We used to eat it on summer Sundays, when we'd been at the beach all day (and weren't having a grilled London broil and some fresh delicious buttered corn). It's so easy - chop up a bunch of tomatoes, season them, and toss the uncooked sauce with hot pasta. If we're feeling fancy, we'll do a caprese version of the same - adding cubed mozzarella and subbing balsamic vinegar for the lemon juice. In fact, we eat that version more than this one because there's a guy at the farmers market with fabulous fresh mozz, so when we eat this more spare, lemon juice version it feels revelatory each time we decide to have it.

And even though it's called spaghettini estivi, I usually use a short pasta like rotini or orecchiette because I like eating it with soup spoon. But I still call it spaghettini estivi, just because.

You probably have all of the ingredients already, so try it.

Spaghettini Estivi, adapted from Jack Denton Scott

2 lbs ripe tomatoes, chopped
a few sprigs of flat Italian parsley, chopped
a good handful of fresh basil leaves, chopped
Juice of 1 lemon
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 garlic clove, finely minced
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1 lb spaghettini (or whatever shape you want)
Grated parmesan cheese or asiago cheese (optional)

1) In a big bowl, mix together the tomatoes, parsley, basil, lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper. Do not cook! Put it aside.

2) Cook and drain pasta, and add to tomato mixture.

3) Serve, with grated cheese, as desired.

Green Soup, Or What's All This About Yogurt Anyway?

Once upon a time, I talked incessantly about my CSA. We still belong, and I still love it. I love that it challenges us to prepare and cook and eat vegetables that we'd otherwise pass up at the farmers market. I love knowing that our food comes from not too far away, from people who care deeply about their role in making the world a better place. And every year, they try growing things that they'd never grown before. This year, it was tomatillos. And I had no idea what to do with them.

Sure, I could have made a salsa, but something sent me to the cookbooks, and something impelled me to pull Annie Somerville's Fields of Greens off the shelf. And there I found a recipe for the unprepossessing sounding "Green Corn Soup". I had the corn, I had the tomatillos, I had an approximation of most of the other ingredients, and so I set to work.

I suppose I could have fed it to my husband and child, but instead I brought it to work, along with a bunch of cilantro, and a container of plain yogurt, and for three days running I had a glorious, virtuous, delightful soup for lunch. Hot, as a nod to fall, but garnished with fresh cilantro and creamy cold yogurt, because summer's still hanging on, it was just what I needed to be eating.

Speaking of yogurt, what is going on with the yogurt explosion? It used to be that there was yogurt, silky, low fat, not especially dense. You know, just yogurt. And then came the "Greek" yogurts, like Fage (which is now based in Luxembourg) and (moldy yucky Greek-style US made) Chobani. And if you're paying attention, more and more countries are getting into the yogurt game. I've seen Australian yoghurt (note the H spelling) and some Icelandic yogurt ended up in my fridge not long ago. In point of fact, Smari, the "Icelandic" yogurt, is actually made in the United States, from milk from cows from Wisconsin, by bosses in California. Whatev. I like their plain yogurt. It's thick, to be sure, but it stood up to being plopped into a bowl of hot soup. And it has an appealing gaminess about it - it's not a bland, boring yogurt. [I didn't much care for the Smari fruit flavors, but I nearly never buy anything but plain yogurt anyway. You want fruit flavored yogurt? Stir in some jam or a cut up peach.]

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Corn and Tomatillo Soup (adapted from Fields of Greens)

1 T. olive oil
1 onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, chopped
2 ears of corn, kernels cut off the cobs
salt
pepper
3 cups chicken stock
1 pint tomatillos, husked and halved
1 poblano pepper, seeded and chopped
fresh cilantro leaves (for garnish)
yogurt or sour cream (for garnish)

Heat the olive oil in a soup pot. Add the onion and saute until soft and translucent. Add the garlic and corn, and cook until the corn is heated through. Season with salt and pepper, and add 2 cups of chicken stock, cover the pot, and simmer until the corn is tender (about 20 minutes). Add the tomatillos and poblano, and cook until the tomatillos are falling apart tender (5 to 10 minutes). Puree the soup with a blender (a hand blender in the pot would be perfect). Add chicken stock if the soup seems too thin. Adjust seasoning as necessary.

Serve hot, garnished with a handful of fresh cilantro and a blob of yogurt or sour cream.

Makes enough for three lunch sized portions.

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Disclosure: The publicist for the Icelandic yogurt had some dropped off at my house. My opinions are my own, and no one paid me to talk yogurt.

A Near Perfect Side Dish

A close reading of the New York Times magazine a couple of weeks ago resulted in the perfect side dish for our Christmas dinner. In fact, it might be the perfect side dish for nearly any roast meat meal, in that it seems like a starch, but it's really mostly vegetables. I'd heard of soubise, but because I'm not Julie Powell and I haven't cooked absolutely everything in Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, I had never tried it. Big mistake. We will have to make up for lost time by putting on the menu several times a year.

Essentially, it's cooked onions thickened with a bit of rice. Or, a reverse risotto - a little rice with a lot of seasoning. And it's really really good, not to mention easy, and forgiving. You could probably even leave the cheese out if you felt that was necessary. What's not to like?

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Soubise
Adapted from Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"

1/2 cup rice, (arborio or carnaroli)
4 quarts water
1 1/2 T. salt (to salt the water)
4 T. butter (one-half stick)
2 pounds yellow onions
1/8 t. pepper (a few good grinds)
1/2 t. salt
1/4 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup grated Gruyère cheese (or swiss)
2 T. softened butter
1 T. minced parsley.

1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees and put 4 quarts of water on to boil.

2. Meanwhile peel your onions, cut them in half the long way, and slice thinly (into half rings).

3. Heat the 4 T. of butter in a three or four quart flameproof lidded casserole. When the butter is melted and foaming, stir in the onions.

4. Add the 1 1/2 T. salt to your vigorously boiling water, pour in the rice and boil for exactly five minutes. Drain immediately.

5. Stir the drained rice into the butter-coated onions, add the 1/2 teaspoon salt and the pepper. Cover and cook in the oven for one hour, stirring occasionally if you must. The rice and onions should become very tender and will smell heavenly. Taste and re-season if necessary. (Pause here if you're making a big meal and have lots of other things to cook - the onions will hold nicely. Reheat before the finishing additions.)

6. Just before serving, stir in the cream and cheese and then the softened butter. Taste again for seasonings and turn into a (hot covered vegetable) dish. Serve with sprinkled parsley.

Cakes and Pies

I was puttering around in the kitchen the other day, trying to figure out what to have for dinner that would use up lots of things in the fridge. It being high CSA season, we're long on vegetables, and there was some swiss chard that was calling out "eat me"! Yotam Ottolenghi gave me the jumping off point, with a recipe for some little swiss chard cakes. I thought they wouldn't be enough for dinner, but there was a tart shell in the freezer, some mozzarella going begging and a pile of tomatoes on the counter, and thus was born a tomato pie. So when the child came into the kitchen and whined "what's for dinner?", I answered her with a straight face "cakes and pies". I do amuse myself. She was not amused when it came time to sit down at the table and it was all vegetables and cheese.

Do you know Ottolenghi? I don't mean him personally, like you have him over for drinks, but do you know his cookbooks, or his newspaper column? His recipes are mostly vegetarian, and veer towards the eccentric, but I've made two things recently that were good. First was some baked orzo with mozzarella and eggplant that I found over on Smitten Kitchen - it was easy, especially insofar as the orzo went into the oven uncooked, we like that one less step. Also, it made a lot - so I had nice leftovers for lunch. Second were these swiss chard cakes - bound with egg, fried to crunchy goodness. I skipped the yogurt sorrel sauce he suggested because I had neither sorrel nor yogurt (does anyone ever have sorrel just lying around?). No matter, they were nice on their own.

Incidentally, the girl ate the swiss chard cakes, and rejected the tomato pie. Go figure. Then again, she'd probably eat a fried shoe, if there was enough ketchup alongside.

Swiss Chard Cakes (adapted from Ottolenghi)

a bunch of Swiss chard
2 T. pignoli (pine nuts)
1 T. olive oil
4 ounces cheese, coarsely grated (see note)
1 egg (or 2)
1/2 cup breadcrumbs
1/4 cup cooked corn off the cob (optional)
½ t. salt
Freshly ground black pepper
vegetable oil & olive oil, for frying

Clean and stem the swiss chard. Boil a big pot of water, and blanch the leaves for about three minutes. Drain and leave to cool down slightly. Once cool enough to handle, squeeze as much water from the leaves as you can (work in golf ball sized lumps) - then roughly chop the leaves, and put in a bowl.

In a small pan, fry the pignoli in the tablespoon of olive oil for a minute or two, until light brown - don't burn them! Add the nuts and oil to the chard, along with the cheese, egg, breadcrumbs, corn, salt and pepper. You may need to add more crumbs if the mix is very soft and sticky. If it doesn't seem to hold together at all, add another egg - at which point you probably will need some more bread crumbs.

Use a mix of vegetable oil and olive oil, and put a couple of good glugs in a nice frying pan. Heat  the oil until a drop of water sizzles. Shape the mix into little patties about 3/4" thick. Fry these in batches for two minutes a side, until golden brown. Transfer to a plate covered with paper towels, to absorb the oil, and serve warm or at room temperature.

Note: Ottolenghi calls for kashkaval, which I confess that I had never before heard of. And I like cheese. His alternative is mature pecorino. I used gruyere because there was a block turning green in my fridge. Yes, we're fast and easy in the kitchen.

Tomato Pie

1 unbaked 9" tart shell
1 T. minced basil
2 plum tomatoes, sliced
8 ounces fresh mozzarella, cut into smallish chunks
olive oil
salt & pepper

Line the tart shell with foil, and fill with pie weights. Bake at 400F for 10 minutes, remove the foil and weights, and bake for another 10 minutes. Sprinkle basil in the bottom of the tart shell. Arrange sliced tomatoes in one layer. Add salt & pepper to taste. Cover tomatoes with mozzarella. Drizzle with olive oil. Bake for about 20 minutes - the mozzarella will melt together to cover the tomatoes, and will be beginning to brown. Remove from oven, and let cool for a few minutes before slicing and eating. It's like a margarita pizza in a pie crust.

How to invent in the kitchen

I've been remiss. My favorite cookbook of the last year, and I haven't mentioned it. It's the book I bought and wrapped for myself for Christmas last year, and it's called An Everlasting Meal, and more than a cookbook, it's a way of being. I've read it cover to cover a couple of times, and I've dipped into many other times. Really, it's a treatise on how to think about cooking. Almost every recipe looks like a recipe, but really isn't. They're guidelines, suggestions.



Take this: A Vibrant Vegetable Salad. The first ingredient is two cups of cooked vegetables. What kind? Does it matter? Would zucchini work? The onion - any color, or a shallot. The herb - parsley or mint. She specifies red wine vinegar, but if the kind of cooked vegetable doesn't matter, why couldn't the vinegar be sherry, or champagne, or even apple cider? And the nuts - do I need nuts? I don't have any nuts.

It's a sketch, an idea for what could be. I peered into the fridge and pulled out a container of grilled zucchini, and another of grilled green peppers - both leftovers from dinner a couple of nights ago. In the freezer, I found a bag of not-yet-croutons, buttery, garlicky, stale lumps of bread. The garden is awash in herbs of all stripes; I picked some mint. A half of a sweet fresh onion turned up in the crisper drawer. Salt, olive oil, mustard: all staples.

I sliced the onion and splashed it with sherry vinegar, and set it aside to soften. I chopped the zucchini. I rubbed some of the burned skin off of the green pepper and chopped that up too. I chopped up the stale bread and tossed it in a skillet to brown. Minced the mint, added the mustard to the onions, added everything else, saving the now croutons for last. Ta da! An invented salad, almost a main course because of the bread. We eat it alongside grilled steak, and little homegrown tomatoes, cut in half and tossed with salt and basil and olive oil.

The salad is magical - humdrum ingredients turned into other. Cold leftover grilled zucchini, limp and squishy? It's transformed by the little bit of mint, and the almost pickled onion, and the crunch of the croutons.



Here, here's what I did. But you should feel free to invent your own. Just make sure you start with that thinly sliced onion, macerated in vinegar for ten or twenty minutes. It's the key.

Zucchini Pepper Bread Salad, inspired by Tamar Adler

1/4 onion
3 T. sherry vinegar
a pinch of salt
2 medium zucchini, sliced into planks and grilled
2 green peppers, halved and grilled
1/2 t. mustard
olive oil
a few sprigs of mint
freshly made croutons

Thinly slice the onion and put it in a big enough bowl. Add vinegar and salt, and toss to coat. Set aside for ten minutes, or a half hour. Stir the onions when it occurs to you. Add the mustard to the onions. Whack up the zucchini and green pepper; add to the onions. Drizzle in some olive oil, add the mint and the croutons.

Waffling Hyperbole

Oh, oh, oh. Great sadness in the world: Marion Cunningham has died. And while her New York Times obituary came complete with a recipe, it wasn't the recipe, it was one for coffee cake. Now, honestly, there's nothing wrong with coffee cake - I could do with a slice at about 4:00 most afternoons - but her hands-down absolute-best make-this-Sunday-morning recipe was the waffles. Raised waffles. Crispy, tangy, light, tender, thin, buttery, yeasty waffles, like nothing you've ever had before. They're easy, too, but you have to start them the night before - mix up the batter, let it sit, add some eggs in the morning and go to town. Yes, you need a waffle iron, but don't you have one? Everyone should have a waffle iron, preferably a vintage one, chrome, with a cotton-covered black and white cord.

I first had these at a bed and breakfast in California, the kind of bed and breakfast that hands out copies of the recipes for the home-baked goodies they fed you that morning. There were two winners, an apple French toast, which I make for Christmas breakfast almost every year, and these waffles, which we make about once a month, just because.

Promise me this: you'll try these waffles, and you'll toast Marion Cunningham with your morning coffee. Even though I never met her, I feel confident in saying it's what she would have wanted. Besides, they really are the best waffles ever.

Marion Cunningham's Raised Waffles
[originally from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, and now all over the intertubes]

1/2 cup warm water
1 package dry yeast
2 cups warm milk
1/2 cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 eggs
1/4 teaspoon baking soda

Use a rather large mixing bowl — the batter will rise to double its original volume. Put the water in the mixing bowl and sprinkle in the yeast. Let stand to dissolve for 5 minutes. Add the milk, butter, salt, sugar, and flour to the yeast mixture and beat until smooth and blended. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let stand overnight at room temperature.

Just before cooking the waffles, beat in the eggs, add the baking soda, and stir until well mixed. The batter will be very thin. Pour about 1/2 to 3/4 cup batter into a very hot waffle iron. (Use a regular one, not one of those very deep Belgian waffle makers.) Bake the waffles until they are golden and crisp.

Theoretically, the batter will keep for a couple of days in the fridge. We prefer to bake it all off, and freeze any extra waffles, because, it probably goes without saying, we don't buy frozen waffles in our house.

A Manifesto About Strawberry Shortcake

There is only one kind of strawberry shortcake. It does not use lady fingers, it does not involve angel food cake. Cool Whip is verboten, sponge cake is all wrong. The strawberries must be local, the cream has to be freshly whipped, and the shortcake is a biscuit.

If you’re me, you have a hardcover edition of The James Beard Cookbook found at a used bookstore and bought because you had to own a copy since your mother always had one. And when your mother made strawberry shortcake, she made it James Beard’s way, which is to say, one enormous shortcake, cut into wedges at the table. Little individual ones, plated in the kitchen, are all well and good – providing that they’re made with biscuits and good berries and real whipped cream – but there is nothing more jaw-droppingly stupendous than an exuberant pile of whipped cream atop an enormous craggy biscuit with pink rivulets flowing off the macerated strawberries.

This is it. This is love. And this is how we celebrated Father's Day.



Strawberry Shortcake (adapted ever so gently from James Beard)

2 cups flour
2 ½ t. baking powder
1 t. salt
4 T. sugar
5 T. butter
¾ cup heavy cream
~2 T. softened butter

1 quart strawberries
2 T. sugar

1 ¼ cups heavy cream
2 T. powdered sugar
¼ t. vanilla extract (optional)

Sift the dry ingredients together into a bowl. Cut in the butter with a pastry blender, or two knives, or your fingers. Stir in just enough heavy cream to make a smooth, soft dough, not too sticky. Turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and knead gently for about a minute. Divide it into two portions, one a little bigger than the other. With a lightly floured rolling pin, roll the larger piece into a circle about 9” across and ½” thick. Gently transfer the disk to a greased cookie sheet. Spread the disk with soft butter. Roll the small piece of dough into a circle about 7” across and ½” thick, and transfer it to atop the first piece. Bake at 450° F for about 20 minutes, until nicely browned and baked through. Let cool.

While the shortcake is baking, clean the strawberries and cut them in half. Sprinkle with 2 T. sugar, stir gently, and set aside.

Just before serving, whip the cream with the powdered sugar and vanilla. Slip the shortcake onto a serving plate, and gently remove the top circle with a spatula. Cover the bottom with half of the strawberries and half the whipped cream. Replace the top circle, spread it with the remaining whipped cream and top with the remaining strawberries. Serve immediately.

Sweet Potatoes Make Spicy Chili

I used the last of the sweet potatoes today. The last of last season's CSA sweet potatoes, that is. Ones that had been down in the cellar in a paper bag since, oh, October? One of them was a little funky looking, but the rest were fine. For some reason, I got it in my head that I wanted to make some kind of chili-ish stew-like thing, which is kind of crazy because it's like SPRING out today, but hey. So I kind of riffed on something I found on A Year Of Slow Cooking, and it was pretty good.

Sweet Potato Chili Riff

 2-3 sweet potatoes, peeled and chunked
1 yellow onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, minced¹
2 cups of cooked chickpeas
2 carrots, chopped
2 stalks of celery, chopped
2/3 of a 28 ounce can of tomatoes²
1 T. chili powder
1 t. smoked paprika³
1 t. chipotle chili powder⁴
1/2 t. crushed dried green jalapeno⁵
1 t. kosher salt
1 1/2 cups water
2-3 T. smooth peanut butter.

Use a 4-5-6 quart slow cooker. Layer all the vegetables in the pot. Add the seasonings. Pour the water over the top. Cover and cook on low for 6-8 hours, or until everything is nice and squishy. Turn off the cooker, and stir in the peanut butter. Serve over rice, with (or without) grated cheese and sour cream.

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¹ Well, I would have used fresh garlic but WE HAD NONE. I swear. How did that happen? We did have some granulated Penzey's garlic, so I sprinkled some in.
² This is ridiculous. 2/3 of a can? It's what there was. Four of the (plum) tomatoes had been fished out for something else; it's what was left.
³ Smoked paprika is the bee's knees. It adds a smoky bacon-y-ness^a to everything. Get some if you don't already have it. It's the magical secret ingredient.
     ^a Or should that be baconiness? I don't think so; too reminiscent of marchioness.
⁴ Funnily enough, this was in the original recipe. However, my jar of it was a gift from a co-worker's girlfriend; she made it herself with peppers that his brother grew out in the midwest.
⁵ It's a jar that's been in the cabinet for YEARS. I think it's regenerating or something, because I stick a bit in anything spicy and the jar is still half full.

Goulash

For some time now, I've had a secret hankering for a slow cooker, despite the fact that they scream "lazy" and "cream of mushroom soup" and "not real cooking". The idea of prepping something in the morning, leaving it all day, and coming home to a finished meal is what appealed to me, even though slicing and sweating onions is not my idea of 7:00am fun. Besides, who needs another appliance?

Well, I got one for Christmas. I poked through books, and memory, and the internet, and remember a particularly delicious and easy goulash that had once been in the Times. One of the distinctive things about that goulash - one of the reasons it stuck in my head - was that there was no browning of the meat. All of the ingredients were layered into the pan, and it was cooked on top of the stove, and it was wonderful.

I dug up that Transylvanian Goulash recipe on the Times website, and then stumbled upon a somewhat similar thing called Kapusta* Pork that actually was meant to be done in a slow cooker. Remember, I'm a slow cooker novice - I was looking for instruction. I kind of combined bits out of both recipes and ended up with something thoroughly delicious, if I may say so myself.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Pork Goulash**

• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 big clove of garlic, chopped
• 1-2 T. bacon fat or olive oil or butter
• 3 lb boneless pork, in 1-2" chunks (I cut the meat off of a picnic shoulder)
• salt and pepper
• 4 cups cabbage, shredded (about a half a medium cabbage)
• 1 1/2 cups of sauerkraut
• 1 cup tomato puree
• 2 T. sweet paprika
• a 12 ounce bottle of beer (I used Sam Adams Winter Lager)
• 1 tablespoon caraway seeds

Saute the onion in the bacon fat, in a frying pan. Add the garlic after a couple of minutes. When it looks and smells nice, scrape it into the bottom of the slow cooker.

Put about half of the pork on top of the onions, and add salt and pepper. Add the chopped cabbage. Add the remaining pork, and some more salt and pepper. Spread the sauerkraut on top and sprinkle over the caraway seeds.

Mix together the tomatoes, paprika and beer, and pour it all. Cover and cook 8 hours on high.

Serve on egg noodles, with a blob of sour cream on the side.

*Yes, I googled Kapusta. It's cabbage. However, according to Wikipedia, "it also is representative of eternal power." I noted, though, that the sentence about eternal power did not have an initial cap, leading me to a conspiracy theory that someone grammatically challenged was working his way through Wikipedia adding "it also is representative of eternal power" to every entry.

**Adapted from Linda Cifuentes and Joseph Wechsberg

Rye, Spelt, Oatmeal...Oh My!

A cookbook came out last year. Oh right, you say, cookbooks come out All The Time. But there are several kinds of cookbooks:

• Pretty ones with lovely pictures, that no one ever uses in the kitchen.
• Encyclopedic ones, like The Joy of Cooking - essential and useful, but not likely to make your heart sing.
• Personal ones that you want to take to bed with you, like Nigel Slater's.
• Niche ones, that tell you how to doctor cake mix or how to be a socialite.

Once in a while, though, you find one that pushes all the buttons - personal, useful, pretty - and you find yourself blown away by the extraordinary recipes, one after another.

For the past year, that spot's been filled - for me - by Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain. It's a book on baking with whole grain flours, divided into chapters by grain. It's not earthy-crunchy to the point of leaden hockey pucks - there's plenty of leavening, enough plain white flour for lightness, and lots of butter. Everything I've tried has been fabulous, from the crumble bars with rye flour and oatmeal, to the mind-blowing zucchini bread with basil and mint. Right now, I've got a batch of her oatmeal bread rising on the counter. I bought spelt at the Greenmarket one day, and used it to make an amazing pie crust, brittle and flaky. And the granola! I've been making great granola for years, but Boyce's technique, with a boiled syrup of honey/brown sugar/butter, makes for a glossier, crunchier product.

It's totally the wrong time of year for zucchini bread, at least here in the Northeast, but save it until next summer when your garden or your farm stand is overrun with zucchini, basil and mint. And put the book on your Christmas list. You'll be happy you did.

---

ZUCCHINI BREAD (from Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain)

2 T. chopped fresh basil
1 T. chopped fresh mint
1 stick unsalted butter
1/2 lb zucchini (about 2 medium)
1/2 cup plain yogurt
2 eggs
1 cup rye flour
1 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup wheat germ
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. kosher salt

Position rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 350°. Lightly butter a standard bread loaf pan, or three mini loaf pans.

Melt the stick of butter. Add herbs and let them steep while you prep the rest of the ingredients.

Grate the zucchini on the large holes of a box grater. Add yogurt and egg, and whisk together.

Stir together the dry ingredients in a separate large mixing bowl.

Scrape the butter/herbs into the zucchini mixture and stir together. Pour the zucchini mixture into the dry ingredients and fold gently until combined. Scrape the batter into your prepared loaf pan(s).

Bake for 60-70 minutes if using a large loaf pan - or about 30 minutes in mini loaf pans. A skewer inserted into the center of the loaf should come out clean.

Cool in the pans for about 10 minutes, then remove and cool on a rack.

Wrapped tightly in plastic, it can be kept up to 3 days, getting better the next day as the flavors have some time to meld together.

Green Grapes and Sour Cream

Working through my drafts folder has meant wading through post ideas that were often nothing but a link, or a link and a sentence, or a headline.

Like one that was headlined:

Green Grapes and Sour Cream

And contained naught but a link:

http://smittenkitchen.com/2010/07/raspberry-brown-sugar-gratin/

Go ahead. Click that link. Or just parse it and note that it's from July 2010 - more than a year ago.

Smitten Deb had published a recipe, for a raspberry brown sugar gratin, a three ingredient dessert. And I'd read it and drooled, but mostly I remembered a recipe my mother used to make, an easy recipe for casual dinner parties.  She'd take some sour cream, stir it up with a few drops of vanilla, blob it over green grapes in a shallow dish, sieve brown sugar over the top, and run the whole thing under the broiler. You'd get the cold juicy grapes, with the tangy unctuous cream, and the toasty caramelized sugar, and it was a joyous mess with shades of crème brûlée.

I haven't made either of them, either Moky's grape version, or Deb's raspberry one. But recipes like that become so much more than just recipes. They're memory prods, Proust's madeleines. They transport you back to a period when people had dinner parties, and women wore perfume, and children were neither seen nor heard. The oven is open, just so, the broiler is going, and just to my right is the big black Garland stove, and there's a marble slab on the counter over the oven, with a waiting cooling rack, even though the grapes never get hot so you don't really need the rack.

What can you taste just by thinking about it? And conversely, what tastes conjure up indelible memories?

As for me, I think I'll make the green grape/sour cream gratin the next time my gluten-free friend comes for dinner.