Gourmet Gadget Gal

New BLOG address gourmetgadgetgal.com

2011-11-03T08:07:00.000-07:00

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Gourmet Gadget Gal

A Grown-Up Appetite

2011-09-14T08:37:00.000-07:00

Thirteen also means you don't recognize your mom in public anymore!

My oldest son, James, turned thirteen last week and a remarkable thing happened – he started eating. Now he has always “eaten” but up until very recently only from that all too familiar menu of American children everywhere : chicken nuggets, applesauce, goldfish crackers and the very occasional nibble of a baby carrot if he’s feeling especially adventurous.
    I cook dinner almost every night and I can say in my defense I only break down and serve the prepackaged chicken nuggets when I’m either feeling terribly desperate or terribly guilty. Terribly desperate nights are when I look up and it’s already 5:30 and there’s nothing in the freezer but a strange foil lump labeled “fish heads” and we have Scouts at 6:30. Terribly guilty nights happen when I decide to spend the afternoon with a recipe experiment that includes eleven spices and a handful of habanera peppers so hot that the smell scorches your eyes. My boys will consider eating that dish child abuse.
    Turning thirteen in our family must involve cosmic crossroads for the taste buds. When I turned thirteen I begged my dad to take me out to eat my first lobster. Before that day the most adventurous thing I had eaten was spaghetti.   But becoming a “grown-up” meant eating weird food and I could think of nothing more exotic.    My dad, genuinely interested in food and eating, humored me in grand style. We drove directly to Red Lobster.
    I ate every morsel of lobster that I could dig out of that creature and I never looked back. Raw oysters – delicious! Baba Ghanoush - how soon could we visit Egypt? From that day on I never skipped trying what the adults enjoyed eating and drinking (although I wasn’t welcomed to a wine glass).
    So, a few evenings after James’s birthday (we feasted on hamburgers and chocolate cake for the actual event), Paul and I were busy in the kitchen adapting a chicken recipe to showcase three perfect pears and a spectacular handful of fresh figs. We were seasoning a reduction, talking of possible additions, crushing fresh garlic and thyme into goat cheese and debating wine - white or red – to accompany what was shaping up to be a delicious dish. The children’s plain chicken was already baked unadulterated by spice and their pears sat cut into pieces in small glass bowls. James, having wandered into the kitchen, talked to us while we cooked and as we seasoned and plated dinner he asked, eyeing the three plates we were preparing for him and his brothers, “is that my plate?”.
    “Yes, do you want more of something?”
    “It’s just that… I don’t think I want that for dinner.”
    “You don’t want what?” I asked. “I thought you liked chicken?”
    “I do,” he explained. “It’s just that I don’t like it that way anymore.”
Puzzled I looked carefully at the chicken thinking perhaps he means he doesn’t want me to cut his up anymore.
    “I can give you a piece that isn’t cut up,” I suggested.
    “No, what I mean is…what I mean is that I want to try the chicken you and Dad are eating.”
    You learn not to raise even an eyebrow.   Without hesitating I put down the plate, pulled a new one from the cabinet and plated him a serving of Balsamic and Fig Glazed Pear Topped Chicken Breast. We then sat down together and everyone happily ate dinner sharing the day’s news. When dinner was over I noticed that James had eaten everything.
    “How did you like the chicken?” I asked casually.
    “It was ok, I guess.”
High praise from a thirteen year old.

Balsamic and Fig Glazed Pear-Topped Chicken Breast – adapted from usapears.org

4 ounces goat cheese
¾ teaspoon dried thyme (a little more if fresh)
¼ teaspoon fresh minced garlic
3 pears, cored and cut in half
1 1/3 cups chicken broth
1 package (about 12) fresh figs, diced – reserving ¼ cup for garnish
¾ cup balsamic vinegar
¼ cup sugar
6 boneless, skinless chicken breasts halves
2 teaspoons salt
ground black pepper

Mix goat cheese, thyme and garlic until blended. Fill center of each pear with cheese mixture. Puree chicken broth, figs, vinegar and sugar until smooth. Pour into strainer press sauce into small saucepan. Discard solids and reduce sauce by half. Pour half of sauce in bottom of 13X9 pan and place chicken breasts over sauce in pan. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place filled pear cheese side down over chicken. Cover with foil and bake at 375 for 35 minutes. Remove foil and continue to bake until internal temp is 160 degrees.

Cut chicken breast in half to serve and spoon remaining reduced sauce over pears. Garnish with remaining fresh figs. Serves 6.

Joining the Club

2011-08-29T11:35:00.000-07:00

I come from a long line of joiners; my grandmother, who is ninety-three, still belongs to clubs she joined over fifty years ago. My earliest memories include going with her to club meetings and visiting with her friends. Back in the days when most clubs met in the morning, the ladies would all arrive bringing covered dishes for the ladies luncheon. It was a point of pride to bring a dish that was “theirs”. Miss Vinyard’s Coconut Cake. Jane Ann’s Chicken and Dressing, Cousin Edna’s Layered Salad; they each brought a signature dish in a special basket or in Tupperware and they fussed over all the food and recited recipes to one another as they ate. I have never since tasted so many ways to use Jello.

My mother still tells stories about growing up under the watchful eye of the Christianburg Ladies Bridge Club. They held monthly evening club meetings that no one wanted to miss; there was too much gossip at stake. At home when hosting, the silver flower bowl was always filled with freshly cut roses from the yard and a set of special hand embroidered towels placed in the bathroom along with little, fancy flower shaped soaps to adorn the sink. If the club met during the summer, my grandmother picked the best vegetables from her kitchen garden and turned them into chilled aspics and fancy ribbon sandwiches. At each seat sat a small nut cup and a tiny basket of sugared mints. “Party Flourishes”, my grandmother called the treats.

About an hour before the ladies arrived, my grandfather left. No one ever knew where he hid, but he would not run the risk of meeting an early arrival. The Bridge Club was a dressy occasion; the ladies always arrived dressed to kill.    There was no such thing as pants for ladies back then. Sunday dresses were de rigueur with pantyhose and high heels, fur stoles at even a hint of chill, and oh, the perfume! Taboo, Joy, Evening In Paris, the women all smelled like boxed gift sets from the Tinsley Bible Drugstore.

By now, three card tables were set up in the front parlor, each with a deck of playing cards, a score pad and, at each place, a fancy little bridge tally with a tassel and an ash tray shaped like a heart, club, diamond or spade. After all the guests arrived the game started and even though the ladies were serious players, they managed to talk and gossip as they bid. Most of them smoked and soon the parlor seemed as smoggy as a pool hall. At the break, it was time for refreshments and that’s the part my mother loved best. Dressed in her fancy Sunday dress complete with wide satin sash, she would carefully carry flat saucer shaped coffee cups filled with percolated coffee to each of the ladies and bring each of them a slice of dessert. Most of them said, “Oh, I shouldn’t”, but they all did.   After the game was over, hostess prizes were awarded and everyone went home. My grandfather would magically appear after the last lady left, finish up the dessert and then everyone would go to bed, worn out from all the excitement.

Gone are the days of dressing up in hose and heels for club meetings with friends. These days, cobbling out a evening to play anything with twelve friends once a month seems nearly as impossible as offering them aspic and coffee instead of chips and margaritas. Most of the old recipes have faded away as tastes have changed and people have grown too busy to be bothered. But there are recipes from earlier times that, while old-fashioned, are easy, delicious and worth rescuing from the past. For a simple summer club meeting or gathering of female friends bring out ribbon sandwiches. All sorts of fillings can be combined and leftover spreads are great for dips too. Here are two of my favorites but Pimento Cheese, Chicken Salad, Cucumber and Cream Cheese are also quite satisfying.

Ribbon Sandwiches – Serves 10-12 people
Note: Allow three ribbon sandwiches per person. You will need 1 pound of bread for every 2-3 cups of filling. I use a mixture of dense white bread and whole wheat bread. Trim all crusts from bread and in stacks of three cut in half for “ribbons”. Spread one side with spread of choice, top with bread spread with next choice to create layered “ribbon” look.

Vegetable Spread
1 large ripe tomato
1 cucumber, seeded
1 bell pepper, seeded
½ small onion
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 ½ packages plain gelatin
juice of one lemon
1 cup mayonnaise
1 ½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon paprika

1.    Grind vegetables in food processor. Place vegetables in colander resting over a saucepan. Sprinkle with salt and lemon juice. Allow to drain. Remove colander. Sprinkle gelatin over drippings in saucepan. Cook over low heat while stirring until gelatin is dissolved. Blend in remaining ingredients and add ground vegetables. Cover and chill until firm.

Spinach Spread
1 (10-ounce) box frozen chopped spinach, thawed and water squeezed out until dry
salt and pepper to taste
1 cup mayonnaise
¼ cup minced dried onion
3 Tablespoons dried parsley
juice from one lemon
1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce

Combine all ingredients except spinach

Licking Windows on Rue Caulaincourt

2011-05-26T13:46:00.000-07:00

I was so hungry in Paris that I licked the windows.

Not really. But translated from English to French, “window shopping” translates to “licking windows” and if you don’t exactly taste the glass, you do find yourself pressing up to as close as you can for the best look. The moment I stepped onto Rue Caulaincourt in Montmarte my first thought was “how can I choose?”. Here is the window I passed first:

This was one of a thousand windows filled with food. We chose to rent an apartment in Paris in an area where tourists visited but did not stay. After 4 p.m. we neither heard nor saw another English speaking tourist on our street or in the local café for the entire week. And yet, our street had three bakeries, three chocolate shops, 4 green groceries, a butcher, a cheese shop, a wine shop and 3 small grocery stores. Each day we stood in line with the locals to buy fresh croissants for breakfast and then stood in line again to buy hot baguettes for dinner. Men in their suits on their way home from the office for dinner walked down the street carrying home baguettes tucked under their arms. I watched the neighbors with their children shopping for supper and pausing at the café not for a quick drink, but for maybe an hour’s rest, visiting with neighbors and friends as they wrapped up their day. As Julia Child once said and the French lifestyle attests “Life itself is a proper binge”.

Chocolate Chickens and Bunnies in Hot Air Balloons

You get out of bed in the early morning, fling open your window to street below and the air smells of fresh bread. Bread crackles with freshness when you bite into it; I spent the whole week brushing off crumbs. Perhaps that is why many French women eschew bras – the crumbs itch.

Just as delicious as the bread is French yogurt. It comes in tiny glass pots with all sorts of amazing flavors: fruits rouges, coconut, ginger, apricot, cassis. In Paris, I would wake in the night and think about the yogurt flavor I would chose for breakfast. My choice was important, I only had seven days so I had to choose carefully. Finally, our green grocery was directly across the street. At 6 a.m. a van would arrive and the produce man would begin to build the fruit displays. Perfect pyramids of blood oranges, grapefruits and lemons sat next to tiny wooden boxes of strawberries and raspberries holding a perfect handful. I walked across the street and in broken French gestured to the raspberries – you would never touch the fruit yourself – and the man would package it gently like a little gift. Such respect for food. For life.

Sister Knows Best Strawberry Jam

2011-05-17T06:50:00.000-07:00

Freshly picked strawberries for jam

When I heard about my sister’s trip to the strawberry farm the other day, I said “Twenty pounds of strawberries!!! What in the world were you thinking?!”
“I was thinking how much I love strawberries,” she said justly.
“Well, I love them too, but picking twenty pounds is picking fifteen pounds more than reasonable. What are you going to do with them all? They’ll go bad so fast,” I chastised in my big-sister known-it-all way.

She’ll raise an eyebrow at me when she learns I picked 22 pounds today.

It is nearly impossible to quit picking strawberries when they are as big as a hen’s egg, sun warmed, and as sweet and juicy as a ripened peach. I took Tommy and Charlie with me, and as I filled my baskets they ran down the long rows pausing to pick and eat the biggest berries they could find, juices running down their chins even down to their socks. They’d dash back again to tip my basket into theirs, “stealing” my berries, run off to examine a ladybug or grasshopper all the while wondering out loud unnerving things such as “do snakes like strawberries?”

I sure hope not.

It must go back to our origins. It’s a primal pleasure to be in a sunny place surrounded by ripe, delicious food with one’s children close at hand playing and eating. What mother doesn’t enjoy watching her children eat? What child doesn’t enjoy picking food from vines or trees? I remember being very young and the compulsion I felt to pick anything I saw growing. My grandmother would take me into her garden and point to the ripe tomatoes and I would happily pick and whatever she would let me. I was desperate to pick every tomato –ready or not. When I was just a little bit older, my Aunt Penny would dress us in old, soft men’s long sleeve cotton shirts with the cuffs rolled up and our blue jeans, hot and scratchy in the July heat, and take us to the edge of the dark woods to pick raspberries. The woods led back into the great Cherokee National forest that we thought was scary and haunted. Bears and bobcats and Indians, oh my! We were always happy and extra loud as we picked buckets of raspberries gulping many mouthfuls and avoiding the Japanese beetles that inadvertently fell into our buckets.

There is practically nothing that smells better than fresh strawberries cooking down into jam. When we made jam at home, my grandmother would skim the foam off the berries and dab it into a saucer to cool. I thought the strawberry foam was a delicious treat. There is not much to making strawberry jam. You use the best fruit, add sugar and lemon juice and cook it until it reaches 220 degrees which seems like will take forever. While it is cooking you skim off the foam. I like smooth jam so I puree mine with a stick blender while it is cooking. The best pan to use for jam making is a Mauviel copper jam pan as copper is such a great conductor of heat and the jam pan is very wide allowing the extra water in the fruit to evaporate quickly. It is also a very beautiful piece of equipment and I am a sucker for kitchen bling.

When the jam reaches its temperature, I immediately can in a hot water bath for ten minutes and then remove it to cool but not before I have ladled hot spoonfuls over vanilla ice-cream for everyone. Our family likes to pick at Kelly’s farm outside of Cross Plains, Tennnessee. There are plenty of strawberries left to pick this week so I’ll have to plan to back when my little sister won’t catch me.

Jam is ready at 220 degrees

Strawberry Jam

8 cups strawberries, hulled
2 cups sugar
¼ cup lemon juice

1. Toss strawberries in sugar and place in the fridge overnight. This releases the juices.
2. In a copper jam pan (or non-reactive saucepan), bring to a boil and stir. When berries have softened, crush or puree. Stir in the lemon juice. Cook over simmer, stirring frequently until the jam reaches 220 degrees, skimming off foam as it develops.
3. Ladle into jars and either refrigerate for up to 3 weeks or can using boiling water bath method.

A Cake for My Mother

2011-05-08T14:20:00.000-07:00

Strawberry Sponge Cake

My mother is, perhaps, the most disciplined eater I have ever known. She can bake dozens of homemade chocolate chip cookies and eat only one. She can open a bag of potato chips before dinner and eat a small handful, place the bag back into the pantry and not think of going back for more. I have found stale chocolate in plain sight in her kitchen cabinet and I have never seen her take a second helping of anything. This would be a sore trial to my green-eyed greedy guts self except for my witnessing her one food addiction. I’ve caught her on more than one occasion eating large spoonfuls of sweetened whipped cream straight from the mixing bowl before dessert is served.

There are those of us who are purists when it comes to whipped cream and those who don’t mind a little dessert topping from a plastic tub. My mother is a heavy cream stickler and avowed denigrator of dairy substitutes. I cannot recall a day in my life when she did not have at least one pound of butter and a pint of heavy cream in her fridge. Some of us squirrel away a bar of emergency chocolate. She keeps a stockpile of emergency whipping cream. You just never know when you might need a fix.

We eat the most whipped cream in May around Mother’s Day. It happens that strawberry season coincides with the day we celebrate Mom and overlaps her late May birthday and so we always go together to pick local strawberries by the flat that are so sweet and delicate that they must be eaten or made into jam that same day. Sun warmed and scenting the air with heavenly perfume, we share and eat pints together while driving home, staining our fingers and planning dessert. Strawberry pie, strawberry shortcake, strawberry layer cake, strawberry soufflé, each of these a beloved springtime treat but none loved more by my mother than strawberry sponge cake. Our family recipe calls for a full pint of heavy cream.

It is a tradition in our family to bake a sponge cake in a half- sheet pan, turn it out while warm onto a powdered sugar dusted kitchen cloth and roll it up to cool. When cool, we gently unroll the cake and spread it with 1 pint of heavy cream, whipped and sweetened and fresh sliced strawberries and roll it back up and chill for a few hours. When you are ready to serve, cut crossways with a piece of dental floss for a very smooth slice to show off the swirl.

Strawberry Sponge Cake:

5 eggs, separated
1 teaspoon vanilla
½ teaspoon salt
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup cornstarch
1/3 cup all purpose flour
powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease and line a half-sheet pan and cover with parchment paper. Grease the paper and lightly flour. Beat the egg whites and add the salt and continue to beat until soft peaks form. Slowly add the sugar and beat until stiff but not dry. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks until foamy and add vanilla: set aside. Spoon the whites over the yolks and sprinkle the flour and corn starch on top. Fold gently until blended and then spread in pan. Bake for about 10 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.

Bad Food Mood

2011-03-29T20:02:00.000-07:00

My view on Caulaincourt - very soon.

I’ve been on the road 21 days in the past month – much of it work related- and with so many planes, trains and automobiles in my life, I have grown unfamiliar with thoughtful contemplation of meals to be cooked and instead I’ve plundered my notoriously overstocked pantry and freezer and managed to cull the contents down to such a sorry assortment that instead of vociferously yowling about what I might be cooking for supper, my children just lie on the floor and pant.

About twice a year I reach the point where I just hate having to think of what we are going to eat next. The second worst time is in late August when the heat is so awful that you break a sweat when you chew. But the worst time is right now. I wander into the grocery store and examine the tasteless white fleshed strawberries that have the spirit of turnips and scoff at the display of unscented imported peaches. Peaches in March? Whom do they think they’re kidding? I scowl at the overly solicitous produce manager. He averts his gaze and goes back to straightening bananas.

I’m in a bad food mood.

There is a remedy for my bad food mood but it is very expensive. It involves exports, complicated maps and lists, conference calls and a serious amount of lurking around on the web. It also involves logistical tactics, paperwork and copious amounts of wheedling and begging. It has me counting down. The days. Until. Paris.

Paris in April.

I have been making a grocery list of a different sort on a little journal I keep at hand. While here I pour the ends of three opened boxes of pasta together into the boiling water to toss later with the children’s most beloved canned spaghetti sauce that must contain taste bud dulling chemicals - it is such miserable slop- I jot down “Pate De Campagne" and think of France. Heating up the end of the giant Costco bag of frozen French fries I think “frites” for me very soon. I think of Paris and I glower a little less. Soon.

Green with Growing Envy - Wilted Lettuce Salad

2011-03-03T05:18:00.000-08:00

The Healthy Way to Eat Bacon?

At this time of the year, when I have to run hither and yon around this winter worn town to pick up poster board for a school project or shirts from the dry cleaners, I find myself pulled almost magnetically to the local plant nursery. I wish I could unfold a lawn chair, unwrap a sandwich and sit in the luscious, green, humid sunroom and enjoy my lunch. Instead, I find myself wandering aisle to aisle, soaking in the vibrant colors and buying too many flats of tender, young plants that have nearly no hope of survival once they leave the greenhouse and come home with me.

For as competent a cook as I may be, I am a completely incompetent gardener, which is puzzling as I come from a very long line of farmers, orchardists, beekeepers, and woodsmen. I practically grew up outdoors with my mother in her flowerbeds and my grandmother in her vegetable garden, but with the exception of a small bed of hearty strawberries I manage to doom any plant I touch.

Thankfully many of the communities in our state now have CSA’s (community supported agriculture farms) that allow gifted green thumbs to share their gardens with people who want to eat local homegrown (and often organic) foods. The CSA farm I buy from has a website where I choose what fruits and vegetables I want as they come available and freshly cut flowers to fill my home all summer long. I feel perfectly blissful picking up my first basket of early spring baby lettuce and a large bunch of gorgeous jonquils. Shares in a CSA usually cost about $25 each week for 15 weeks and customers generally receive a half-bushel basket filled with produce. Items like flowers, honey and organic soap cost extra, but I always feel good knowing that if I can’t grow homegrown, I can bring homegrown home.

The earliest vegetables of spring that arrive in my basket are new baby lettuces, green onions and baby spinach. This is my favorite first Spring vegetable salad recipe and a classic Tennessee dish. It’s the only way I can eat bacon and feel that it might not be so bad for me:

Wilted Lettuce Salad - serves 2-4

Ingredients:

5 cups of baby salad greens such as romaine, red leaf, spinach and arugula
4 slices of bacon
6 green onions, sliced
2 Tablespoons red cider vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
salt and pepper to taste

1. Carefully wash salad mix and dry with paper towels to remove water. Place greens in salad bowl and toss with green onions.
2. Place bacon in pre-heated, non-aluminum skillet and fry until crisp. Remove bacon to plate and slightly cool the oil –you should have 1 tablespoon of oil.
3. Add the cider vinegar, sugar, lemon juice and salt and pepper to the oil, increase the heat and whisk until sugar is dissolved and dressing is hot.
4. Pour hot dressing over the salad greens and toss. The greens should begin to wilt.
5. Crumble bacon on top of salad and serve immediately.

For information in your area for local CSA’s in Tennessee please visit localharvest.org - a website to find farmers' markets, family farms, and other sources of sustainably grown food in your area, where you can buy produce, grass-fed meats, and many other goodies.

Southern Traditions - Sweet Potato Biscuits

2011-02-20T18:05:00.000-08:00

I read recently that if you were offered a diet consisting only of sweet potatoes and water that you could survive healthily for years until you finally fling yourself off a cliff for having to eat so many sweet potatoes. Not really. I made that last part up. I have a love-hate relationship with sweet potatoes. Living is the South, I am accustom to being offered them topped with marshmallow or pecans at every family holiday with the exception of the Fourth of July when we celebrate the birth of the United States by fasting from vegetables. I remember as a child looking with foreboding at the first steam tray in the cafeteria line featuring large hunks of stewed, syrup covered “candied” sweet potatoes knowing that meant it was altered turkey day. Maybe you remember altered turkey with its standardized oval puck shape and spotted pink, grey and white variegation? It is surely no coincidence that many moms today are overindulging their children by offering them unhealthy but delicious choices for dinner. I’ve never actually seen a child eat a school lunch.

If I am being honest with myself, I genuinely only want to eat sweet potatoes – especially in casserole form- once a year and that is with turkey on Thanksgiving and I do not wish to eat either thing again until the next Thanksgiving. My mother-in-law is the only person in the world (sorry mom) who has ever made a sweet potato casserole that I might eat more than once a year and that is probably because she makes a real Louisiana praline topping for it. It should probably be called something like “Slutty Sweet Potatoes” because she corrupts all the virtue out of the vegetable with a recipe that begins “melt a pound of butter and add directly to ass”.

We do eat baked sweet potatoes at home fairly regularly, not because I like them but because I keep thinking we “should” eat them just like we “should” use less salt. I never feel any need to salt sweet potatoes because after adding all the butter and brown sugar you need to change the texture into something palatable, the salt would just be lost. I do think they are O.K. fried, but I rarely fry food at home unless okra is in season and then I completely skip the “should” and wallow in fresh fried “shouldn’t”. In case you were wondering, Bobbie’s Dairy Dip in Nashville has the best sweet potato fries in town, possibly because she serves them with a sour cream dip that tastes like vanilla cake icing.

I have finally hit upon the best way to eat sweet potatoes at home, though. It is in biscuit form. I’ve been trying sweet potato biscuits for years but my take on most recipes is that they are often too dry. Working from my own standard biscuit recipe, I modified the ingredients to make the dough very wet and tender and filled with as much sweet potato as I could cram into the mix to “healthify” the dish. These biscuits are delicious with honey butter or surrounding a piece of juicy ham or pork tenderloin. Maybe you couldn’t live on sweet potato biscuits alone, but I’ve also read that there are some things worse than death.

Southern Sweet Potato Biscuits

1 large mashed sweet potato or 1 1/2 cups canned sweet potato, mashed

1/4 cup whole milk buttermilk, cold

2 cups all-purpose flour, soft wheat like White Lily, plus extra for rolling dough

1 Tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 tablespoon dark brown sugar

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon balck pepper

1 stick (8 tablespoons) cold unsalted butter, cut into roughly 1/2 inch cubes

1. Set the oven rack in the middle position and preheat the oven to 425degrees

2. Combine sweet potato with the buttermilk and mix well. Set aside

3. In a food processor, process 2 cups of flour, baking powder, baking soda, brown sugar, cayenne pepper, salt and black pepper until mixed.

4. Drop the butter pieces over the flour mixture and close the lid. Process in pulses until the mixture looks like cornmeal.

5. Spoon the sweet potato mixture over the flour mixture and process until the dough forms.

6. Flour a pastry board and scoop out the mixture. It will be fairly wet so sprinkle flour on top of dough. Fold the dough in half, add a little flour and fold again until it is soft to the touch.

7. Flour a rolling pin and gently roll to about 1 inch thickness.

8. Use a sharp 2-inch biscuit cutter to cut biscuits. Reuse scraps to make more biscuits and place on baking sheet.

Bake 12-15 minutes until light golden brown.

Foodlady Librarian - The Things We Cook For Love

2011-02-14T10:26:00.000-08:00

Not to boast or anything but I was the envy of all the sixth grade girls on Valentine’s Day. I, the mousy, skinny eyeglassed bookworm, received the biggest valentine of all. AND, it was from a boy in another classroom - a fifth grader at that. Love knows no boundaries. I can admit now that I really didn’t “like” him but he “liked” me and that was enough to create a buzz. For some arcane reason it was a status symbol to have a boy in a lower grade “like” you. Then again, me still with the glasses, still skinny and unlovely, in the ninth grade my friend Joe Jim sidled up to me and said, “There’s something for you in your locker and if you don’t want it me and Billy will eat it.” What excitement! It was a heart-shaped box of chocolates and of course I wanted it. How long we remember these gestures and how much they mean to us in our lives. Now I wonder what my children remember about Valentine’s Day. I know they remember that we always had chicken pie with big chunks of chicken, mushrooms, peas and onions in a rich chicken gravy. The piecrust was the one my grandmother always made and it had heart shaped cutouts and no, there’s no recipe. I just made it up as I went along. We also had either a strawberry or chocolate dessert and nearly always cut out Valentine cookies with red sugar on the icing. The things we do for love are the things people remember most and we do a lot of cooking for love. Pillsbury said it well with the “nothing says loving like something from the oven” campaign.
I do a lot more reading of cookbooks than actually cooking from them now that I usually cook for only the two of us. I must say that my boy, Walter, is a most appreciative eater, but it’s a little discouraging that he likes almost anything set before him. His favorite meal, and I kid you not, is a hamburger patty, a scoop of cottage cheese, and some frozen green peas. Give him a little ketchup and he’s all set. He does, however, enjoy fine dining and his favorite treat is going to Atlanta for dinner at Bacchanalia where hamburger patties are tre passé. That’s our Valentine’s Day splurge this year but we will be home on the actual day so I am scouring my new cookbooks for dinner possibilities. It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken and has been reissued with a new foreword by her daughter Jo Bracken. I remember when this was a big hit with my mother and her bridge club friends. Looking through the book I spied some old familiar dishes: chicken baked with a can of mushroom soup poured over it, chili made with a can of tomato soup, cream of chicken soup mixed with processed cheese spread and garnished with parsley: all sorts of mixtures with canned soups. Don’t think that I am being scornful, although I am, just a little. I remember the days of coming home, totally wiped out, trying to deal with hungry children, homework, laundry and the thousands of things that needed to be done before bedtime. But then I look at a recipe for Cancan Casserole with eggs, evaporated milk, cream-style corn, tuna, green pepper and onion, all baked in a casserole for one hour, and I sigh. No matter how I feel about these recipes, I still love this book. Peg Bracken was one of the funniest writers in the world of cookbooks and other books, including poetry. The book is just plain fun to read and her household hints are just great. Here’s one: use your old nylons to strain the jam. Also: if your veils and lace collars get that tired look, iron them between two pieces of waxed paper.
Another new cookbook that I have found interesting is The Gypsy Kitchen by Lisa Lamme She promises to transform almost nothing into something delicious with not-so-secret ingredients. Sounds like a plan to me!

Lemon olives sound delicious as do the bean dip recipes. I’m going to try the grilled lemon herb chicken breasts first. It’s always nice to find a new recipe for chicken since we eat it so often. A nice feature of this book is that none of the seasonings appear to be those rare and exotic ones that you can’t find or have to pay a fortune for. I see a lot of garlic, onion, hot sauce, lemon, soy sauce and the like. The only thing listed that I don’t ordinarily have on hand is tofu and that’s easy to obtain. Another plus is that most of the recipes are fairly quick and easy. No turducken or puff pastry! As for the book’s author Lisa Lamme, her wine and cheese shop was recently chosen as one of Boston’s Best by Boston Magazine. I look forward to trying several of these recipes.
And last, but by no means least, is a wonderful new book As Always, Julia: the Letters of Julia Child & Avis Devoto. All this talk of food, of kitchen equipment and gadgets, of the cookbook in preparation and of a wonderful and enriching friendship give the reader a fascinating insight into the life of the person we think we know so well. This is not a cookbook but it contains many insights into cookery. It’s a big book - almost 400 pages- but I found something of interest on every page. If you’re into personal history give it a try. And may you receive a valentine from someone who really “likes” you!

Southern Traditions - Red Velvet Cake

2011-02-07T11:09:00.000-08:00

Red Velvet Cake for Charlie's 6th Birthday

Around the time of my birthday when I was a little girl, my mother always asked me what I would like for her to cook for my birthday supper and bake for my birthday cake. At the time, I had no idea there was any such a thing as a bakery cake with plastic toy decorations and fat, colored icing roses. I thought the height of sophistication in cakes was my mother’s red velvet cake sprinkled with red sugar on top of her antique glass cake stand. She always made whatever I asked for from scratch using recipes from an old Fanny Farmer cookbook and frosted the cake with her own recipe for buttercream and topped with “Happy Birthday Jane” written in cursive script across the top. I clearly remember hugging myself with delight upon seeing the cake with its candles lit and listening to my family sing.

This week my youngest son, Charlie, turned six and when I asked him earlier in the week what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday, for the first time instead of saying a “Power Ranger” or “ Thomas the Tank” cake, to my heart’s delight he asked for my red velvet cake. I love it when a family tradition lives on.

Making a wish!

I’ve eaten a lot of red velvet cake since I was a child, and I have strong feelings about this quintessential Southern dessert. It has to be dark red. Not pinkish red. It needs to be the color of Alabama’s crimson tide but not the color of their fans' necks. To color the cake you need between 1 and 3 ounces of red food coloring and to give the proper taste you need half a cup of regular cocoa powder. Without that boost of cocoa powder, red velvet cake recipes tend to turn out bland and boring. Red Velvet cake is really a light chocolate cake and this adds enough cocoa to create a subtle but not dominate chocolate taste.

As far as adding color to the cake batter, many sources say that at one time red velvet cake needed no added dye as the cocoa powder of our Grandmother’s day contained a chemical which reacted naturally with the ingredients to cause the red color and thus the cake was named “red velvet” as to distinguish it from another popular cake recipe at the time called velvet cake. Some people have postulated that the cake was originally colored with beets and then christened “red velvet”. But since the oldest recipes from the early 1900’s called the cake “Red Devils Cake” (with no beets in evidence), it is unlikely that beets were ever used. Today’s cocoa powder is processed to remove most of the alkaline chemical that in olden days caused the color reaction. The reason why we add vinegar and soda is that having enough acid balance in the cake is key to its rising and is also why you must never use Dutch-processed cocoa in this cake. Dutch process cocoa is so alkaline that it will rob your cake its ability to set up as the protein in the eggs and in the flour need acid to react. My sister, Sarah, once made two failed red velvet cakes in a row because of a simple substitution of Dutch process cocoa. Not many of us would understand this chemical difference and it took us some time to figure out what had gone wrong. Most home cooks use standard Hersey’s cocoa, which does not have enough of the removed chemical to cause the red color reaction but does have the cocoa flavor and some of the acidity that the cake needs for texture and flavor balance. If you are entirely opposed to adding coloring, you can experiment with the equivalent amount of red beet juice. Some bakers do this to avoid food dye, believing dye might contribute to allergies. You cannot leave the color or liquid substitute out all together though, as dropping the cake liquid volume 1 to 3 ounces is going to throw off the cake’s chemistry.

There are many good recipes for Red Velvet cake. My sister-in-law, also named Sarah, makes a delicious one we enjoy every Christmas. The Lee Bros. Cookbook has a great version that is also posted on their blog, but my hand’s down birthday cake favorite is one from Confetti Cakes Cookbook by Elisa Strauss because she uses the right amount of cocoa to give the cake flavor depth and dark color and it bakes up beautifully to make a 3 layer cake perfect for the happiest of celebrations.

Red Velvet Cake by Chef Elisa Strauss from The Confetti Cakes Cookbook

INGREDIENTS:
Note: this recipe yields three 9-inch rounds, 1 half sheet (13x18 inches), or 24 cupcakes
  3 ½ cups (14 oz.) cake flour 
½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 ½ tsp. salt
2 cups (16 oz.) canola oil
2 ¼ cups plus 1 tbsp. (16 oz.) granulated sugar
3 large eggs 
1/3 cup (3 ounces) red food coloring
1 ½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 ¼ cup (10 oz.) buttermilk
2 tsp. baking soda
2 ½ tsp. white vinegar

PREPARATION:
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Brush the bottoms and sides of the pans with melted butter and line the bottoms with parchment paper.  
2. In a large bowl, sift together the cake flour, cocoa powder, and salt. Set aside.
3. In the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, combine the oil and sugar and beat on medium speed until incorporated.  
4. Set the mixer to low speed and add the eggs, one at a time, scraping thoroughly between each addition.  
5. Add the red food coloring and vanilla in a slow stream and beat until incorporated.
6. Alternately add the flour mixture and buttermilk in two batches, starting with the flour. Scrape down the bowl between each addition until thoroughly combined.  
7. In a small bowl, whisk together the baking soda and vinegar. Set the mixer to medium speed. Immediately add the baking soda mixture and beat for 10 seconds.
8. Divide the batter evenly between the cake pans or muffin tins. For 9-inch cake pans, bake 1 hour or until a toothpick comes out clean; for half-sheet pans, bake 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean; for cupcakes, bake 20 to 25 minutes, or until they spring back after being touched.  
9. Allow the cake to cool for 20 minutes. Once the cake is cool, release it from its pan by running a metal spatula or knife along the sides of the pan. Flip the cake over onto another pan or cake board and peel away the layer of parchment.

Both of these recipes are ones I use at home. If you make a larger cake (more than 2 8-inch layers) you will need to increase the amount of frosting.

Momma's Buttercream Recipe

1 stick butter, unsalted
1 egg yolk
2 cups confectioners' sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Beat the butter until it is light and creamy. Stir in the egg yolk and continue to beat, adding the vanilla and the sugar, 2 Tablespoons at a time. Beat until the frosting is fluffy.

Cream Cheese Frosting

8 ounces (one box) Philadelphia cream cheese, at room temperature
1/4 cup butter, at room temperature
2 cups confectioners' sugar, sifted
1 teaspoon vanilla

Beat the cream cheese, butter, confectioners' sugar and vanilla in a mixing bowl until perfectly smooth and spreadable.

It's Learning About Cooking, Ya'll. Seriously!

2011-02-04T13:27:00.000-08:00

So I stole the title for this post from my first blog award from Oh!Virtual Learning. Scott and his followers have recognized my blog as being decidedly "non-schooly" but contributing to learning about cooking in a non-academic format which is certainly more in keeping with my scatterbrained, whimsical writing. Thanks to Scott and his readers! I've been called "non-schooly" before but never as a compliment.

In other news, I've been working really hard to get my new blog site up and running which has pulled me away from blog posts here, but the new site is almost completed and I'll soon have a fresh new blog that I think is very reflective of my style. My second column has just come out in the February issue of At Home Tennessee magazine and I am very excited to be writing and developing recipes for it.

As I write this I am forking Red Velvet cake into my mouth and trying not to drop crumbs on the keyboard. Look for my new post about this Southern favorite sometime this weekend.

Best, Jane

Gourmet Gadget Gal on Talk of the Town (CBS) today at 11

2011-02-01T07:39:00.000-08:00

Hi Friends, I'm going to be on Talk of the Town today at 11 making my recipe for Pimento Cheese Fondue! It's a great recipe for your upcoming Superbowl party.

Southern as Cornbread

2011-01-25T08:49:00.000-08:00

Loaded Tex-Mex Cornbread -with cheese and heat!

In a day and age when we can get just about any ingredient our hearts desire from Himalayan pink salt to stone ground Mexican chocolate, I find myself feeling still bitter about the discontinuation of my favorite cornmeal -Three Rivers. When White Lily Flour, owner of the Three Rivers brand of cornmeal, was acquired by Smucker’s the tie to Tennessee was severed and the familiar brown and yellow bag of cornmeal with its slightly coarser texture was eliminated. We eat a lot of cornbread at our house as I was raised with either cornbread or biscuits at almost every meal and I love cornbread so much that my Grandmother would say to me when I went to take a third helping, “they fatten pigs on corn”. I’ve decided that with a name like Smucker’s it doesn’t have to be good (but I might change my mind if they’ll bring back my cornmeal).

Cornbread in the South is an awful lot like bar-b-que in the South. Each place has its favorite style and recipe. One constant you can depend upon if you are at a loss for conversation is to strike up a discussion about either cornbread or bar-b-que then stand back and watch the debate. Just the other night we were invited to meet our new minister who recently relocated from North Carolina. Sure enough, moments into the conversation, he was pressed to talk about North Carolina’s traditional vinegar based sauce and whether he understood that we in Tennessee had strong opinions about that?! Before I could pin him down and move on to cornbread he was rescued by his wife so I’ll have to continue to wonder if he’s my kind of Presbyterian. I hope I don’t find out he likes the sweetened kind.

My friend Cindy made her signature cornbread for Bunko dinner the other night but it is so different from traditional cornbread that I can accept her culinary point of view. She loads it up with onions, cheese, and jalapenos and it is so spicy it will make your eyes water. Leave it to Cindy to bring on the heat!

Cindy's Loaded Tex-Mex Cornbread

Ingredients:

3 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup of milk
3 cups of cornmeal - White Lily Self Rising will have to do for now
1/2 cup of oil
3 teaspoons of sugar
1 14 oz. can of cream corn
2 cups of shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1 large chopped sweet onion
1 6 oz can of jalapenos

Directions:

Preheat oven to 450℉

Mix all ingredients together and pour into lightly greased muffin pan.

Bake for 15-17 minutes

Note:
This makes about 12-15 huge muffins and this batter freezes well to use later

If you do not like the heat of the chiles you can leave the jalapenos out of this recipe.

Oh There’s No Place Like the Campfire for the Holidays…

2011-01-19T13:08:00.001-08:00

Campfire Cooking for the Holidays

When Paul suggested we go camping for the holidays I suggested why not just go directly to hell and save on firewood? I am not a camper. First of all, I hate man-eating bears. Second of all, I look ridiculous in winter hats and yes, I am vain enough to worry about how I look in hats - even in the woods.

Paul begged and wheedled and tried to bribe me to go by offering me a veritable treasure trove of camping related presents: a new sleeping bag, a QUEEN size air mattress (“we can keep each other warm,” he offered), a new pair of Uggs (more tempting than the mattress) and then he poked through the chink in my armor. “You’ll learn a new way to cook,” he exclaimed, “We’re going to bring the Lodge Dutch ovens and you can plan the feast. We’ll cook a delicious holiday meal and you can decorate the table with pinecones or moss or something and then you can write about it. It will be like that travel show Globe Trekkers except we’ll be camping in Fall Creek Falls State Park instead of in Zambia”.

“You had me at “new way to cook”,” I said.

The original outdoor kitchen

For a two day camping trip it took us about eleven hours to pack the truck. We also made about six shopping expeditions to various camping stores around town where I stood examining the freeze dried meals and wondered at the variety of choices. Beef Stroganoff, meatloaf, cheese tortellini, chili with beans each with their own special chemical heating package with instructions that read “ better when heated”. Really? Why not just print “abandon all hope” on the package? My vision of camping involved at least no more self-flagellation than sleeping in something called a bag. I also visited my first Army/Navy store. They did not have anything much related to any of the service arms except for a wall filled with military medals and ribbons. I stared at that wall for sometime thinking perhaps I should buy myself some medals: Maybe a medal of valor for bad hair? I also picked up and considered buying myself battery powered heated socks, a camouflage Snuggie, a spork on a lanyard, and the best invention for fools I’ve ever seen- a waterproof jacket + tent + backpack called the JacPac complete with armpit ventilation. I reluctantly skipped that and instead bought a new winter toboggan.

The things I have learned about camping! Let me tell you. You have to be organized! If you forget the salt, then you’ll have to use your tears and there’s no crying in camping. I worked on planning the menu down to the last marshmallow. With the gear and the food and the children sandwiched into the backseat resting their feet on cast iron cooking vessels we set off on our weekend journey to meet up with the rest of the family, Paul’s sister Sarah and her husband Jason, our resident Dutch oven expert, our nephews Jackson and John and Paul’s parents, a.k.a. Grandy and Poppa, who grinned ear to ear when we pulled into the campsite in the inky black of night to set up our tent in the balmy 35 degree weather. Believe me, even the campfire shivered.

I curse the day I cancelled my subscription to Indoor Magazine. If I had kept my subscription I would have benefited from the articles like “Tents? – Better in Theory” and “Camping – There’s No App for THAT!” My new sleeping bag was rated to “F” for fail. I slept in all my clothes including my bra – I was that cold – and at 3 a.m. when the skunk wandered onto our site and got into the garbage I briefly thought of stoning it with my dead iphone, gutting it and stuffing my frozen feet in its dead carcass a la Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back. To add insult to injury – Paul snored all night long.

When I can’t sleep at home I think of the most random things- boy names that are also girl names, cereals that aren’t made anymore, all the different kinds of dogs. When I can’t sleep while camping I think of one thing – ax murderers - the kind that chop you to pieces when you go outside in the dark to pee. At 5 a.m. the boys woke up raring to go. Jason, our resident fire starter, was raring to start breakfast and I was raring to get behind a tree. And, wouldn’t you know it – my new long john pants were zipped into the teeth of the jeans I had pulled on in pitch blackness at two a.m. By the time I had tugged my hind end out of those jeans I had dance hopped my way into clear view of our young male camping neighbors who were enjoying a freshly brewed cup of coffee while admiring the forest scenery. I’m not certain that I added to their viewing pleasure but I do think I startled them. We noticed later they kept one eye on our activities for the rest of the weekend.

I've heard tales about these guys

Well meaning people who enjoy camping told me again and again how good cooking over a campfire tastes when you are camping and I think I now know why. It is because you very well may die before your next meal; Of course food is going to taste delicious! Camping is filled with hazards. Here are just a few of the possible scenarios I considered while roasting marshmallows: falls down steep cliffs, wolf attacks, falls off rusty rental bike onto rusty nail, tent pole accidents, propane grill explosion, tent fire, swinging bridge collapse, bear rampages, falling rocks, tree prolapse, trip and fall into the campfire, creek flash floods, forest fires, lighting strikes, and… boyscout zombies.

So, what did I decide to cook? Christmas dinner! A whole beef tenderloin, savory bread pudding, fresh cranberry relish, roasted corn and asparagus, jalapeno scalloped potatoes, cornbread and mixed berry cobbler. All either directly over the campfire or in Lodge cast iron Dutch ovens.

Campfire Skillet Cranberries

Dutch ovens, with their three pronged legs and half inch raised flange lid ,and a cast iron skillet over a campfire are the original outdoor kitchen. With a well-built fire and a supply of charcoal you can cook just about anything outside and many people do. Dutch oven cooking societies exist all over the world as do recipes and techniques for outdoor cooking.

Even though before this trip I had never cooked outdoors before, I have always been fascinated by Dutch oven cooking. As a gourmet gadget collector, I have managed to acquire two Dutch ovens over the past few years and find the cooking method intriguing.

Cheddar Jalapeno Scalloped Potatoes

As a rule, the outdoor Dutch oven finds its fans among men, whom, as a rule, really love to cook outside. Unlike grilling, which requires careful tending and turning, Dutch oven cooking is rather relaxing once the ingredients are combined. It is also fast and loose in its heating instructions: the amount of heat you will need in August is going to be different than the amount of heat you will need in December. It is not a precise method of cooking which is one big reason it appeals to me. I always appreciate casual rustic techniques over the formal fussy ones when it comes to meal time.

Dutch oven cooking uses charcoal briquettes for its fuel. It is also useful to know that you should not use pre-treated charcoal as it will not burn as long as a good quality charcoal. A good rule of thumb for determining how many heated coals you will need for Dutch oven cooking is to take the size of the oven (and they make this dummy proof by stamping the number on the lid) and doubling it. Depending on what you decide to cook in your Dutch oven you place the coals accordingly. If you were baking cake or bread you would place two-thirds of the coals on the top of the oven and the remaining third on the bottom and if you were cooking chili or stew you would place two-thirds underneath the oven and the remaining third on the top. In the winter when it is very cold (my experience) you may need to replace coals with freshly heated ones when the first ones no longer glow. This isn’t as much of an issue in the summer.

Our Lodge Dutch Oven Collection

I also learned that turning your Dutch oven while cooking prevents hot spots and that you can easily tend the food by very occasionally lifting the lid and checking the progress. One important note is that if you have cheap cast iron cookware you will probably not get great results; cheap cast iron often has unbalanced lids that are prone to tip ashes into the pot when a lid is lifted. My Lodge ovens balanced perfectly when lifted, so while I still had to be careful, I did not need to worry about seasoning my meal with ashes.

You don't want an unbalanced lid to ruin your recipe!

For our dinner we used five Dutch ovens, two cast iron skillets and about 1 medium bag of charcoal. To light the charcoal we used a charcoal chimney that was also useful for preheating the Dutch ovens as we simply placed them on top of the chimneys for a few minutes before filling with food. Thanks to Jason’s expertise and the patience of our dinner party, we were able to create a festive holiday dinner that we enjoyed by moonlight and antique lanterns and despite the cold, I loved Dutch oven and campfire cooking. But as for the sleeping in tents business, I have a sleeping bag in mint condition that I will sell for cheap.

Dutch Oven Savory Bread Pudding

Skillet Cranberries and Tenderloin on the Grill

We Interrupt this Marriage to Bring You Football Season

2011-01-07T13:20:00.000-08:00

Classier than a football shaped chip bowl!

Depending on your New Year’s resolution, it may be desirable- even necessary – to incorporate some celery into your upcoming Super Bowl party. This would be thoughtful for others, naturally. You are probably still holding fast to your resolve to wear the soles off those blindingly white athletic shoes and snack exclusively on baby carrots.

The beginning of the year is the season for fresh starts, fresh snow, fireside chats and America’s heralded and junk food laden favorite Sunday – The Super Bowl. Football season at our house has been in full swing now for five months. It starts in August with the boys returning to pads and practices in ninety-five degree heat and crescendos around Thanksgiving with high emotions about school state championships, college bowl game positions and feelings of either elation or despair about how the Titans’ season looks.

I am a gal in a house surrounded by guys. My husband has spent every winter night at home since 1998 wearing his UT National Champion’s sweatshirt and our oldest son’s first sentence was “tackle him”. I happily watch football games live and on T.V. but I must confess that they make about as much sense to me as a Spanish soap opera. I get the gist, but the nuances are lost. I have yet to figure out why after they complete the coin toss they fight so hard to get a quarter back?

I do enjoy the social aspects of football – tailgating, get-togethers and post-game celebrations are a foodie’s delight. I love throwing parties and feeding people and The Super Bowl comes at a point in the year when entertaining is easy. There’s no reason to decorate, pull out the fine china or serve a fancy dinner. Everyone is satisfied with pizza or chili or fondue.

Fondue, you ask? For a Superbowl party? Fondue is easily one of the most people pleasing party foods you can make at home with simple ingredients. It is a hot dish with many variations that allow the cook to present an attractive and tasty offering without a lot of fuss. To my mind it is much more festive than a football shaped chip bowl.

Cheese fondue only takes about ten minutes to make. Most recipes are straightforward. You sauté some garlic in a little butter, fish out the garlic, add a little wine or vermouth mixed with cornstarch to keep the cheese from separating and stir until all the cheese is melted. The useful thing about my fondue pot from Emile Henry, is that I can cook directly in it and not have to move the fondue from a saucepan into another pot. This fondue pot is actually made of clay that can be used over an open flame and can also be used later as a casserole dish for my oven. I guess it follows that a country that knows food so well would make beautiful and useful cooking equipment too.

My recipe for fondue though, is not French. It is a twist on a pure old-fashioned Tennessee favorite – Pimento Cheese. We keep pimento cheese on hand all summer as it goes especially well with homegrown tomatoes, but in the winter those jars of diced pimentos are pushed to the back of the pantry shelf. Around mid-January, I start to long for a taste of summer. A juicy ripe peach and some freshly buttered corn on the cob are the sugar plum fairies that dance around inside my head. A real homegrown tomato sliced and topped with homemade pimento cheese and crisp bacon? Neither love nor money can bring that in the wintertime.

Pimento Cheese fondue stands in as a winter counterpart with the familiar flavors of summer melted over an open flame. I spice my pimento cheese fondue with hot sauce to give it a nice bite and accompany it with pumpernickel bread, summer sausage, soft baked pretzels and, yes, celery. And as a bonus, while the fellows are rejoicing in victory or moaning in defeat, the chef can be "cleaning up the kitchen" and scarfing up those last delicious chewy bits of cheese. There's a lot to be said for football season, especially when it's over!

Pimento Cheese Fondue with Bacon and Tomatoes

Ingredients:
2 Tablespoons unsalted butter
2 small tomatoes, finely chopped
4 garlic cloves, smashed but whole
1 (4 ounce) jar diced pimientos, drained
1 teaspoon prepared horseradish
1 teaspoon hot sauce
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
a few grinds of black pepper
5 Tablespoons dry vermouth
2 Tablespoons cornstarch
5 cups shredded cheddar cheese
4 strips of crisply fried bacon, crumbled

1. Heat Emile Henry Fondue Pot over medium heat and melt butter.

2. Add tomatoes and garlic. Stir occasionally until liquid is nearly evaporated.

3. Add pimientos, horseradish, hot sauce, Worcestershire and pepper.

4. In small bowl, stir together vermouth and cornstarch until mixed. Add to Fondue pot and stir.

5. After one minute remove garlic and discard.

6. Add Cheddar cheese 1 cup at a time and stir until each cup is melted.

7. Remove Emile Henry Fondue Pot from heat and place on the base over lighted burner. Keep flame to medium low.

8. Sprinkle bacon on top of fondue.

Serve with cubes of French bread, Pumpernickel bread, Soft Pretzels, Carrots, Celery, Summer Sausage or anything else you might enjoy.

Foodlady Librarian - Kickin' it Old School

2010-12-24T07:16:00.000-08:00

How many glugs equal one cup?

I will never be the Homemaker of the Year. For one thing, if I had to submit recipes, no one could follow them. That's because I learned to cook without recipes and many of the dishes I make come from that era of following my mom's verbal instructions. I'm not sure that I knew cookbooks existed when I knelt up on a kitchen stool and heard from Mama, her back turned as she peeled something over the sink, "Put a couple of scoops of that cornmeal mix in the bowl. Now break in an egg. Pour in about three glugs of milk. Stir it until you don't see any lumps. Let me take a look. That's good, just a little more milk. Let's mix in this hot bacon fat and pour it in the skillet. Put it in the oven and it'll be ready for supper." You can see the problem, can't you? How much is a scoop and how do you measure a glug of something? This is the way I learned to make, among other things, biscuits, potato salad, fried chicken, banana pudding, macaroni and cheese and apple pie. I didn't know there was a recipe for pie crust until I signed up for home economics in high school. There I learned to follow several new recipes including three formulas for light, medium, and heavy white sauce. We had to memorize and be tested on them. I'll let you guess how many times I have made white sauce since high school. You got it. Zero.

Is white sauce going to be on the test?

Probably because of the casual way I learned to cook I especially enjoy what I think of as conversational cookbooks. Lately I have been interested in One Big Table: A Portrait of American Cooking by Molly O'Neill.

Coast to Coast Recipes with Stories

Subtitled 600 Recipes from the Nation's Best Home Cooks, Farmers, Fishermen, Pit-Masters, and Chefs, this book has it all. A paragraph about the origin and history accompanies each recipe. Additional sections include topics such as the social history of stoves, raising beef, and An Unrefined History of Bread. This book is so much fun to read that I haven't even begun to cook from it but when I do there are seven fried chicken recipes, all different and all sounding delicious. I'm considering Blackberry Farms Tea-Brined Batter-Fried Picnic Chicken. Or perhaps Reverend Wayne Lee's Piping Hot Chicken. But then I turn the page and find Etsuko Scholz's Panko chicken and I wonder if Jeff Beil's buttered radishes and Big Mama's Whipping Cream Pound Cake would round out my menu. These are hard choices but someone has to make them.

Another wonderful conversational cookbook that I have been taking to bed with me for many nights is Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking: the Time-Honored Ways Are the Best -Over 700 Recipes Show You Why.

Old Fashioned Ways Better Found than Lost.

Allen, who has been called the Julia Child of Ireland, has run the Ballymaloe Cooking School for 25 years.

My school looked nothing like this!

Her book also includes sections explaining subjects related to cooking such as foraging, preserving, cheese and yogurt making. As for the recipes, the variety will be surprising for those who think of Irish cooking as oatmeal, lamb and soda bread. All sorts of game, seafood, vegetables and baked goods are included. And I'll warrant you that you haven't, at least lately, cooked crubeens(salted pig's trotters - see below), gooseberry and elderflower tart, or Bastible bread. Never fear though; the majority of recipes in this book contain readily obtainable ingredients for American cooks. Ms O'Neill and Ms Allen have each performed a great service to cooks by making these recipes available in such a friendly and interesting format. It's almost like having Mama telling me what to do. And yes, she still does that sometimes.

Arbutus Lodge Crubeens from Forgotten Skills of Cooking:

6 crubeens (Salted pig trotters), 1 large onion, 1 large carrot, 1 bay leaf, 6 parsley stems, sprig of thyme, a few peppercorns. Place all ingredients in a large pot, cover with cold water, bring to a boil and skim. Boil gently for 2-3 hours or until the meat is soft and tender and falling off the bone. Eat either warm or cold, with a little mustard if you wish.

Crubeens from Kavey Eats

Holy Moly Cheese Straws - How to Make The BEST!

2010-12-18T16:34:00.000-08:00

Holy Moly Cheese Straws

Confession number one: I’m the guest who bogarted the cheese straws. Confession number two: I stuck a handful into my beautiful white Sunday coat pocket and completely forgot about them until I was sitting in church the next morning. I ate them secretly during the sermon because once I realized they were there they started calling me. “You forgot to eat breakfast,” they wheedled “if your stomach growls your neighbors will hear it.” I broke off one small bit at a time and with almost no appreciable movement I ate every last one. This was particularly difficult because a woman who’s dislike for me is tangible sat next to me and I am hyper aware of her disdain. Confession number three: I wished there had been more cheese straws in my pocket.

Possibly because I was trying to appear very intent on the sermon so as to deflect any possible suspicion that I was (gasp) eating in church, I tried to look like I was paying special attention to the message. Like Ralphie in A Christmas Story, I nodded in agreement with what I thought the pastor was saying: “I’m sure that the guilt you feel is far worse than any punishment you might receive. Now, don't you feel terrible? Don't you feel remorse for what you have done?”.

I’m not sure that was exactly what the pastor was saying because I was concentrating on chewing very quietly. Like Ralphie though I knew adults loved to say things like that but kids knew better. We knew darn well it was always better not to get caught.

I am inordinately fond of cheese straws and these particular ones were especially delicious. They were not homemade – they were from Mook’s Mill or someplace- and to be honest I have never actually eaten homemade cheese straws as delicious as the ones you can pay a premium for from businesses that make them commercially. Why are they so much better? What is the secret? I pondered all these questions in my heart as they passed the offering plate. I also prayed for God to forgive my disrespect and then for the first time ever I thought of all the lifesavers I’ve eaten in church and how God probably doesn’t split hairs.

The whole question of why the expensive prepackaged ones were so much better than homemade really made me curious. I would say that almost without exception, most prepackaged food is inferior to homemade. I started reading the ingredients on the packages of different brands of cheese straws. They looked no different than the recipes I found in cookbooks most of which varied very little. I decided that it had to be a matter of technique.

Cheese straws are a pastry related to piecrust. From the time I could hold a rolling pin I’ve been on the search for the perfect piecrust and have learned many useful lessons. Any pastry, if it is handled too much, will be tough, so the first rule is use a light touch. Overworking is the cause for many baking failures from tough biscuits to piecrusts that are crumbly instead of flaky. The second rule is temperature control. When I worked in the bakery, I added ice to any pastry mixture to bring the temperature down. This helped keep the butter or fat from melting before it went into the oven and assured light and flakey pockets in the croissants and Danishes. The third rule is that cheese , when browned, changes flavor and with cheese straws this is undesirable. The essence of a sharp New York cheddar is lost when any browning occurs, so it is necessary to watch your oven temperature and time when you are baking them as they go from perfect to overcooked almost instantly. Overcooked aren’t inedible, but they aren’t what you want.

To make the perfect cheese straw I started with the same basic ingredients called for in most Southern recipes: Sharp yellow cheddar cheese (extra sharp is the best choice), butter (not margarine like some older recipes call for), flour, salt and cayenne pepper. I use extra sharp New York Cheddar from Cabot that I grate in my food processor. I also use White Lily self-rising flour as using a soft winter wheat flour will give a more tender result. Hard wheat flours like King Arthur and Pillsbury are excellent for bread, but for pastry they do not work as well as soft wheat flour. Using self-rising flour gives the pastry just enough rise without having to add egg.

When mixing the cheese straws you want to start by having half of the butter at room temperature and the other half partially frozen. I take the butter out of the fridge and pop one stick in the freezer for as long as it takes the other to come to room temperature. I mix the shredded cheese with one stick of butter until very creamy, add the salt, pepper and flour and then remove the butter from the freezer and cut it into tiny little squares by cutting each stick in fours and then again in fours and then in very small slices. Then I sprinkle the bits of butter over the cheese mixture and mix it in until just incorporated. You still can see the butter bits throughout the mixture. This is what you want for a very tender and flaky cheese straw.

I run the dough, which will now be easy to handle, through my cookie press and make long ribbons that I bake and cut into straws. Sometimes I get a little wild and use the other cookie shapes but I don’t know, they never seem to taste as good. We eat first with our eyes, they say, and my eyes want straws.

Speaking of eyes, I imagine some will be on me tomorrow morning in church. Since I’m baking cheese straws today, you’ll probably want to look for me in the balcony.

Holy Moly Cheese Straws

1 pound Extra Sharp New York Cheddar Cheese, shredded
1 cup butter, (2 sticks) one softened, one partially frozen
2 ½ cups self-rising White Lily (soft wheat) flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper (if you like less heat cut the pepper in half)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1. Place cheese in large mixing bowl. Add 1 stick (1/2 cup) softened butter. Cream the cheese and butter together until light and fluffy.

2. Whisk pepper and salt into flour and add to cheese mixture. Mix until incorporated.

3. Remove 1 stick of butter from freezer and cut into tiny cubes by cutting stick long ways in fours, turn and repeat and then slice across.

4. Mix butter bits into cheese mixture just until scattered throughout.

5. Place in cookie press with ribbon attachment and press long ribbons onto cookie sheet.

6. Bake for 7 or 8 minutes. Take out when slightly puffy and dry but still pale.
7. Rest on cookie sheet for 5-10 minutes before removing to cooling rack.

Store in cookie tin with wax paper.

Ask Doctor Alcohol - Holiday Wine Confusion? Avoid furry critter mascots.

2010-12-15T13:17:00.000-08:00

Dear Doctor Alcohol
Every time I go into a wine store I am baffled by the stacks of wine and rows of bottles that I see and it seems that the more I look, the more confused I become. I end up either picking something I've seen a million times that is going to taste exactly the same as it always does or I pick by price and it is a crap shoot whether I get something, well, crappy. Do you have any advice for me as I need to go buy wine for gifts? Could you give me some buzz words to mention to the staff to make me sound like I know what I am doing so they don't direct met to Bartles and Jaymes? Do you have any suggestions for widely available but interesting bottles?

Thanks

Oeno Wannabee

Dear Mr. Wannabee,

I think learning about wine is akin to learning a foreign language. Some of us want to read Dante’s Divine Comedy in perfect Italian, and some us just want to know how to say shit in Spanish. In the same way, popping in for a bottle of cheap plonk is all some drinkers aspire to, and in a way, there’s nothing wrong with that. The world would be devoid of McRibs and Miley Cyrus if everyone had great taste.

red pins indicate dual McRib and Miley Cyrus sightings

Wine makers and merchants acknowledge this duality and contribute to the glut of garbage out there. Often it’s easier to sell a case of wine with a furry critter on the label that a single bottle of a craft made pinot noir that sells for the same price.

So what’s a neophyte to do? When I was an intern on the road to becoming a full- fledged doctor of alcohol I asked people who seemed to enjoy wine where they liked to shop. Sommeliers are a good resource also. Once you get a few recommendations, shop there with some regularity so you can get a feel for the strengths and weaknesses of the place and they can get to know your palate as well.

Another good strategy is to buy based on the context of how the wine will be served. Old world wine is frequently drier, more acidic, and lower in alcohol than its new world counterparts. These characteristics often make them shine at the dinner table but wallflowers at a cocktail party. Conversely, if you try to pair Yellow Tail with food you’re in for a fruity, oaky disappointment.

Are there Clif notes for all this learning? You bet. If you want to look like you’ve been studying for years, consider buying wines based on vintage. Napa Cabernets in 2007, Oregon Pinot Noir in 2008, and Beaujolais (not nouveau) in 2009 have all been hyped recently and in most cases are worth the buzz.

Another tip is to watch what good restaurants pour by the glass (but don’t order them). These are often food or cocktail-hour friendly, widely available, and most important, cheap. The reason to avoid them at the restaurant is that the markup is anywhere from 200-500% and they might be sitting open for long periods of time.

Finally, keep in mind that many wineries have an unadvertised second label. In some cases you could save a bundle and act like you really know what you’re talking about if you asked for a Jayson instead of a Pahlmeyer. For a nice list see here.

But in the spirit of the upcoming holidays, here is my gift to you, dear reader. A few specifics:

This time of year sparkling wine is a great gift. The Roederer Estate NV Brut is always reliable and about $20. (NV stands for non-vintage). You could also go for NV Scharffenberger Mendocino County Brut Rosé, another American classic for $25.

An overlooked spot for value and wine geekery is Riesling. The bad ones are always too sweet but they are world-class wines when balanced with acidity (and low alcohol). Ask your wine merchant for something from St.-Urbans-Hof

The Oregon Willamette Valley - A treasure box for many wine gems

Remember the Oregon 2008 pinot noir tip above? Try 2008 Adelsheim Willamette Valley ($30) or 2008 Cristom Mount Jefferson Cuvee Eola-Amity Hills ($30). In fact, Oregon remains a hidden gem for pinot all around, and many bottles sell for fewer than 30 bucks.

For a Cabernet drinker the 2007 Educated Guess is a wine structured enough to sell for 2-3 times its $20 price tag. (See the vintage thing again?) Columbia Crest’s Horse Heaven Hills Line is always reliable and inexpensive.

Hopefully the above tips will keep you from feeling like you’re trapped in Dante’s Inferno, looking at the gates of hell and reading: Lactate ogne speranza, voi ch'entrate. Which of course means, “Abandon all hope - Ye Who Enter Here”

THE CORNUCOPIA PROJECT!

2010-12-12T17:35:00.000-08:00

I am very flattered to be included in a national recap of what we are cooking and eating across the United States for the holidays. Check out the cool Cornucopia project and look state by state at all the many different ways we celebrate our thankfulness and share our love of food and cooking with our family and friends.

While the Cat's Away....Duralex Kids Like to Play

2010-12-09T13:25:00.000-08:00

This is our latest video made featuring the children and Duralex Kids Glassware. Duralex is a French Glassware company that makes virtually unbreakable glassware - I have my original set of Picardi glasses that I received as a wedding gift over 16 years ago which says a lot considering how clumsy I am!

What is so special about Duralex beside how durable it is? Its completely tempered. That means it holds up in temperature extremes. In Europe, these glasses are used for hot coffee. They are also found in the cafes across the Continent and in the schools where the tradition is to check the bottom of the glass for the number on the bottom (each glass is stamped with a number). The child that draws the glass with the highest number has to remove everyone else's dirty dishes. I think that is a playful example of how creative children can be.

The beautiful and durable Picardi Duralex Glass

I got rid of every bit of plastic dishware that we owned in the past year or so because of the scares about BPA and chemical leakage. We use Duralex exclusively now. They make cereal bowls, plates, small serving bowls and a wide number of sizes and shapes of glassware. For more information, check out the Duralex website.

Foodlady Librarian - Haunted by the Ghost of Bad Cooks Past

2010-12-08T12:17:00.000-08:00

I blame my endless fascination with cooking and food writing on my mother. From birth, I was surrounded by cookbooks. I remember fondly how as a small child I ate my meals sitting on top of Larousse’s Gastronomique for my booster seat. My mother, who is in most other ways a perfectly reasonable and pleasant person, is addicted to buying and reading cookbooks which can be found spread throughout her large country house including the guest rooms where they trouble the most disciplined houseguests into rising up from bed in the middle of the night to raid her kitchen pantry. She is the purveyor of an extensive and well-rounded personal library of cooking and food literature although her patrons are quite lackadaisical about returning items from her collection. It would be hard to collect fines from your own children, I imagine.

She has kindly offered to regularly guest post for me to tell you about her life as it relates to cookbooks and food writing both current and old. As a career librarian, she often helps me find the answers to obscure food and recipe related questions and routinely introduces wonderful new (and old) food writers and recipe developers. I guess this makes me a cookbook "enabler".

My kitchen skills were learned from two of the best and one of the worst cooks in the world. Their influence varies and sometimes I feel the spectre of my great aunt Josephine hovering at my shoulder.

Bad cooking influences do play a part in my kitchen

That's when I forget the careful training of my mother and grandmother. Last week, for example, I burned the top of my lavish butter, cream cheese and six-egg pound cake. So I thought I would slice off the burnt top, turn the cake over - it was a bundt cake anyway - and make a gorgeous caramel frosting to hide the damage. Sounds good in theory but I was unaware that my candy thermometer had malfunctioned and would not go over 150 degrees. I cooked the frosting and cooked it and cooked it , giving up only when I burned my fingers in the steam while trying to hold an instant thermometer in the boiling lava. Of course it had not cooked enough so I nearly burned out the motor of my ancient mixer trying to achieve the creamy finish specified in the recipe. "Too bad," I thought and dumped the whole mess into the center hole of the bundt cake from which it promptly began to ooze out all over the counter.

Hillbilly Cake Carrier - extra frosting not included

For consolation I decided to indulge myself with a long sulk in a hot bath. As soon as I submerged myself I remembered that I could have repaired the frosting by beating in enough powdered sugar to achieve the correct consistency. Or I could have saved the frosting to heat up later as a delicious caramel sauce. Thanks, Aunt Jo, who managed to burn everything possible, to boil over every pot on the stove, and to cook the strings and ends along with the green beans. You who fed me toast and applesauce for breakfast and who gave the farmhands green beans and cornbread for lunch on threshing days. You who cut my Three Musketeers into seven pieces - one for each day of the week. (Guess how long that lasted!)

My caramel frosting recipe, which was absolutely wonderful when I made it with a new thermometer, came from a great new cookbook. I have been impressed with THE SOUTHERN FOODWAYS ALLIANCE COMMUNITY COOKBOOK, edited by Sara Roahen and John T. Edge.

170 True Southern Community Recipes

I can't agree with Alton Brown, who wrote the foreword, about the necessity for a spiral binding as they wear out too fast for me but that's not significant . This is a collection of all sorts of recipes, both simple and complex, gathered from home cooks as well as professional chefs. Call me prejudiced - I've been a lot of places in my time - but I don't think there's much better cooking than southern in the world. I can't wait to try the pimento cheese hushpuppies or the limpin' Susan, a cousin of Hoppin' John. And the bacon forest is on my bucket list.

I'm not hard to shop for, but nobody seems to want to get me this for Christmas

Now if I can get my hands on enough greens, grits and grease I'm going to cook my way through this book. The Alliance Web site is www.southernfoodways.org. Their goal is to document, study and celebrate the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. An impressive list of contributors is located at the end of the book. You will recognize such names as Matt and Ted Lee, Louis Osteen, Craig Claiborne, Bill Neal and our own Allan Benton, hog curer extrordinaire of Monroe County, Tennessee. If you aren't familiar with Allan you should read Gourmet's article here. Taste buds get ready.

Pancakes with a side of Motherly Guilt

2010-12-06T06:09:00.000-08:00

My middle child is the world’s pickiest eater. His favorite expression is “Yuck, I hate that” and he is as ornery as a toad when it comes to trying something new. I decided long before my children were born that they would all be good eaters. While I was pregnant with my oldest I even joined a forum of mothers on babycenter.com where we discussed our commitment to making sure our children would eat all the foods we loved too, like Unami sushi and gazpacho. We agreed that at the start it is all equally new to a child so why should they find it any more objectionable to eat oysters than chicken? Limit sugar and they’ll never miss it, right?

Who needs a Happy Meal when you can choose this, right kids?

I am now certain that my children came out of the ether and into life with their own convictions about food, fully formed and buoyed by some misguided prenatal intuition that I mean to poison them.

The conventional advice is that you should offer your children new foods over and over again until they accept it. Susan B. Roberts, a Tufts University nutritionist and co-author of the book “Feeding Your Child for Lifelong Health,” suggested a “rule of 15” — offer it this many times to get them to eat it. I don’t know much about Ms. Roberts but I do know my children. What they believe if I offer a food again and again is that it is nauseating; Familiarity breeds contempt.

I do admit that out of desperation I hide and disguise food. I don’t go so far as Jessica Seinfeld, mixing white bean puree into cupcakes, but I am not above grinding vegetables into pap and calling the green specks “spice”. Two of mine accept this. One does not. Tommy is a born skeptic. And my trickery does catch up with my conscience. As I’ve written before, I remember what it is like to be tricked into eating.

I really hope that someday they will like all my cooking. While I do cook plenty of plain food that they sort of eat (reluctantly), there is one dish that I make out of shear exhaustion from being worn down by their miserable wails of “not that again!”. Pancakes.

There is nothing inherently healthy about a pancake. It’s remorselessly made from bleached flour, sugar, oil, milk and egg, fried in butter, slathered in butter and soaked with syrup. My children won’t even eat real maple syrup. If I have no maple flavored syrup they go straight to powered sugar. I’ve tried the healthy pancake mix method, the fruit on top method, the fruit stirred in method and the yogurt topped method. Each time, the dog had a great supper but the children boycotted eating. I’m lucky if I can get them to drink orange juice and to eat a small bowl of unsweetened applesauce.

But the guilty part comes from two places. One, I state above. But the other is that I really, secretly love pancakes. Love them so much I want to marry them love. So, if you can feel guilty for making so many dinners that your children hate and then feel guilty for serving them one they love and that is terrible for everyone then I am that mother.

Which brings me to tell you about the most delicious pancake recipe in the entire world. It is from a box. You add buttermilk, eggs and oil and bake them in cake rings. They rise about an inch high and are truly unbelievable.

Cake rings assure tall, fluffy pancakes nearly 1 inch thick

The mix is made by a restaurant in Chattanooga, Tennessee called Aretha Frankensteins (home of these delicious pancakes) and sold in a variety of places including my friend Marcy Kelch’s store Mia Cucina where you can also buy the cake rings for perfect pancakes. It looks like you can also buy the mix direct from Frankenstein Mills -the website for these pancakes which are called “crack cakes” because once you try them you will be hooked.

Move over Aunt Jemima

Under Pressure to Make Supper? Part 3 on Pressure Cooking

2010-12-02T15:24:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the most frequent question I’m asked after "is that a perm?" is how do I use a pressure cooker for my recipes at home?

What my hair looks like in the a.m.

Understanding some terms about pressure cooking is key for successful pressure cooked recipes. The first key technique to understand is “timing”. Remember that pressure cooking reduces your overall cooking time by two-thirds so you need a lot less time to cook foods than you would by traditional methods. Almost all recipes for pressure cooking involve timing the recipe from the point it reaches “high pressure”. If you have a recipe that calls for 7 minutes at high pressure, mashed potatoes for example, the actual recipe would include both the time to bring the potatoes to high pressure, perhaps 3 minutes, plus the 7 minutes at pressure. This matters because depending on the volume it will take varying amounts of time. Using a timer is important for making sure you do not overcook a dish, but if you undercook a dish you can always return it to high pressure for a few extra minutes. It is very common when cooking meat that you might check it and find it needs a few more minutes. You would simply lock the pressure cooker lid again and return it to high pressure.

You'll lose at this "High-Low" but not with pressure cooking

The second key technique is “high to low”. A pressure cooker recipe generally calls for you to place the pan over high heat until it comes to pressure and then reduce to low heat. Keep in mind that you have locked the heat in the pan and the contents are under pressure so that when the pan is heated you no longer need much of an external heat source to maintain the pressure. Once you have reached high pressure, turn the stove down to low and it will maintain the internal temperature quite easily. I generally turn my flame to low simmer and maintain the pressure for the duration of the cooking time.

Releasing pressure this way won't fill your belly

The third key technique is pressure release. With older pressure cookers, there were two ways to complete a recipe with pressure release. The first was to remove the pressure by carrying the pan over to the sink and running the lid under cold water to quickly drop the internal temperature. The other way was to let the pressure drop naturally by turning off the heat and allowing the cooker to gradually drop its temperature on its own accord. These days, spring-valve pressure cookers have a quick release button on the lid of the cooker that allow you to remove the pressure on the stove top without moving the pan.

Shredded Beef Tacos with Cilantro Cream

It is also useful to know that when converting a recipe for a pressure cooker use, the amount of liquid necessary is greatly reduced because you do not lose steam in the cooking process. An example of this would be my homemade beef stew. Using a traditional method of cooking I need between 6 and 8 cups of liquid. When I use my pressure cooker, my liquid is reduced to 2 cups.

Most recipes will work quite well in a pressure cooker. Some of my very favorite dishes on weeknights made super fast include pressure cooker paella, risotto, shredded beef tacos, chicken curry, country style ribs (you get the tenderest ribs which you then quick grill - yum - we are having these for dinner tonight!), pinto beans, mashed potatoes, rice (7 minutes!!), bread pudding, cheesecake, chocolate pots and ANY stock you want to make fast for homemade soup.

Dad Cooks Dinner has a great post on making stock

Pressure cooking is like any other type of cooking method. If you know the principles, you can easily cook with this versatile and super quick piece of cooking equipment and enjoy fast food – the healthy, homemade kind – all week long.

Part 4 of this series will include some recipe basics, useful tips and a recipe for super easy chocolate bread pudding with raspberry sauce. Y'all come back now, ya hear!

Introducing Doctor Alcohol and a recipe for spiked Apple Cider

2010-11-30T07:35:00.000-08:00

Call it five-thirty on a Monday night. My children, crashing around the kitchen like cymbals since they burst through the door two hours ago, are the chorus from a Greek tragedy interspersing wailing and lamentations oven my chosen selection for dinner while I fake cheerful questions about everyone’s day. Outside the dark kitchen window, the wind whips cold rain into a froth of icy rivulets than rush down the driveway beneath the car bearing expired tags and a burned-out headlight bulb. There is no wine in the house. No beer, either. Bottles of vulgar Marsala, dry vermouth, a sad finger of Glen something or other and a new bottle of Calvados, a gift from a friend, stand before me. Poor nerve -wracked mother of three boys; One evening cocktail would be so lovely. But for as much as I know about food, I know little to nothing about alcohol. Enter my friend with his (responsible) knowledge of the world of mixed drinks. He, with his mastery of wine and his in-depth scholarly pursuit of the study of spirits is my resource. I call upon him to solve my quandary. What can I mix? And, with that conversation, an idea is born. You too, my friends and readers, may call upon him with your questions. And so, I introduce to you my professor of mixology, the Ph.D. of party punch, the intellectual bartender or as I know him -Doctor Alcohol.

Dear Doctor Alcohol,

I've always loved the idea of hot holiday punch with alcohol but I hate it when a drink is either too sweet or too overpowering with alcohol flavor or fumes. I want to make an apple spiced hot cider for my holiday party but I don't know what kind of alcohol to use? What do you like to serve your guests when it comes to hot toddies and can you tell me a little bit more about how to mix up party punch?

Warm and Cheerful Regards,

A Fan

Dear Fan
This is certainly the time of year for warm fires, party punches, and Sarah Palin’s Alaska!

The use of apples to make alcohol goes back centuries. Anywhere it was too cold to grow grapes you could bet apples were fermented to make hard cider, or distilled to make brandy. The early colonists here in America left their barrels of cider out during the winter and removed the ice to concentrate the alcohol. This “applejack” was the fuel that warmed many a long bleak winter in the northeast—the colonial day equivalent of sweat pants and snuggies.

Warmer than a Snuggie and makes your couch buddy more attractive- not less!

That said making a delicious hot cider holiday drink has its challenges. When you warm a spirited drink, you speed the evaporation of the alcohol and get an accentuated “burn” in the nose. Further, warming the drink enhances the inherent sweetness of the cider so balancing it properly is a real test. Rum is the traditional spirit to pair with apple cider, though Calvados (apple brandy) is often used as well.

There is a revival of sorts in hip bars across America serving elaborate punches and David Wondrich , the drinks editor for Esquire, has a new book on punches that’s worth a look here.

But punches at a party are a gamble. If it’s not outta this world you’re left with 2 gallons of sweet, spicy hooch that you can’t do much with, short of loading up the kids so they’ll sleep through Rudolph landing on the rooftop.

With all of these challenges to overcome, how about a sparkling hard cider to serve your holiday guests? Eric Asimov, the wine critic for the New York Times recently expounded on the virtues of this overlooked alternative here.

Or, for a more robust alternative to sparkling cider check out Clear Creek Distillery in Parkdale, Oregon. Their lineup of fruit based spirits is world class and now fairly widely available. The apple brandy packs a wallop but is remarkable for its lovely apple flavor and fierce intensity. The good Dr. Alcohol recommends this kind of apple a day to keep the winter chill away.

But, if you must serve a warm punch, a nice version is reproduced below. I would probably leave out the brown sugar or reduce it significantly. Cheers!

Hot Apple Cider with Rum
Recipe courtesy Emeril Lagasse, 2002

Serves:
2 quarts, about 8 servings

Ingredients
1 apple
2 teaspoons whole cloves
1 orange, thinly sliced
2 quarts apple cider
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 teaspoon allspice
Pinch grated nutmeg
1 cup dark rum
Cinnamon sticks, garnish

Directions
Stud the apple with the cloves. In a medium pot, combine the studded apple and remaining ingredients except the rum. Slowly bring to a simmer over low heat. Simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and add the rum. Discard the apple. Ladle into mugs and garnish each with a cinnamon stick. Serve immediately

Buying Time by Buying Into Pressure Cooking - Part 2

2010-11-28T11:05:00.000-08:00

The more the merrier

We visited out of town recently and attended a church service that was not inspirational. The tiny church with its long-winded preacher and choir of warbling little old ladies had the boys squirming in the pew anxiously awaiting either the end of church or the end of time, neither of which felt like would arrive before we all turned to stone. It is difficult enough to take the boys anywhere much less a place where the only distractions are silent tic-tac-toe and offering a one dollar bill for the collection plate as the ushers round up Sunday’s take. After the service, as we drove off to find a suitable place for lunch, I complained about the endless tedium of the morning’s message and the poor choice of hymns selected. “Although Mom,” said Tommy sagely, “you have to admit it was a lot of church for a dollar”.

What do you get these days for a dollar? Not much. Which leads me to the second part of my piece on pressure-cooking: how to buy a pressure cooker. There are many different brands, models, and sizes of pressure cookers on the market today. The first rule of thumb in buying any piece of cooking equipment is to buy the best you can afford. With pressure cookers, like any other cooking equipment, you do get what you pay for. When deciding on any piece of cooking equipment, keep in mind value over time. If you buy a cheap piece and hate it, you've probably wasted money, time and food. I justify buying quality cookware because I know the performance and durability will make it more likely that I will use it all the time.

There are many things that account for price differences between brands. At the bottom of the heap are inexpensive pressure cookers in the $30- $60 range that will have locking pressure regulators with thin metal sides and bottoms. These types of cookers are the most temperamental to use as the thinness of the material causes uneven heat distribution and hot spots over time.

Holding the family jewel - my old Mirro Jiggle-Top

The next generation of “jiggle-tops” like your mother owned are really the second tier of pressure cookers. Most of these pressure cookers are in the $60 - $150 price range. It is quite easy to know when you are at high pressure with these as you can hear the loud sputter of the regulator at pressure.

The most advanced type of cooker today is the spring-valve pressure cooker. While expensive when compared to the basic models, these are constructed with high quality stainless steel, thick multi-ply bottoms and stay-cool handles. Many are guaranteed for life. One very nice feature about the spring-valve cookers is how quiet they remain while in use and how easy it is to see your pressure cooker is maintaining pressure. These generally range in price from $150 to $400. While I have used many different pressure cookers including an old Mirro brand given to me by my Mother-In-Law, I do teach pressure cooking classes with Fissler pressure cookers for Fissler and I believe they offer a great value for price and performance.

What accounts for the difference in prices? In a word, engineering. In the least expensive pans, besides the smallest amount of material being used, the pans are often poorly constructed out of inferior materials that do not hold up well over time. Components of the pans are often made of cheap plastic parts that break easily. In the mid range, you can find a decent quality pressure cooker but the materials used for these are often inferior to the best quality cookers and the component parts in the cooker are subject to more frequent replacement, as they are not as durable. One feature in many pressure cookers that I find especially irksome is the placement of the vent on the lid. Many are designed to vent steam through the center of the lid creating a possible hazard. Most of the premium pressure cookers vent away from the cook. When shopping for a new pressure cooker you may want to keep the versatility of the pan in mind, too. My favorite pressure cooker comes with a glass lid so I can also use the pan as a soup or stock pot when I am not pressure cooking. With limited kitchen space, I appreciate having a pressure cooker that can serve in other capacities.

One other consideration when shopping is the size you need. Keep in mind that for pressure-cooking, you need to keep the top 1/3rd of the pot empty so that the steam can build and the contents will not block the vents. You will need to allow for this in your recipes, so the size of the pressure cooker you choose needs to take into account the number of people you generally feed.

The third part of this series will cover how to use a pressure cooker and resources for more information.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Pressure Cooker?

2010-11-24T07:13:00.000-08:00

With the exception of a French chef’s mandoline, no single piece of cooking equipment is more feared and less understood that the pressure cooker. “ Don’t they explode?” , one friend asked as I made a quick risotto. “I hear they’re very dangerous,” she said as if we were discussing a venomous snake or Charlie Sheen.

Pressure cooking is not this dangerous!

In my travels I find this is the overarching perception about pressure cooking. I sometimes think people come to my pressure cooking classes just to see if something blows up! The truth is pressure cookers are totally safe and, more importantly, they’re a big time saver.

Maybe you were the child shooed out of the kitchen when your mother used her pressure cooker. Perhaps you saw the beans on the ceiling from the pressure cooker explosion 40 years ago. Old pressure cookers, the types with one steam release valve, could spew soup if the valve clogged or the cook left the pot unattended. But today’s pressure cookers have features built into them that assure even the most novice cook they are easy to use and will enhance available meal options when time is short.

Food illustrator Johanna Kindvall from her blog gets the general misperception

It never occurred to me to be afraid of pressure cookers. My mother and grandmother, with children to raise and dinner to prepare after long days working, often used pressure cooking to put healthy, homemade meals on the table in half an hour. The first meal I ever made by myself was made in a pressure cooker. I thought the “jiggle, jiggle” sound of the gage the most familiar of sounds.

Tipper from The Blind Pig and the Acorn grew up around the jiggler too!

Long gone is the “jiggler” . Now pressure cookers have integrated, clog-proof valves that regulate pressure and show the pressure level. Features like these are why pressure cookers are so handy. Once you’ve locked the lid in place and turned on the heat the liquid inside the pan begins to boil. Unlike regular pans where the liquid escapes as steam, in a pressure cooker the steam builds inside the pan. As it does, the pressure builds heating the inside of the pan. The result is that the food inside the pan gets much hotter than normal and because you have increased the temperature you have decreased the cooking time. Pressure cookers reduce cooking times by 2/3rds!

The results for recipes using this method are excellent. Fork tender pulled pork butt bar-b-que in 35 minutes is simple and delicious. You can make risotto in a pressure cooker in about 25 minutes and only stir for 3. Desserts, too, are fabulous in a pressure cooker. Have you ever baked a cheesecake that cracked in your oven? You don’t have that problem in a pressure cooker. Steam envelops the cake and drops slowly while cooling, allowing it to gently settle. The result is a light, creamy texture and no cracks!

No cracks just like this pretty cheesecake!

Part 2 will continue on what to look for when shopping for a pressure cooker.

Chicken Tamales with Roasted Salsa Rojo

2010-11-21T17:59:00.000-08:00

Chicken Tamales with Roasted Salsa Rojo

By the time I was nine my mother had lost so many library books she had to either become a librarian or go to jail. Each Thursday night she worked late and my father was in charge of dinner.

My Father was in the Air Force before I was born and was stationed all over the world. In the service he developed a love of super fiery foods and brought this great love back to the United States. My mother has never shared his taste for hot food. So when Thursdays rolled around he took the opportunity to get his spice on and piled my brother, sister, and me into the car and drove to an isolated, dimly lit restaurant in a questionable part of town for the only ethnic food that Knoxville, Tennesee had to offer – La Cabra. The Goat.

La Cabra was a dark, windowless restaurant with a worn red carpet and black velvet paintings of nude women, desert sunsets, and Elvis wearing a halo. The tables wobbled on stacked sugar packets and were sticky with spilled beer. The menu was a single paper sheet with no further descriptions than tacos, enchiladas, burritos, pozole rojo, tostadas, and tamales. Chips were served, accompanied not with salsa, but with the hottest of Mexican hot sauces - El Yucateco – a red habanero sauce which came in a bottle featuring an intimidating picture of the knock-out pepper on its yellow label.

Jesus looks doubtful about this.

The game began the moment we sat down. “Bet you can’t eat this,” he’d tease. “I’ll just put a little drop on the corner of your chip but I bet you won’t be able to eat it”. He’d pass us each a chip with just the tiniest of drops on the edge. “Stick your tongue on it", he’d coax. We’d slowly bring the chip close to our mouths playing along with him, touching our tongues to the sauce, feeling the shock of the burn as it lit up our mouths. And so we would sit, my brother, sister, and me, with our dad daring us through a basket of chips until our mouths were so numb we could hardly taste the tamales that followed.

Tamales. Just the thought makes my eyes and mouth water.

Tamales are to Mexican food what BBQ is to the South. In his book, Mexico One Plate at a Time, Rick Bayless writes that tamales are “part of Mexico’s collective consciousness…a celebration of its own… carried into the middle of all parties”. Tamales are not at all hard to make. The ingredients are fairly simple – a base of masa, or finely ground corn meal, and a filling of chicken, pork, or beef. As Mr. Bayless tells it tamales are great for parties or a “tamalada”, a casual way for friends to gather in the kitchen and cook together. I love the idea of a tamalada with a salad and a pot of black beans for sides.

One food blog I follow, A Spicy Perspective, offers a nice southern twist on the tamale. In Spicy’s version, Tamale Bites, the masa dough is rolled into balls and shaped into small cups filled with a delicious beef and pepper mixture baked and served with fresh crumbled Mexican cheese. What an attractive and easy way to serve a bite of tamale at your next holiday party.

Finally my friend Marcus, owner of Distinctive-Decor.com and one of the nicest gourmet stores in Oklahoma, teaches a class on authentic Mexican food with a variation of salsa that brings to mind the heat and flavor of the Mexican food of my childhood.

So with a tip of the cap to Rick Bayless, Sommor at Spicy Perspective, and Marcus, whose recipe for Roasted Salsa Rojo is listed below, here is my take on tamales.

The ingredients are not complicated.

Tamalada Chicken Tamales

24 corn husks – this is an ingredient you will probably have to visit the local Mexican Grocery Store to find but you could also order on line from www.mexgrocer.com
Cooking twine – 24 pieces cut 5” long.

Tamale
4 cups mesa flour – this is a finely ground corn meal you can find at the grocery store
1 cup butter, softened
½ cup vegetable oil
1 ¼ cup chicken stock (you’ll need 2 ¼ cup total for recipe)
1 ½ teaspoon baking powder
Filling
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 chopped onion
1 can diced jalapenos
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 cup chicken stock
2 Tablespoons mesa
½ cup half and half
2 cups cooked, shredded chicken breast
2 cups shredded cheese (I use a mixture of jack and cheddar)

1. Soak corn husks in cold water. Weigh them down with a small bowl or plate so they are submerged to soak.
2. In mixer, combine mesa flour, baking powder, butter and oil and mix until well combined. Add 1 ¼ cup chicken stock to mixture and mix well. It should have the consistency to hold together when squeezed.
3. In a large skillet add the oil and heat. Add the onion and sauté until translucent. Add jalapenos, cumin, chili powder and sauté for 30 seconds.
4. Stir in chicken stock (1 cup) and mix well. Add mesa and stir.
5. Bring mixture to low boil and cook for about 2 minutes until it begins to thicken. Remove from heat and add half and half, chicken and cheese.
6. Stir until melted.
7. Take one corn husk from water and place on work surface with narrow end facing you.
8. Using your hands, scoop up about 2 Tablespoons of mesa dough and spread on husk. Flatten with fingertips.
9. Spoon about 1 ½ tablespoons of filling on top of mesa dough.

Press the dough flat

10. Wrap up tamales and tie closed.

fold up and tie leaving end open

Instructions to wrap and steam tamales:

1. From side to side, fold one side over the other.
2. Fold up the end and tie with a string leaving one end open.

Place open end facing up to steam

3. Stack with open ends facing up in a vegetable steamer or heat proof colander that will fit into a large pot.
4. When all the tamales are in the steamer, cover them with one layer of leftover husks. If you don’t have enough tamales to keep them standing fill the gaps with wadded up aluminum foil.
5. Add water in the bottom of pan – enough to fill bottom but not touch steamer contents. Bring to a boil and reduce heat to low boil.
6. Set the lid in place and steam over constant medium heat for 1 ¼ hours.

Girl and Boy Coronas

7. Unwrap and Serve.

Pressure Cooker Tamale instructions:

1. Follow the instructions above steps 1 through 6.
2. Bring pressure cooker to high heat and cook for 27 minutes.
3. Rest pressure cooker off the heat for 5 minutes.
4. Serve.

Roasted Salsa Rojo – From Cooking with Marcus

This makes a perfect accompaniment to my Chicken Tamales

1 onion, peeled & cut in half
4 large jalapenos
4-6 cloves garlic, unpeeled
2-4 tomatoes
8-20 hot dried red chilies like chile Japon
1-1/2 cups water, hot, not boiling
Dash of vinegar
Juice of I lemon
½ tsp. Mexican Oregano, crumbled
1 tsp. salt
1-2 cans (15 Oz.) of tomatoes (roasted if you can find them)

Place jalapenos, onion, garlic, and red chilies in fry pan Toast a few minutes then remove red chilies to hot water in a small saucepan to reconstitute. Continue toasting until all vegetables are charred a bit. You may need to remove garlic first to prevent from burning. Peel garlic. Chop all other vegetables rough chop. Place in food processor.
(When red chilies are reconstituted, about 20 minutes, drain and add to food processor. Reserve water as you may wish to thin salsa with it.)
Add salt and Oregano. Pulse until mixture is processed evenly. Do not puree.
Add tomatoes, pulse to process evenly.
Add lemon & vinegar, pulse to blend.
Taste and add salt if needed.

Scratching the Surface of Plain County Cooking – Homemade Buttermilk Biscuits

2010-11-17T18:24:00.000-08:00

Homemade Buttermilk Biscuits

I never took home economics high school.

I took hunter’s safety.

“Why would you do that? “, you ask. “You love to cook. You were practically born in the kitchen. Why in the world would you pick rifles over recipes?

One word.

Boys.

All the boys took Hunter’s Safety. All the girls (except this one) took Home Ec. So, while the girls were off learning how to make biscuits and thread a sewing machine, I was off with the boys at target practice happily learning to ready, aim and fire.

Another more practical reason why I never took Home Ec. was because I was raised in Home Ec. My Grandmother taught Home Economics for over twenty years to nearly every girl in the county (and a few curious boys). As with most great teachers, she never stopped teaching even when outside the classroom. Any time spent with her in the kitchen was a cooking lesson. We might call them “hands on” lessons, since the first requirement was for you to do it, so you could know how it is done. To this day I have to do it to know it.

In her home economics class, the first cooking lesson taught and the first one she taught me at home was how to make homemade biscuits. In East Tennessee, like most of the South, biscuits with meals are commonplace. Discussions abound about whom in these parts makes the best biscuit. For a young person with no cooking experience, homemade biscuits were an easy place to start.

We don’t have Home Economics classes any more and so much the poorer we are for that as a society. Becoming competent in the kitchen is about so much more than cooking and eating. Being taught to cook by someone who cares about the subject is of great value. Think about the lessons in a simple biscuit recipe. Measure. Compare. Use ½ cup shortening in one recipe and 2 tablespoons in another. What happens? Why? How many biscuits can you make if you use a recipe with 2 cups of flour? How many could you make with a bag of flour? How much do biscuits cost to make? How much to buy ready made? Are there nutrients in biscuits? Should you eat biscuits every day? Why not? Could you make them healthy? How?

We still go out to lunch occasionally, my Grandmother and I. She’s in her nineties now but still loves to visit. Inevitably, when we are at lunch someone will approach her like she’s a local celebrity. “Miss Clark,” they’ll say. “You taught me how to make biscuits. I like to cook because of you.”

I like to cook because of her too. And… I’m a great shot.

Buttermilk Biscuits with Sourwood Honey - my favorite!

Home Economics 101 Buttermilk Biscuits

Here in Tennessee we like the tang and crumb that buttermilk gives to biscuits. Sweet milk biscuits are also popular and all you would need to do for that is substitute sweet milk for buttermilk and remove the baking soda.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

2 cups all-purpose flour – use soft wheat flour like White Lily for best results
½ teaspoon salt
2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ cup shortening
½ stick cold butter
½ cup buttermilk

1. Spoon flour into measuring cup (baking rule- flour packs easily so spoon and measure and don’t dip and sweep)
2. Add salt, baking powder and soda. Whisk together.
3. Cut in (mash the fat and flour together) shortening with a pastry fork until the crumbs are about the size of baby peas. It should look like picture A
4. Cut in the cold butter, but only until you have larger flakes of flour covered fat- it should look a little chunky like picture B

A. See how the little lumps look sort of like peas

B. Now the mixture looks lumpier. Is lumpier a word?

5. Mix in buttermilk until blended.
6. Flour a work surface and turn out dough. It should be fairly sticky. Flour the surface and fold. Repeat twice more.
7. Roll out to ½ inch thick. Cut straight down with sharp biscuit cutter. Bake immediately on ungreased baking sheet or in cast iron skillet (my preferred way).

Buttermilk Biscuits with baked in butter, brushed on butter and spread with butter. Did I mention the butter?

Gourmet Gadgets- Crafty Homemade Gifts (but not by me)

2010-11-14T18:22:00.000-08:00

Lisa Orgler - food artist

I inwardly cringe at the thought of arts and crafts.

I’m hopeless with a needle and thread. My self-hemmed pants look uneven and the inside stitches gape so if I don’t carefully point my toes I catch them and rip out what I’ve labored to tack up.

I am a terrible painter. My attempts of visual artistic expression are limited to stick figures and puffy trees. I can’t doodle. I once tried scrapbooking and ended up cropping off part of my index finger. I dread it when my children bring home school projects because the diorama in their dreams ends up a paper and glue soaked catastrophe.

Humiliating.

Lisa Orgler recipe cards $13.50

I am drawn to people with excellent craft skills and I love to give homemade Christmas gifts as long as they’re made in someone else’s home. Here are a few I’ve found:

Lisa Orgler is a food artist and blogger. Her blog is called The Lunchbox Project. She started her blog by drawing a food item each day for a year. She draws food better than most of us can make it. Her prints are charming and original. I can’t wait for her upcoming cupcake print to be issued. Food art and cupcakes? Brilliant. Lisa’s work is for sale on Etsy.

Perfect teacher's gift - $7.50 each

I love kitchen linens and I constantly switch mine out to match the season. Kathy Mizzi, “the towel lady”, makes wonderful, homemade kitchen linens and aprons that she designs and sews herself. Neither mass produced and nor expensive Kathy makes darling designs for everyday and holidays too.

Do you have a sweet little dog and you want his white colored fur on a blue towel with a red Santa hat? Done. A personalized list of your family on a “Santa’s Gift List” tea towel? Done. A cute way to present a friend a bottle of wine – she has that too. You can visit her website at www.towellady.com

That's Gussie in the middle.

Twisted tasting spoon $27

Finally, when I teach people how to cook I always remind them how important it is to taste for seasoning as you cook. The best way to taste anything is from your own special wooden tasting spoon – wood doesn’t get hot so you don’t have to worry so much about burning your mouth. I found these twisted handle ones handcrafted from Rich Fasel from Out Numbered Novelties on Etsy.

Bunko Belles

2010-11-12T15:59:00.000-08:00

Every second Friday I get together with my Bunko Belles. There are twelve of us in the club and while a few have moved away, we still manage to hold a group together for the sake of the sacred “girl’s night out”. We’ve held each other’s new babies, been though cancer with a dear one, cried with sorrow for problems but cried more with laughter from the stories told. We also eat. In our group the hostess makes the entire meal and you can depend on it to be good.

My guess is that women have been getting together to play games and eat for as long as there have been women. About half the time we play bunko, an easy dice game, but mostly we eat. We’ve even self-publish two cookbooks for all the delicious and easy meals we’ve shared and like to cook regularly at home.

Our group is not fancy. We don’t dress up. We don’t set the table. We mostly use paper plates. The point is to spend time visiting and not prepping and primping. If it isn’t totally relaxed, then it’s missing the point. We are all so busy these days raising children, working and managing our homes that if we don’t keep it simple it might change from a cheering pleasure to a draining burden.

We still, after 10 years, manage to tickle ourselves with themes, too. We always look forward to Amy’s pajama bunko partly because it is thrilling to drive while wearing pj’s (What would our mother think?! What if a hot policeman pulls us over?!) but mostly because Amy’s idea of a pajama dinner is stuffed French toast, maple sugar bacon, Krispy Cream Donut Bread Pudding and chocolate martinis. At my house we’ve had White Trash bunko with a menu of Fancy-Schmancy Chicken Casserole, Ramen Noodle Salad and Lord Love ‘Ems. Whatever the meal though, it is a blessing to be together once a month. I sure am thankful for Bunko night and the Bunko Belles. I guess I better go put my sweatpants on – I hear we’re having Laura’s Banana Bundt Cake for dessert tonight.

Ramen Noodle Salad
We all love this salad so much that it is on regular rotation for Bunko. I don’t know who created this recipe but I consider her a salad goddess.

Crunchy and delicious

Ingredients:
1 package ramen noodles, crushed to pieces and season package tossed in the garbage.
½ cup chopped pecans (or almonds, walnuts, whatever you have on hand)
2 Tablespoons sesame seeds
2 Tablespoons butter
1 head Romain lettuce, washed, dried and torn into pieces
1 bunch of green onions, cleaned and chopped with tops

1. Melt butter in skillet. Add crushed noodles, nuts, seeds and cook over medium heat until golden brown. Remove to paper towel to cool.
2. Mix lettuce with green onions.

Golden brown ramen noodles, nuts and sesame seeds for flavor and crunch

3. Make dressing.

Dressing Ingredients:
¼ cup rice vinegar
¼ cup vegetable oil
2 Tablespoons sugar
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon fresh black pepper
2 Tablespoons soy sauce
1 clove minced garlic

1. Shake all of the above up in a jar.
2. Toss everything in a salad bowl and mix.
3. Serve.

Lord Love ‘Ems
Again, no earthly idea who invented these quick cookies but if you like those chocolate covered Samoa cookies that the girl scouts sell then you are going to love these. This is a measure and scatter recipe too so you can’t screw it up.

Ingredients:
¼ cup butter
1 cup graham cracker crumbs
1 cup shredded coconut
1 cup chocolate chips
1 cup pecans, chopped
1 can condensed milk

Melt butter in an 8x8-inch pan (or 9x9 but they will be thinner). Sprinkle the crumbs on the butter and then layer by the next 4 ingredients. Bake at 350 degrees until golden brown. Cool and cut into squares.

Live on Talk of the Town making Southern Pecan Baklava

2010-11-11T11:10:00.000-08:00

Southern Pecan Baklava

2010-11-09T11:41:00.000-08:00

I don’t know about you but at my house around the holidays I’m surrounded by nuts!

My brother recently gave me about 10 pounds of unshelled pecans. He lives in a beautiful old home with large pecan trees that provide shade and thousands of nuts every fall. It is such a pleasure to have a freezer filled with all the pecans one could possibly eat in a year.

My Grandmother has a Black Walnut tree in her yard that drops hundreds of nuts in the driveway and on your car if you aren’t careful! I don’t like those quite as much - they are full of tannin- but they make delicious Christmas divinity. At our house, we have a wooden bowl of mixed nuts by the hearth as soon as it is cold enough for fires. I’ve had to hide the nut-cracking tools as the boys use them to torture one another.

One afternoon, as I shelled the pecans, I started thinking about all the nut expressions we use or hear on a daily basis. “He’s nuts”, “ What a Nutso”, “They should put her in the nuthouse”, “You’re a nutjob”, “I’m nuts about her”, “Have you gone nuts?” “She’s as nutty as a fruitcake”. What is up with the nut expressions we use when we think something or someone is crazy? Why do we say that? What has the tree nut ever done to be associated with foolishness or scorn?

It seems that the answer is really an issue of word association. A very old English word for the head is “nute” and if you had a cracked nute you were probably what we politely say in the South “not quite right”. Nute and cracked nutes became associated with nuts and their hard shells thus the head case is also the nut case.

My family is a nutty bunch. I have a crazy old lady aunt who photo crashes anytime she sees someone aim a camera whether she knows them or not. I have a cousin who spends every available spare moment dressed as a Confederate Colonial hanging out at country gas stations to see what weirdoes might be passing though. One of my uncles tapes instructions to everything in his house. He once nearly burned the house down when the paper taped to the toaster caught fire so he made up a new list of safety instructions about posting more instructions. The funny thing about living in the South is everyone has eccentric relatives and most Southerners love to tell about them with pride!

Triangles and diamonds of flaky, delicious pastry

But back to the pecans. My sister-in-law, Sissy (decidedly not nuts – at least most of the time), called me a few weeks ago with a great idea for a Southern twist on a favorite dish –pecan pie. You know how on Thanksgiving, when the breakfront is loaded with all the pies and cakes and you want some of everything but you know you won’t have room? Enter the Southern Pecan Baklava. Little flaky triangles of pecan goodness coated with a sweet syrupy glaze of sorghum, brown sugar and vanilla. Rich? Yes. But they’re also a bite of complete satisfaction. Plus, they are super simple to make and take with you to a party and I promise with a dollop of cinnamon whipped cream you’ll please your own nutty family and save yourself a little more dessert space for Mom’s famous pumpkin cheesecake.

Southern Pecan Baklava

Notes: Phyllo dough is not difficult to work with if you keep two things in mind. First, keep your phyllo from drying out by placing a just damp tea cloth over it as you work with the sheets. Second, if a piece tears or wrinkles it does not matter! You are making many flaky layers and unlike pie crust that you have to patch you do not have to do that with phyllo. Also note that you are going to bake this after you cut it into pieces and after it is baked you pour the syrup over the top.

Ingredients:

I package Phyllo dough, thawed and brought to room temp.
1 cup unsalted butter, melted
2 cups finely chopped/ground pecans (I use a food processor)
1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup sorghum (sorghum gives the syrup a tang that isn't a cloying as regular molasses)
1 teaspoon vanilla

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees
Remove pastry dough from 1st package (there will be two in each box). Unroll and cover with damp tea cloth to keep moist.
In a 9x9 pan, layer one piece of pastry at a time and brush all over with melted butter. Repeat for 6 layers.
Sprinkle with 1/2 cup ground pecans
Layer again with 6 sheets - each brushed with butter.
Sprinkle with 1/2 cup ground pecans
Repeat twice more.
With a sharp knife cut into squares or diamonds and bake 35 - 40 minutes or until golden brown.

While pastry is baking, combine sugar, water and sorghum in 2 quart heavy bottom saucepan and cook over medium heat until sugar has melted. Bring to a low boil (and this will foam up a bit so use a 2 qt pan) and stir occasionally for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and add vanilla.

When you remove pastry from the oven, pour 1/2 of the syrup over the top and let the dish rest for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes pour remaining syrup over the top. Serve immediately with cinnamon whipped cream or cool and serve later.

Southern Pecan Baklava

2010-11-09T05:26:00.000-08:00

Don't miss me on Talk of the Town, CBS News Channel 5 today at 11. I'm making Southern Pecan Baklava - a perfect dish for Thanksgiving or to take to a holiday party. I'll post the recipe later today!

Autumn Vegetable Velvet with Maple Cream

2010-11-08T10:29:00.000-08:00

Beautiful Autumn Soup pleases the eye and the palate.

When I was a little girl, there was no such thing as throwing out leftovers. For instance, my mother would cook a bone-in rump roast for pot roast, use the leftovers for hash and then use the bone, plus whatever was in the vegetable drawer to make soup. The same was true for chicken or turkey or ground beef. And the day after the soup was served for dinner, we’d eat the leftover soup for lunch. It was always delicious.

Homemade soup is a perfectly satisfying dish. Brown bones and vegetables until golden, add water and aromatics like onions and celery then gently simmer over a low flame until the flavors melt together for a tasty, rich base. Add bits of this and handfuls of that and you’ve created a nourishing meal that feels homey and comforting. Fixed in my childhood memories are the dull paring knife I used to help cut up potatoes for soup and how my mother would pick me up and let me stir the soup with the long wooden spoon she kept hanging on a nail beside the stove.

One of the most appealing aspects of soup is its seasonality. In the summer I like to make gazpacho and cold creamy cucumber and garlic soup with tiny poached shrimp and avocado. In the spring, when the asparagus is young and tender, I make a cream of asparagus soup that would convert even the most reluctant eater. My Grandmother used to put up “soup mix” in the summer, canning jars of mixed stewed tomatoes, onion, corn, limas, carrots and okra. In the winter she would add the mix to beef broth with bits of shredded beef and thinly sliced potatoes. I make my garden vegetable soup the same way.

Last year, I set out to create a soup recipe that would combine all the flavors of Fall root vegetables with a hint of a little something sweet and fun for dinner. I call it Autumn Vegetable Velvet with Maple Cream. It was a big hit at our house and now in my classes and I think you will like it too.

Note: The green apple gives this soup a special tartness so don't substitute a sweet apple. The heat of the cayenne also accents the soup and balances the richness. You don't have to use it but it is better with than without.

Ingredients:
¼ pound butter (1 stick)
1 cup cored and chopped granny smith apple
1 cup peeled, seeded and chopped butternut squash
1 cup peeled and chopped rutabaga
1 cup peeled and chopped carrot
1 cup peeled and chopped sweet potato
1-quart good chicken stock
Salt to taste
Cayenne pepper to taste - I use 1/2 teaspoon
1-cup heavy whipping cream (brought to room temp)
2 Tablespoons maple syrup
½ cup toasted pecans

1. In a heavy bottomed soup pot, melt butter and add apple and all vegetables. Cook until onion is translucent. Pour chicken stock over mixture and cook until mixture is very tender - 30 to 40 minutes.
2. Puree soup with stick blender or carefully pour mixture into blender and puree until smooth. Add about 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
3. Whip cream with maple syrup. (If you have an ISI this is great to make and use leftover cream for waffles and pancakes.)
4. Place serving of soup in bowl. Add whipped cream. Garnish with toasted pecans.

Pressure Cooker Instructions:
In 6 or 8 quart Fissler pressure cooker, melt butter and add apple and vegetables. Cook until the onion is translucent. Pour chicken stock over mixture and stir. Place lid on pressure cooker and bring to high pressure. Cook for exactly 7 minutes. Release pressure and puree with stick blender until smooth.

Gourmet Gadgets- Coffee Mugs

2010-11-06T15:14:00.000-07:00

I’ve decided coffee mugs are like empty coat hangers – the minute the door closes they breed like mice. Four of my kitchen cabinets have glass doors, so I try to keep an attractive display on view. The cabinets with solid doors, however, hide all the kitchen skeletons. Behind those doors are stacks of unmatched chipped dishes suitable for 3 boys hell bent on breaking, dropping or spilling something at every meal and a collection of various plastic cups with slogans like “Dr. Smith D.D.S. –our smiles aren’t false” , and ugly corporate logo mugs given away at trade shows. Behind the closed doors they multiply, until one day, after watching back to back episodes of “Hoarders”, I clear out the clutter, boxing it up to take to our friend “Good Will”. (As an aside, I just found out my five-year-old believed Good Will was a person – not a business – that we gave old household things too because he was such a great guy) .

I am a compete sucker for coffee mugs, though. They’re like button flair for my kitchen. I thought today I’d share a few of my favorites:

Looks like paper!

If you have been in a gift shop in the last 6 months you have probably seen these new ceramic traveling mugs with a silicone lid that looks like the plastic one from a to-go coffee cup. I take mine with me in the morning when I drive the boys to school, and haul it into the bagel shop for refills. You get 20 cents off the coffee if you bring your own cup!

Hand warmer

One of my other favorite is called a “Snuggle Mug” because it is designed for you to cup your hands around the rounded base to warm your hands. It’s the kind of mug you want to have in front of the fireplace on a cold winter’s night.

"not me mom"

A quirky cup that my kids like features a chalkboard and pencil for writing messages on the mug. The boys write early morning messages to me like “Mom – find my gym clothes!”

Finally, I have a beloved Curious George mug that sits beside me as I write. It is extra large and reminds me to be playful and curious about life.

Big Orange Pumpkin Bread

2010-11-03T18:38:00.000-07:00

Big Orange Pumpkin Bread

I met my husband, Paul, in the geekiest place possible – the computer lab. While most of my hip college girlfriends met their boyfriends at mixers or waited until their ripe middle-twenties to start thinking maybe someday off in the distant future they might get married, I simply looked to the right of my desk into brown eyes the color of maple syrup and a smile that would melt butter. We went out for pancakes that same night and were married one year later.

As geeky as hanging out in the computer lab might seem, (and old-fashioned – do they even have computer labs anymore?) we had what seemed like endless amounts of time to hang out in labs and other college places. One of our favorites was a ridiculously dark windowless café in the basement of the student center called Rafters. Gloomy and dim as a cave, it served delicious coffee in a time pre-dating Starbucks and it showcased the University of Tennessee Bakery – a bakery known by students and locals for delicious cakes, pastries, cookies and pies and widely regarded as having the best pumpkin bread in the entire world. Dark like gingerbread and rich with pumpkin, the bread scented the air with cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg. Students and visitors filled the lines each morning when the bread was brought in and sliced in inch-thick slabs and served warm. It is one of the few batter breads I have ever had that is equally good cold too.

If you haven’t had this treat at U.T., then you cannot understand how good this bread tastes. After years of reminiscing among friends about how much we missed it, my sister-in-law, Tara, made it her personal mission to track down the recipe so we could make it at home. She found someone who knew someone who could smuggle us the recipe. You can make this one or if you live in Knoxville order some direct.

http://www.campusdish.com/en-US/CSS/UnivTennessee/Bakery/UTBakery.htm

Made in a really cute Nordic Ware Pumpkin Patch Pan

Big Orange Pumpkin Bread
1 ½ cups sugar
½ cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
1 cup canned pumpkin
1 ¾ cup all purpose flour
¾ tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Baking Soda
½ tsp Salt
¾ tsp ground cloves
¾ tsp ground nutmeg
¾ tsp allspice
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp vanilla
¼ cup water

1. Mix sugar and eggs in mixer until combined. Add oil and mix until combined.
2. Add pumpkin, vanilla and all spices. Mix well.
3. Whisk flour with salt, baking soda and baking powder. Add into wet ingredients to combine and mix well.
4. Add water and mix at medium speed for 2 minutes.
5. Pour into standard 6 cup loaf pan and bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes or until internal temp reaches 210 degrees.
6. Cool in pan on rack for 10 minutes then release.
7. Cool for 30 minutes and serve warm with whipped cream if you have it or cool completely.

Notes- this recipe is easily doubled and the bread freezes very well. It is really even better the next day if it lasts that long.

Halloween Hangover Tomato Soup

2010-11-01T17:03:00.000-07:00

As I sit here rifling through last night treat bags gorging myself on Snickers and Reese’s while the boys are still at school, I am amazed at the quantity and assortment of candy that they have managed to amass in two short hours of sugar-fueled panhandling. In the month leading up to Halloween, and it was a MONTH of decorations, costume decisions and candy corn gorging, the boys entertained themselves for good stretches of time flipping through mail order party supply catalogs and talking with friends about the pros and cons of potential costumes including an entertaining conversation I overheard between Tommy (3rd grade) and his best friend Maddox about the merits of wearing verses not wearing clothes under the costume.

Last night’s haul is truly a dentist’s Nirvana. I pull out the kitchen scale – 14 POUNDS of candy between the three of them! The average is 2 ounces of chocolate for each minute of trick or treating! It seems there is no recession on Candy Mountain.

I don’t have hard and fast rules on sugar at my house. There is usually candy somewhere in the house and a drawer or container with forgotten treats leftover from a recent birthday party or generous relative. I find that the boys are completely burned out on candy by day three when I bag it all up and send it to school for the “Bee Havor Jar”, as Charlie calls it. A few of my friends cash the candy out trading it for money and one friend’s little children even believe in the “candy fairy” a deep dark middle of the night visitor who trades sugar for toys. My boys don’t complain about the confiscation – probably because they are crafty enough to squirrel away their favorite treats. Charlie hides under his bed to eat anything he suspects I might consider contraband; I have to clean under there with regularity so we don’t attract ants.

Spooky Fellows

So for a short while, almost like Frances in Bread and Jam for Frances, the boys eat lots and lots of sugar and I cook meals as healthily as I can ( I love Halloween candy too) and trick-or-treat season passes away and we start to look forward to the holidays. As for tonight’s supper – we’re having homemade tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. With the sugar hangover I’m gonna have by then it will be all I can do to chop up an onion.

Halloween Hangover Homemade Tomato Soup

2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion
1 carrot
1 clove garlic
1 can crushed tomatoes - 28 ounce can
½ teaspoon dried thyme (or 2 sprigs fresh)
3 cups chicken broth
2 Tablespoons honey
½ teaspoon salt
1/8th teaspoon cayenne pepper
black pepper to taste
1/3 cup cream (for cream of tomato)

1. Chop onion and carrot in food processor until minced.
2. In soup pot, add oil and heat. Add onion and carrot mixture. Cook until onion is translucent.
3. Mince garlic into pan and cook for 30 seconds.
4. Add thyme and stir.
5. Add crushed tomatoes and honey.
6. Add chicken broth, salt and peppers. Cook for 25 minutes.
7. Add cream just before serving for Cream of Tomato.

Grilled Cheddar Cheese and Honey Crisp Apple Sandwiches

Good dense bread- I like Ciabatta – sliced
Butter
Extra Sharp White Cheddar Cheese
Honey Crisp Apples

Thinly slice bread, cheese and apples. Butter bread and heat grill pan. Grill bread butter side down and add cheese and sliced apple. Top with other slice of bread and turn when golden brown. Serve.

Check out this very cool food artist I love! She can draw any dish and make it really fun.

Chef Jane Gaither at Savory Chef - Table Talk - October 2010 -

2010-10-27T14:42:00.000-07:00

Chef Jane Gaither at Savory Chef - Table Talk - October 2010 -

My First and Only Pen Pal

2010-10-26T12:16:00.000-07:00

My husband's grandmother and the boys' great-grandmother died this morning at age 86. I thought I would share a brief post about her with you.

Ovene Gaither was my first and only pen pal. She didn’t start out as such – she was just my husband’s Grandmother when we first met when I was in my early twenties, but as the years went by we found a special relationship in letters and shared many laughs delivered by mail.

There is something very special about a friend who will sit down, write and post a letter to you in these times. With email and facebook, something as old-fashioned as a letter in your mailbox is almost so unusual as to be considered “quaint”. But a letter from a friend is a precious thing. Handwritten and personal, my letters from Ovene carried more than the news - they carried her love. Coupons clipped from the Sunday paper sorted by where I was in my life – diapers and baby food from when the boys were babies, puppy chow coupons from when we brought home the new pup, juice box and cereal coupons as the babies grew – tiny paper clippings demonstrating how even the Sunday paper reminded her of the people she loved.

G.G. and James Braxton

She sent me jokes and cartoons too. One of my favorites was a cartoon cut from newspaper that she sent me after James Braxton Gaither - my oldest son- was born and named “Braxton” after his father and grandfather. One old codger says to the other old codger “My Grandson named his newborn after his Grandfather”. The second old codger replies “He named a baby Grandpa?” . She wrote above it in tiny script “I once knew a boy named Pickle”.

Her letters were also filled with small encouragements and humor – she was an encouraging, cheerful person wherever she went and her letters shared those qualities too. Once when I wrote her a letter to tell her about our favorite dog of 16 years passing away she sent me a four page letter telling me about all the pets she had loved and lost and why she had liked them. My favorite story she told in that letter was about a pet pig she had as a child that she loved. One day for no good reason, the pig just up and died. She wrote that while she was very sad to lose the pig, she was even sadder that they couldn’t eat the pig since they didn’t know how it died. She wrote “I’ve always liked ham”.

I feel blessed to share letters back and forth with Ovene. If I could send her one last letter it would be to tell her that I love her and to thank her for her many kindnesses and for sharing her life with me.

Charming Charlie's Chocolate Chunk Cookies

2010-10-25T12:27:00.000-07:00

Charlie's favorite cookies

As I write this, Charlie, age 5, paces back and forth on the bench seat in front of the kitchen window telling me at great length about why his kindergarten class had to visit the principal’s office en masse the day before Fall break. “The entire class?” I question. “All of us except the girls,” he tells me. “They didn’t have to”. “What did the Principal tell you?” I ask. I quickly get up to check his backpack; I haven’t checked it since Fall break began. No note. “She showed us the time-out room,” he nods his head wisely. “It’s for getting control. One boy was already in there getting his control.”

It’s already been a crazy school year. Charlie’s first Kindergarten teacher abruptly retired two weeks into the school year. Then a retired P.E. teacher came in to be the temporary teacher until they could hire a new one. The P.E. teacher taught them calisthenics – jumping jacks, push-ups and running in place. Charlie came home exhausted but no closer to writing his name than before he started school.

Charlie is my youngest – the “baby” of three boys. His story is a little different than most. He was born with a type of cleft palate that left him completely unable to speak. At 2 ½ he had only two speech sounds – one vowel and one consonant. But that never for one second stopped him from communicating. He learned sign language and his favorite signs were apple, milk, cookie and goldfish- a sign he made up by wiggling his index finger like a fish tail. A little before Charlie turned three he had surgery to rebuild his palate. He recuperated on a strict pureed food diet for three months. We all became heartily sick of applesauce.

Little hands like big cookies!

Charlie healed beautifully, but still was unable to speak. We kept learning new signs- at this point he had over 100- and we waited. And then, one beautiful October afternoon exactly three years ago as I was pulling a tray of cookies from the oven, Charlie pulled my jeans leg and very clearly said “Want juice Momma”. I nearly dropped the hot pan on his little blond head.
Here we are today. Charlie is in Kindergarten and he never stops talking. He is the loudest child – no filter either – and now he is in trouble at school for talking too much. Who’d have thought? We joke that he’s busy catching up for lost time. And, every time I bake these cookies I think of that day, my baby and how blessed I am.

Charming Charlie's Chocolate Chunk Cookies
A few tips to make your cookies better - ALWAYS sift your flour before adding. This gives a lightness to your mix that makes a real difference in the way the cookie turns out. Also, use a uniform cookie scoop for measuring out the dough - this way your cookies will all bake evenly. I like Cuisipro's cookie scoop better than any other I've used.

1 cup butter
1 cup shortening
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
4 cups all purpose flour
2 cups chocolate chunks (or chips or mixture of both, and you can add pecans too if you like but my boys make a mess picking them out of the cookies which is very annoying)

1. In a large mixing bowl, cream butter and shortening.
2. Add brown sugar and sugar and cream until well mixed.
3. Add eggs, one at a time until mixed into the batter.
4. Add vanilla and mix.
5. Stop mixing and sift dry ingredients over the wet ingredients. Mix to incorporate.
6. Add chocolate chips.
7. Bake at 350 degrees for 7 minutes or until golden around edges.
8. Cool on pan until you can move the cookies without breaking.

Scratching the Surface of Plain Country Cooking - Chicken and Dumplings

2010-10-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

One of many Southern comfort foods

When I was a very little girl, I would stand on top of a tall kitchen stool in my Grandmomma’s kitchen and help her cook. She’d dip my hands in flour and give me leftover scraps of her chicken and dumpling dough. I rolled and pounded the dough flat and patted it into my little enameled spatter painted pie pan. Then I’d wad it back into a ball and roll it out again until finally my Grandmomma took the tough flat gray puck, pressed my fingerprint in the middle and placed it in the oven to bake. It was to be my contribution to the dog’s meal and I was very proud to offer it to the less than enthusiastic farm mutt. He always accepted my gift in the polite way that a dog will, mouthing it softly before dropping it on the ground. It took some amount of coaxing to get him to eat that biscuit.  

My Grandmomma was what you would call a “plain cook”. Her spices were salt and pepper. She seasoned with bacon fat. Her methods were straightforward. She doesn’t cook much anymore (she’s almost 93) but when she did she cooked with economy. A painted sign hangs in her kitchen above the fireplace which reads “A Fat Kitchen…A Lean Will” and she taught that it was possible for a little to go a long way with great satisfaction: true in cooking and also in life. Her pantry was always stocked with flour, cornmeal, sugar, and rice and her dirt cellar shelves loaded with home-canned vegetables, pickles, fruit, and jam. With very little else she eased around her kitchen cooking delicious Southern country favorites she called “scratch dishes” since you “scratched around the kitchen to figure out what to cook”. 

On chilly, damp Autumn afternoons, when the evening creeps into the kitchen long before six o-clock, I pull a chicken out of the fridge and make her recipe for Chicken and Dumplings. The bird stews, filling the house with a savory aroma my Charlie calls “chicken perfume”. The finished dish warms the belly and brings back memories of other homey kitchens I love and miss. It is cold weather “plain cooking” at its simple best.

Annie Ruth’s Chicken and Dumplings

1 2 ½ - 3 pound chicken

water to cover chicken in stewpot

1 carrot, chopped

1 onion, chopped

2 stalks celery, chopped

4 peppercorns

salt – about a teaspoon

Place chicken in a heavy stewpot and pour cold water over chicken to cover. Add carrot, onion, celery, pepper and salt, cover and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until chicken is tender – about 1 ½ hours. Remove the chicken and vegetables. Skim any fat off the broth, remove ¼ cup broth to cool and cover pot. Cool the chicken until you can handle it, remove breast meat and shred into chunks.

( I always save the dark meat for another recipe – usually Chicken Chili).

Dumplings

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 ½ teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

4 Tablespoons butter, cold and cut into small cubes

½ cup buttermilk

¼ cup chicken broth

Place flour, baking soda, powder and salt in a mixing bowl. Work the butter into the flour with a pasty cutter (or the back of a fork like my Grandmomma) until it resembles the crumb for biscuits – that is pretty much what you are making. Stir in the buttermilk and broth and mix until combined. Turn out onto a floured board and add flour to handle. Gently fold 4 or 5 times and roll out about 1/4^th - 1/8^th inch thick. Cut into 1x2 inch strips.

Skim broth once more if needed. Bring back to boil and drop dumplins into broth, cover and cook about 6 minutes. Add the chicken to the pot and I like to add back the bits of cooked carrots for color. Fresh parsley never hurt a dish at the finish either.

Note: You probably don’t need to roll these out and you could probably drop pieces by small spoonfuls into the broth. The strips are nice in the dish though you should expect them to swell and some will fall apart. This is typical for the dish and turns the broth to more of a sauce of sorts.

Vampires BEWARE! – New Garlic Gadgets for Fall

2010-10-16T18:59:00.000-07:00

Click here for how to host your own Vampire Wedding

I once attended a Vampire themed wedding. I did not know either the bride or the groom very well as I was the “guest” on my date’s invitation and I remember how surprised we both were to be seated in a dimly lit event hall decorated with heavy gothic candlesticks and blood red roses. The groom wore a black tux with a long cape and the bride had a specially made gown of white satin copied from the black gown Morticia Addams wore in The Addams Family. Even at nineteen I recognized the discomfiture of the bride and groom’s family. The organist stumbled over Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor – and yes, that is the organ music you were thinking of – as the groom, his men, the mothers, the bride’s attendants and finally the bride herself with the gravity of one of the undead, joined the bewildered pastor in front of a room filled with dumbfounded guests.

The reception was sort of anticlimactic following that spectacle except for the cakes and the amount of booze served. I wished a thousand times for my camera as I knew no one would ever believe me when I told about all of it. The wedding cake was almost traditional except for the pools of red oozing blood dripping from the top where the cake topper sat – a vampire biting the neck of a bride with a perfect pool of blood beneath. The groom’s cake was even better – a black iced cake in the shape of a coffin. When my date took me to meet his old childhood friend and his new bride I told her it was certainly a wedding not one of us would ever forget. “We planned it to the last detail,” she remarked proudly “we even made sure the caterer didn’t bring a thing with garlic in it.”

Click&Clean

Vampires probably wouldn't like eating at our house these days- garlic is piled high in the blue bowl beside the stovetop and I find myself adding it to almost everything in the Fall when I start cooking stews and soups again. Garlic gadgets continue to be very popular in kitchen stores I work with too. This fall, two companies I’m familiar with have introduced garlic gadgets that I think are interesting. The first is garlic press called the Click&Clean by Jonas of Sweden. The great thing about this press is the self contained cleaning tool. The tool clicks open to unclip the handle so you can easily remove the waste, but stays in own piece so you can quickly clip it back together to use again or store. It is very inexpensive too and costs about $6.50.

Garlic Twist

The next gourmet gadget is called The 3^rd Generation Garlic Twist by NexTrend. Unlike presses, the twist works by a set of cross cutting teeth that mince the garlic as you twist it. This useful invention also works on shallots and peppers. My boys really like to help (play) with this one. It retails for $17.99.

Rosle garlic press

Finally, not new but a most beloved and used garlic gadget in my kitchen is the Rosle garlic press. Hefty, solid stainless steel with a lifetime guarantee- this workhorse is designed to press garlic without your even having to remove the skin and the basket is attached to the tool so you can easily clean this piece under running water. I press up to three cloves at a time with this gadget, but beware, it is so strong you'll need to aim it carefully lest you spray your sous chef with garlic. A handy weapon indeed for fighting vampires.

Tricky FireCracker Jacks

2010-10-14T18:01:00.000-07:00

FireCracker Jacks

Baseball season is nearing its end and I’ve had Cracker Jacks on the brain. Fall also makes me crave those familiar foods served around Halloween – popcorn balls, caramel apples and candy corn.

I’ve been working on a recipe for a spicy main dish that uses popcorn. Interestingly, ground popcorn that has been dry roasted is quite commonly used in some West African countries for a breakfast dish called “Tom Brown” in the way we might call a dish “John Smith” if it was very commonly found here. It is a simple dish served to children and consists of roasted, ground popcorn kernels, hot milk and brown sugar. Check out Betumiblog for more about the dish and the recipe.

Working on my recipe (unrelated to the recipe for Tom Brown) I found myself fixated by sweet heat - food and spice combinations that are sweet on the front end and spicy on the finish. One of the ingredients I’m working with is a very old southern Alabama syrup called Alaga -a mixture of corn and cane syrup with a taste and aroma not as strong as molasses but more complicated than dark corn syrup. Cracker Jack coating is based on molasses and most available recipes for making them at home call for this ingredient but I wanted a crunchy, sweet heat. I switched the basic recipe up and used Alaga - it has a similar taste to sorghum – and added a full teaspoon of cayenne pepper to give it a kick. The result is sweet and crunchy with a nice punch of heat at the back of your palate. It's my trick for Halloween.

FireCracker Jacks

3 quarts fresh popped corn (not microwave), lightly salted and please use a little oil when popping–it will taste better.

1 can mixed nuts – I like to have a variety but you can use just peanuts if you prefer

1 cup dark brown sugar

½ cup Alaga syrup (or ¼ cup molasses and ¼ cup dark corn syrup)

½ cup butter

½ tsp salt

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp vanilla

1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1. Preheat oven to 250 degrees.

2. Place popcorn and nuts in a large roasting pan.

3. Combine sugar, syrup, butter and salt in saucepan and bring to a boil. Boil for 4 minutes and remove from heat.

4. Add vanilla, baking soda and cayenne. Pour over popcorn and nut mixture and mix well to coat.

5. Bake for 1 hour, stirring often.

Things to note: When you add the baking soda the volume with increase for a few moments so make sure you work in a 2 quart saucepan so you won’t make a sticky mess.

Class in Evansville, Indiana at Kitchen Affairs

2010-10-13T11:16:00.000-07:00

Welcome! How do you like your coffee?

I drove to the Midwest yesterday to Kitchen Affairs in Evansville, Indiana and met a lot of new people that seemed like old friends. The store owners, Mike and Shelly Sackett, have owned their interesting and well-stocked store for almost 25 years and along the way they’ve not only left customers with the impression that they come out ahead in their own cooking when they shop in this comfortable and friendly store but that they feel connected to a broader community of people with the same interests – cooking and high quality kitchen equipment.

Cooking Gadgets Galore!

It’s telling that many of Mike and Shelly’s staff have been with the store for many years. There is an immediate camaraderie felt as soon as you enter the place. They are also unabashedly frank. Immediately upon arriving to set up for my class they greeted me with reviews of my recipes and presented me with my own inconsistency in cooking direction for me to remedy: and then, a whirlwind of helpful hands to gather, support and prepare for the class.

You never know what to expect when you visit a new place - especially for work. Each city or town has its own local color. Each business owner infuses their own store with a personality which trickles down even to the most lowly stock boy. Each cooking class has its own dynamic. A wise, experienced cooking teacher in Knoxville, Terri Geiser, told me before my very first class “There’s one in every crowd” because she knew what all experienced teachers know well – some people make pot-stirring a hobby. I jokingly asked the staff last night, “who do I need to watch out for in the class?” “No one,” they said “not here”. And they were absolutely right. Southern hospitality has nothing on the graciousness of the hosts and the local folks in Evansville who came out to take my class last night.

Me with owners Mike and Shelly

I’ll be happy to visit Evansville and Kitchen Affairs again soon.

Rainforest Stew (a.k.a. Vegetarian Pasta Sauce)

2010-10-11T10:12:00.000-07:00

Rainforest Stew also known as Vegetarian Pasta Sauce to grown-ups.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Do you remember the indignity you felt as a child when someone older tricked you?

When I was a child, there was no convincing me to try any food – no matter how good it smelled – if I instinctively hated the name. Rutabaga. Casserole. Croquette.

Children are very particular in their choices. When I was about 5, my father took me fishing for flounder which is a very particular type of fishing. You use a heavy weight and you drag bait along the floor of the ocean where the flounder live. I caught a beauty of a fish that warm summer morning and remember my dad showing me the eyes on the same side of the fish’s body and how its color was the same as the sand we walked on. He showed me how to clean the fish and that night we ate the fish I caught, dipped in cornmeal, fried in oil and bacon fat, salted and served with fresh lemon slices and eaten so hot it nearly burned your fingers: quite a delicious, early first food memory.

For the next five years the only type of fish I would taste was flounder. Every restaurant we visited, I ordered flounder. Flounder was the best! Amazingly, it came in all kinds of shapes and sizes and preparations. Sometimes it was bright pink! Other times it was meaty and thick. Its variations I never questioned.

One night, at the Red Lobster ( the ONLY local place you could eat seafood as the A&P merely stocked canned tuna, salmon and fish sticks) I caught my mother mouthing to the waitress over my ordering flounder, “Child’s fish dinner”. A hundred prior fish dinners flashed before my eyes. I’d been duped! Gamed by a pair of parental con men, I’d been suckered into eating about every edible gilled creature available.

Oh, the sins of the father, how they are passed down from one generation to the next. Even with all the promises we make before we have children we set into motion their undoing. With certainty I once said, “My children will eat what I cook. They’re going to love my cooking and so I will never make them eat anything they don’t like and I will never trick them.”

Then, an evil spell blew throughout the land and all my sweet babies heard the siren song of the trickster who lives under the golden arches. Having tasted the ambrosial nuggets and fallen under an enchantment so strong that even my magical knee kissing power and go-away bad dream wand (a red chopstick) could never release them from the magnetism of mystic nuggets. Thus, the spell blocked any and all room for other food choices, especially anything from the vegetable family and including all things green including lime jello.

Now, I believe all mothers worry about feeding their children. We all want them to eat. Most mothers I know worry about feeding their children right most of the time but some of the time they let them eat junk. A few mothers worry about feeding their children right all the time and I admire their discipline - fantastic for them, excellent in theory, but our family likes fries with that.

Since I don’t always serve what is healthiest, I do find myself resorting to the small trickeries of my parents. I cut all fish and fowl into nugget shapes. Any fleck of green in or on any food is powdered four-leaf clover. And I do my best (since I think lots of childhood food aversions are texture related) to grind things into invisibility. The same small boys that stand at my side flapping homework sheets at me as I grind vegetables to bits, sauté them and stir in garlic and spices, will ask “what are we having for supper?”; remember friends, it’s all in the delivery.

“We’re having rainforest stew over tunnel noodles,” (the words rainforest and tunnel having magical properties). “OH, that’s ok then,” they sigh. “A good supper”. So this is how I get my boys to happily eat vegetables. This dish is loaded with a variety of vegetables and grinding them up gives the sauce a meat-like texture. Coupled with whole wheat pasta it’s so healthy they would gag if they knew!

And when they’re ten, the duplicity of their mother will dawn on them.

Rainforest Stew (a.k.a. Vegetarian Pasta Sauce)

1 medium onion

2 carrots

½ bell pepper (any color), seeded

1 stalk celery

1 Tablespoon olive oil

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 28 ounce can crushed tomatoes

2 Tablespoons tomato paste

¾ Tablespoon oregano

pinch salt

pinch pepper

pinch sugar

1. Clean onion, carrots, celery and bell pepper and prep into large chunks. Grind in food processor until it is almost mushy.

2. In heavy bottomed saucepan, heat oil until it shimmers. Carefully add the processed vegetables and cook over medium heat until they start to turn golden brown. You really want to cook these to a deep color.

3. Add garlic and cook 30 seconds then add tomato paste and stir to coat vegetables and add spices. Add can of crushed tomatoes.

4. Cook for 25 minutes over low heat, stirring often. Remember that tomato products can scorch over heat so watch your heat and stir.

6. Serve over whole wheat penne pasta with fresh parmesan cheese.

Fast Food for Slow Risers - Boeuf Bourguignon

2010-10-10T09:53:00.000-07:00

Boeuf Bourguignon with Cream Cheese and Chive Mashed Potatoes

If I had to invent a new gadget it would be an alarm clock coffee maker that would sit on my bedside table and brew coffee while I was gently roused and serenaded by NPR. The alarm coffee maker would also have a small chilling drawer for cream.

I am not by nature a “morning” person although having three boys has, over time, driven me to bed earlier and earlier so that these days I’m crawling to the coffee maker around daybreak. It is all I can do in the early morning to find socks for everyone - my least favorite chore of motherhood. So, guess what cooking appliance collects dust in my pantry? My slow cooker.

You have to be both organized and “with it” in the morning to operate that countertop beast. Every time I go to the bookstore to peruse cookbooks I’m overwhelmed by the number of books dedicated to slow cookery: Creative Crock-Pot, Slow Cooker Bible, Art of the Fast Slow Cook and my favorite, The Complete Idiots Guide to Slow Cooking whose first instruction reads: “Get the hell out of bed a little earlier.” I can’t even pretend I’m capable.

If you’re one of my tribe, you need to do what I did and get a pressure cooker.

Pressure Cooking is so cool. You may think of the pressure cooker your grandmother had and remember the story you heard about so-and-so’s eye being blown out by projectile split pea soup but those days are long gone. Slicing bagels is much more dangerous. You probably know someone who went to the E.R. from slicing a stale bagel.

Today’s pressure cookers are very safe and very fast. I make boeuf bourguignon in 45 minutes in mine. You can make rice in 7 minutes and creamed potatoes in 8. You can make a cheesecake in 20 minutes and risotto in 18. Best of all, you don’t have to start anything in the morning before work. With your fully alert afternoon personality, you can grab a glass of wine, pull everything together and have dinner on the table in half an hour and spend all those extra morning minutes doing what I do: sleep until the last possible moment.

Boeuf Bourguignon in the Pressure Cooker

3 tablespoons oil

2 pounds of lean stewing beef cut into 1 1/2 inch chunks

2 sliced carrots

1 sliced onion

1/4 cup water

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

1/4 cup flour

2 cups red wine - Chianti or other dry red wine

1 Tablespoon tomato paste

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 teaspoon thyme

1 crumbled bay leaf

2 Tablespoons butter

1 cup pearl onions -frozen

1 1/2 cups sliced mushrooms

Salt first then flour beef, heat oil and saute beef until brown on all sides. Remove to plate. Saute carrot and onion until onion is translucent. Add 1/8 cup water (if you need) to deglaze pan and cook out water.
Add tomato paste, garlic, thyme, bay leaf, salt and pepper. Cook briefly and return beef to cooker.
Lock lid in place. Bring to high heat to high pressure. Reduce heat to maintain pressure and cook for 30 minutes. Release pressure and check beef for doneness. Return to pressure and cook 5 more minutes if beef needs additional time.
In separate pan, saute onions and mushrooms in butter until done. I hate the way mushrooms get rubbery in stew so cooking these on the side gives both a better texture and flavor.
Release pressure in sink. Remove lid facing away from you. Add onions and mushrooms.

You can also make this recipe in the oven but you will need to adjust liquid to 5-6 cups of wine or wine/beef broth mixture, add carrots and onions 1 hour before finish and adjust cooking time to 2- 2 1/2 hours.

Mrs. Lunchroom Lady Peanut Butter Bars

2010-10-09T11:42:00.000-07:00

My elementary school was very small. I went to school from Kindergarten through eighth grade with the same group of twenty-three children. It was a parochial school; we had chapel on Wednesday and the whole school would fill the sanctuary and listen to our earnest principal crash and bang the keys of the organ, flipping reverberate and chimes in such a maniacal fashion that I knew Jesus’s soundtrack would fend off the very Devil himself.

Chapel was dreary beyond belief. Each Wednesday, a different grade was assigned to present the scripture and the teacher always, always chose the poorest reader or shyest kid in the class to read the text. It took weeks to get through that part of the service. Next, the pastor would give his sermon and, looking back, I think he used us for his dry run for the Sunday service. I don’t think a single child ever understood a thing he said. The most exciting thing I remember happening in chapel in nine years was one time the pastor gave the service wearing a black eye-patch and I just knew he’d finally blown his pirate cover by forgetting to take that bit off. We were very hopeful for awhile.

The very best thing about Wednesdays was that you could depend on lunch to be delicious. The lunchroom ladies must have felt stirrings of sympathy for so many young children suffering the tedium of those services. At that time, the lunches were always homemade and generally quite good but on Wednesdays they were a banquet. Roasted turkey and creamed potatoes, green beans seasoned with bacon, fresh yeast rolls with little pats of butter, skillet apples – an example of lunchroom bounty that cheered every little soul.

And while the main menu changed from turkey to pot roast to fried chicken, the special dessert always remained the same. Peanut Butter Bars. Those three words alone caused children to bounce in place as we lined up for lunch. I don’t recall anyone ever having heard of a peanut butter allergy back then.

I spent twenty-eight years after elementary school thinking about those peanut butter bars. I searched and googled and perused spiral bound church cookbooks one after another to seek out this particular recipe. Finally, someone created a facebook fan page for my old school and I immediately posted my desire to track these cookies down. Someone who knew someone found the elderly lunchroom lady and to the delight of many of us posted her recipe. Here it is:

Mrs. Lunchroom Lady Peanut Butter Bars

This makes a big (18” x12”) tray of bar cookies. I usually make these for a large gathering but never for school events. That would be a quick way to become unpopular with the other moms.

Bars:

1 1/3 cup peanut butter

1 pound butter, softened

2 cups sugar

3 cups brown sugar, packed

4 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla

4 cups self-rising flour

4 cups rolled oats

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.

2. With mixer, beat peanut butter, softened butter and sugars together until well mixed. Add eggs and vanilla and mix until incorporated.

3. Add flour and oats. Mix until combined.

4. Spread in jelly roll pan

5. Bake for 12- 15 minutes until golden brown. Cool.

Frosting:

16 ounces creamy peanut butter

¾ teaspoons salt

1 Tablespoon vanilla

1 box powdered sugar

2/3 cup milk

1. With stand or handheld mixer, mix peanut butter, salt and vanilla.

2. Slowly add powdered sugar and milk alternating to mix.

3. Spread on cooled bars.

All Chef's Jacket and No Restaurant

2010-10-08T11:28:00.000-07:00

I think chef jackets make me look fat. That and they aren’t very stylish, which is beside the point since they aren’t supposed to be stylish, but I still don’t like them. Also, they are white which is the stupidest color in the world for me to cook in as I’m a world class splatter master. I also never wear white to dinner because when I do the host always serves red sauce and it is a distraction to try to talk to someone who keeps cutting their gaze away from me to look at the silloutte of George Washington I’ve dripped on my shirt.

Since I don’t work in a restaurant it really isn’t an issue. I own a chef’s jacket and I tried to practice cooking in it to see if it would grow on me but I felt like a fraud even alone in my kitchen. I kept worrying that friends would pop over and I’d forget I was wearing it and then they’d say “OH, I didn’t know you were a chef. I just thought you loved cooking”, but secretly they’d say to themselves “All chef’s jacket and no restaurant”.

SO, I’m inordinately fond of aprons. I collect aprons. I wear aprons. I even design aprons. I have a special fondness for hostess aprons that I love to wear when I entertain. I have a big box filled with frilly, sheer, useless aprons that look like food fetish lingerie. I have beat to hell kitchen aprons and old waitressing uniform aprons. But my favorite aprons are hip and useful, attractive and, if not slimming, make a kitchen fashion statement. My favorites say “Hey, not only can I cook. I look better than the food!”

It helps that none of my aprons are white.

This year my award for most favorite apron goes to Mu Kitchen. It’s the red poppy apron I’m wearing in my photograph. Mu’s colors are fresh and the patterns pop. They also make top notch kitchen linens that match and that wear really well. Besides the poppy pattern, I like the sea blue color. Oh, Mu doesn’t sell white aprons either. I guess they understand their customer

Pan Grilled Duck Breast with Muscadine and Jalapeño Sauce with Wilted Red Dandelion Salad

2010-10-07T08:57:00.000-07:00

In Tennessee, duck season begins in earnest in September with a very enthusiastic following of hunters who can hardly wait to bag the waterfowl with its primary diet of acorns- the wood duck . Duck is a delicious game meat and in urban markets it is usually priced less than steaks, but in the South, where your neighbors own rustic but fully functioning kitchens in their own duck blinds, duck meat is synonymous with the plenty of Fall and is often a gift to the cook ready to prepare a meal for friends. Muscadine grapes are the perfect accompaniment to the flavor of duck and are in season at exactly the right time.

Pan Grilled Duck Breast with Muscadine and Jalapeño Sauce with Wilted Red Dandelion Salad

Ingredients:

6 duck breasts with skin, pin feathers removed

2 1/2 teaspoons Chinese Five Spice

1-pound Muscadine grapes (Concord if you can not get Muscadine)

½ cup sugar

1-cup water

1 teaspoon vegetable oil

2 jalapeños, capped, seeded and minced

2 small, sweet onions – minced and divided in two

1 bunch of red dandelion greens

1-teaspoon sugar

2 Tablespoons Balsamic Vinegar

Salt and Pepper to taste

Instructions:

1. Wash grapes and cut in half and place in reduction saucepan. Add sugar and water and bring to simmer.

2. In small sauté pan, add oil and cook the jalapeños along with half of the minced onions until onion is translucent. Add to grapes and stir. Stir often and cook until reduced to syrup consistence – grapes will break down and skins will color syrup after about 30 minutes. Press through a food mill or mesh strainer to remove skins and seeds. Hold sauce.

3. Wash greens and pat dry. Remove tough stems and roughly chop leaves. Place in salad bowl.

4. With tines of fork, puncture all over the skin side of each breast of duck and rub with a small pinch of Chinese Five Spice.

5. Heat Grill pan on Medium High. Add duck, skin side down and grill for 3- 5 minutes or until skin is nicely browned and crispy. Turn duck and grill 3 -5 more minutes until internal temp is 160 degrees. Tent duck with foil and rest.

6. Into heated grill pan with the duck drippings, add remaining chopped onion and cook until soft. Add sugar, balsamic vinegar and salt and pepper to taste and mix well.

7. Add greens to grill pan and toss well to coat with dressing and wilt greens.

8. Slice duck on bias and plate with greens. Top duck with drizzle of Muscadine –Jalapeño sauce.

9. Serve.

Jane Gaither Next Food Network Star

2010-10-06T17:19:00.000-07:00

This is the entry video we shot in our kitchen for The Next Food Network Star. The video features my three boys, Charlie (5), James (12) and Tommy (9) and my powerfully handsome husband Paul (40).

We shot the video with a flip camera and a work light from Home Depot on a Sunday afternoon and actually ate the duck as our dinner with a well-earned bottle of French Rose. The apron is from Mu Kitchen and I used Lodge Signature Series and Viking cookware.

I actually bought the duck from Whole Foods in the frozen section. They also carry duck at our Publix in the frozen section near the frozen liver which most of us have probably never shopped for - thus duck is possibly overlooked in our eye aversion from the "liver" section. As for the remaining ingredients, all were found at the Nashville Farmer's Market.

A few things I did not have time to tell you in the video. First, duck is actually a very healthy food to eat. It has less saturated fat than butter - by half- and it has lots of the "good" fat. Wild duck is even better for you if you can get it as the best variety fattens itself on acorns. You have to be a really quick and accurate shot to bring down this variety though as they are super fast flyers. I prefer not to dress game- although I would do it. I guess I'm that kind of gal.

Second, the guns were not loaded.

Third, no gnomes were harmed in the making of this film.

Sweet Tea Ice Cream

2010-10-06T14:13:00.001-07:00

Among the many funny regional peculiarities of Southern food and drink is the South’s love for what’s now called “Sweet Tea”. Traditionally, tea in the South is brewed fresh, pre-sweetened and poured over the top of narrow glasses filled to the rim with ice that melts quickly and must be added to as the meal goes by. Lemon is always offered with what we call amongst ourselves “Ice Tea” -there’s no “iced” about it – and the recipe for the perfect pitcher varies from home to home where the youngest child is asked to slurp a taste from a wooden spoon to adjust the sweetening accordingly.

Our fondness for Ice Tea started me thinking about our fondness for another Southern family favorite – homemade ice cream (and we don’t say iced-cream so why would we say iced-tea?). This is my recipe combining two favorites into one.

Ingredients:

Zest of 3 lemons

¼ cup fresh lemon juice

1/3-cup sugar

½ cup sweet tea concentrate (instructions below)

1-cup sugar

1-cup water

8 small black tea bags

4 egg yolks

Pinch of salt

1-cup whole milk

2 cups heavy cream

Instructions:

1. In non-reactive bowl, mix the lemon zest, juice and sugar. Chill.

2. In a small saucepan, place 1 cup of water and heat until just boiling. Remove from heat and steep teabags for 10 minutes. You want a very strong tea flavor.

3. Remove teabags. Add 1-cup sugar, stir and heat until simmering. Reduce to ½ cup. Cool.

4. In large stainless steel mixing bowl, slightly beat the egg yolks.

5. Heat the milk to a bare boil in a large heavy saucepan.

6. Temper the eggs by adding just a bit of the heated milk to the eggs and whisk in briskly. Then add the egg mixture back to the milk and whisk that quickly together. Gently heat the mixture until it will coat the back of a wooden spoon to make custard.

7. Pour the tea concentrate, the lemon mixture, the heavy cream and the custard together into the stainless bowl. Place bowl into ice water bath and stir every few minutes until cool.

8. Depending on the type of ice-cream machine you have, either chill the cream for 2 hours and then proceed or spin in ice-cream maker according to directions.

Tennini - Pimiento Cheese Panini with Tennessee Flair

2010-06-18T15:09:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase Charles Dickens, the very best meals of my life have always been consumed in the very worst mannered place to eat a meal - over the kitchen sink.

I grew up in family where we ate meals together at the table with silverware, breakable dishes and tall glasses that as a child took two hands to lift. We were not a formal family - we used our share of paper napkins and meals were always filled with everyone talking over everyone else - but we sat together and passed platters and bowls and the butter to one another and we laughed and argued and ate. Once, my sister brought a friend home for dinner and at the usual time -6 p.m. - we gathered around the table and sat down for supper. My mother, noticing that our guest was looking a little askance, asked her if she didn't like something being served. "No", she said "I'm just not used to eating in front of people". She told our family that at her house everyone took their plate off to their bedroom to eat alone.

But, as an exception to the rule, occasionally ignoring well-mannered raising to indulge oneself in a dripping tomato peeled and sliced, slathered with mayo and sandwiched between fresh toasted bread is a wickedness worth savoring. Like most wickedness, I don't want you to catch me at this, but if you did, I'd beg your pardon and probably repeat the behavior after you left with a juicy ripe peach.

My new favorite kind of summer sandwich is the panini. Like pizza or pasta, olive oil or ice-cream, I guess the Italians had the grilled cheese sandwich perfected long before we figured out we could do better than Velveeta. I've had my eye on the electric panini presses for some time now but I could not bring myself to buy another appliance with a cord. I am simply out of room and think another appliance might send my husband into a nervous collapse. When Lodge Cast Iron Cookware decided to make a panini press that fit perfectly into their very useful grill pan, I felt justified in acquiring it. It's heavy but it's small, it doesn't have a cord, and I can use it to press bacon too! My friend the psychologist calls this rationalizing.

Using the best of what is local (which includes Lodge) I decided to undertake revamping the family recipe for pimiento cheese, add the juiciest tomato and fry up some of the delicious Benton's bacon I had in the fridge. Benton's Hams, now famous from fine restaurants coast to coast, is located in Madisonville, Tennessee not 5 miles from our family farm and the cheese I chose to use is the best Cheddar from the same county - Sweetwater Valley Farms.

Gourmet Gadget Gal’s Tennini Panini

You’ll need:

1 loaf dense bread for grilling like bakery Italian

1 ripe Granger County Tomato (or any ripe local tomato)

Thick Bacon – I use Benton’s from Vonore, Tennessee

Pimiento Cheese

softened butter for spreading

Lodge 12” Grill Pan and Panini Press

Gourmet Gadget Gal’s Pimiento Cheese Spread

3 cups Shredded Cheddar Cheese

1 (4 ounce) jar diced pimientos

½ teaspoon prepared minced garlic

1 teaspoon prepared horseradish

1 teaspoon Durkees

1 teaspoon Hot Sauce

1 teapoon Worcestershire sauce

a few grinds of fresh black pepper

6 Tablespoons Mayonnaise (I use Dukes)

Make Pimiento Cheese. Spread each slice of bread with butter. Heat grill and press on Medium heat. When heated, place bread butter side down on grill and top with a few spoonfuls of Pimiento Cheese. Add crispy bacon and sliced tomatoes. Top with bread – butter side facing up. Take hot Panini press and place on top of bread for 2 minutes. Remove press and remove sandwich and eat - my preference is over the sink.

Pimiento Cheese - A Summer Classic with a Twist

2010-06-18T14:05:00.000-07:00

Glowing orange flecked with red like a Tennessee sunset, Pimiento Cheese is a simple summer food that when paired with fresh, homegrown tomatoes, a great quality bacon and the right kind of bread will elevate your Saturday summer lunch to a recipe you'll want to share with friends - just remember to choose the kind of friends who don't mind eating their sandwich over the sink.

Gourmet Gadget Gal’s Pimiento Cheese

3 cups Shredded Cheddar Cheese
1 (4 ounce) jar diced pimientos
½ teaspoon prepared minced garlic
1 teaspoon prepared horseradish
1 teaspoon Durkees
1 teaspoon Hot Sauce
1 teapoon Worcestershire sauce
a few grinds of fresh black pepper
6 Tablespoons Mayonnaise (I use Dukes)

Mix all these ingredients up and serve on fresh bread with sliced tomatoes and crisp bacon or make a Tennini - A Tennessee Panini. Also, this is a delicious spread for butter crackers or celery.

Nutella Brownies with Strawberry Cream Cheese Swirl

2010-05-01T15:54:00.000-07:00

Watch for my latest cooking segment on CBS Nashville / NewsChannel5’s Talk of the Town Monday May 5th at 11am

Nutella Brownies with Strawberry Cream Cheese Swirl

For brownies
2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
1 3/4 cups sugar
1 cup Nutella
2 large eggs plus 1 large yolk
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
1/2 teaspoon salt, see note

For swirl

1 8oz package Philadelphia strawberry cream cheese at room temp

1 egg

1-teaspoon vanilla

Make brownies: Preheat oven to 350 degrees F with rack in middle.

Spray bottom of 9x13 pan with Pam.

Beat together butter and sugar with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until mixture is light and fluffy, then add nutella and beat until incorporated. Beat in whole eggs, egg yolk, and vanilla. Reduce mixer sped to low, and then mix in flour until just combined. Remove about 1-½ cups of batter to a small bowl.

Mix in chocolate chips (1 1/2 cups) into remaining batter then spread batter in baking pan, smoothing top. (It will be thick, almost like cookie batter.)

In mixing bowl beat together the cream cheese, egg and vanilla until smooth. Spread over the top of the brownie batter. Using tablespoon, drop remaining batter by spoonful across strawberry layer. Using a chopstick, swirl dollops of batter with strawberry layer to marble.

Bake until brownies are deep golden, puffed on top and a wooden pick inserted in center come out with some crumbs adhering, 40 to 45 minutes.

Cool completely in pan on a rack, about 1 1/2 hours.

Talk of the Town Recipe and Video Clip

Knowing Beans about Glass Bakeware and Kelsey’s Baked Beans

2010-04-01T16:07:00.000-07:00

I admit it – I was skeptical.

I got a sample of a new glass casserole dish from a company called Arcuisine to try. It came nicely packaged with a pretty picture on a sleek black box and what I thought at the time was a pretty hefty price tag - $29.99. This is a LOT more expensive than the Pyrex I am used to using.

It may be from France, but it is a glass casserole dish, I thought to myself. It’s pretty, but is that important for my glass bakeware? Hmm.

I looked at the packaging –made of borosilicate glass -– I don’t know what that means but the glass is very attractive. Resistant to thermal shock – Now this I understand a little bit – it isn’t going to shatter when I pull it from a hot oven and place it down on my cool countertop like some other glass bakeware I’ve tried. 20 year guarantee, smooth and easy to clean….wait- now you have my attention!

I have always hated glass bakeware even though I have always used it. I hate the way glass pans look cloudy after a few uses and I hate how sometimes they shatter when you move a hot glass dish out of the oven and onto a cool surface - I’ve had this happen twice. I hate that when you bake in glass, you can’t get the smudgy brown scum off the sides of the pan unless you use Ajax and then scrubbing etches the glass and makes it even more difficult to clean.

Now, here is a product that says it is going to solve these problems for me. Well, we shall see. It’s time for the baked bean test.

Is there any dish that bakes onto a glass surface worse than baked beans? Somehow the combination of beans and tomato sauce combines to make a baked on film around the edges of the dish that has more staying power than super-glue. This should be a nice test for Arcuisine.

My Momma and Daddy live around the corner – if you can call five miles of twisting gravel back roads of Muddy Creek around the corner – from the factory for Bush’s Beans. When my oldest boy, James, was learning to read he delighted in looking for the “bacon” door on his way to see them. There is actually a refrigerated room on the factory site that you can see from the road. A “bacon” sign is painted on the door – bacon being an important component of baked beans (unless you buy the vegetarian variety). Being in such proximity to the factory, you might imagine that we grew up eating lots of baked beans. We did. When I was a child, Bush’s had a dented can store where you could buy a can of beans for 10¢. Fortunately, we all like beans - except for my husband, Paul. He used to, but once, my Aunt Penny, in a fit of charitable giving, gave him three cases of Beanie Weenies as a Christmas gift and during an exceptionally lean financial period for him in college he ate Beanie Weenies every day for two weeks straight and now sickens at the smell of beans.

My friend, Kelsey- a fabulous Mississippi gal with a knack for great Southern cooking – turns canned baked beans into a special side dish that will make you very popular at any bbq you attend. I know there are many variations of this dish around but her recipe is so good people come back for seconds on beans – which according to my 8-year old son, Tommy, are really supposed to just be “filler”. She doesn’t have a name for her beans so we now all call her beans “Those Baked Beans that Kelsey Makes”. To make, you mix together 2 large drained cans of Bush’s Original Baked Beans, about ½ cup ketchup, 1/8^th cup cheap yellow mustard, 2 Tablespoons Worcestershire sauce, ½ cup brown sugar, ¼ cup spicy bbq sauce (we like Sticky Fingers), 1 undrained can of Rotel. Stir all this together and bake in the oven at 375° for about 90 minutes with a half onion peeled and placed in the middle.

Now, back to the bean test. I made the beans last night in the Arcuisine casserole dish as the ultimate test of clean-ability. The dish did indeed look beautiful and as I was taking it to a cookout, I noticed that the dish stayed exceptionally warm- part of the heat retention property of the type of glass I learned later. The beans were a hit and I came home with an empty, baked-on glass dish that I placed immediately in the sink and filled with hot, soapy water. Sure enough, with my scrubbing brush in hand, I went to work on that dish and within a few minutes I pulled out a perfectly clean, new looking, glass casserole dish.

It is smooth and easy to clean. It does clean up like new with no etching from the scrubbing. I do like the way it looks on the table. I’ll have to get back to you about the 20 year guarantee but I’ll probably be around then – as my boys all tell it – “Beans, beans they’re good for your heart.” We’ll leave the rest unsaid for now.

Better Baking - Friday Night Chocolate Cake with Hot Chocolate Frosting

2010-03-29T14:48:00.000-07:00

When I first started working at the bakery I learned something very useful that many home cooks do not realize when they are baking at home- weighing ingredients instead of measuring them improves recipe performance. When we measure by cups and tablespoons, we leave a lot of room for error. Maybe you measure flour that has settled in the bag and so you get a little more weight in the measuring cup than is optimal? Perhaps your eggs are extra large and the recipe calls for medium? Baking depends on ratios and chemistry, so measuring differences might throw off our own best efforts.

When I worked at the bakery, we used an old fashioned scale with calibrated weights. The volume I measured daily was enormous – My chocolate chip cookie recipe called for over 10 pounds of flour! And, it isn’t as easy as dividing a recipe in half and then in half again until you get to the size batch you want to make at home– bakeries have ratios that they follow to keep the reactions of ingredients in line depending on an order size or the demand for a product. Thus, I have two problems if I want to make a bakery recipe at home for my family -1st – I would have to use the baker’s percentages to reduce the size of what I wanted to make and 2nd- I would then have to weigh everything at home using a scale. That’s a lot of effort to make cookies when you can open a cookbook and find any number of recipes by cups and tablespoons.

But many cooks notice that time and time again they use the same recipe and get varying results. Or, they follow the recipe to the letter and still get an inferior product. While you can’t truly control for everything –humidity and its effect on flour for example – you can now bake by weight at home and it isn’t such a hassle.

Using the Escali Pana Scale makes measuring very easy for the home cook – you only need one bowl to measure everything! By following the instructions for conversions, you can move between a recipe from cups and tablespoons to weight and back again. You can also use just one bowl for many recipes – a great feature when you hate to wash dishes as much as I do. You can use European recipes (most are given in weight) and easily translate to cups and tablespoons if you choose, or you can take your favorite recipe and translate it to weight and now have the same consistency professionals have at home.

One of our most popular cakes at the bakery was a moist chocolate cinnamon sheet cake we baked only on Fridays. Frosted while it was still warm with a soft, almost liquid chocolate icing - people came by and bought it to end the work week on a sweet note. For years, I could not bring myself to convert the recipe down to a manageable 9X13 pan size, but with my Pana in the kitchen (and a little help with percentage conversions from my husband bribed with the promise of warm chocolate cake) I now have the bakery recipe culled down to size and I will share it here with you:

Friday Night Chocolate Cake
8.5 ounces all purpose flour (I use King Arthur)
8.5 ounces sugar
8 ounces hot water
8 ounces butter
.80 ounces cocoa
4 ounces buttermilk
4 ounces eggs
.10 ounces cinnamon
.20 ounces soda
.25 ounces vanilla extract

Remember to tare (zero out) each bowl before weighing ingredients.

1. In one large bowl, weigh flour and then sugar. Whisk these together and set aside.
2. In another bowl weigh butter, water and cocoa and place in the microwave and melt the mixture. Pour this over the flour and sugar.
3. In third bowl, weigh eggs, cinnamon, baking soda and vanilla and add to the large bowl.
4. Stir everything together well and pour into a greased 9X13 pan and bake 20 – 25 minutes at 400°

Hot Chocolate Frosting
4 ounces melted butter
.80 ounces cocoa
2 ounces milk
16 ounces powdered sugar
.25 ounces vanilla extract

1. Place milk and cocoa in bowl with melted butter. Microwave until mixture comes to a boil.
2. Pour over sugar and stir until mixed.
3. Add vanilla
4. Pour over warm cake and spread.

Strawberry Sponge Cake

2010-03-28T18:50:00.000-07:00

Making a fine cake takes attention to detail. Many of us have recollections of being in the kitchen when our mothers or grandmothers baked cakes, “Don’t peek in the oven! Don’t slam the kitchen door – the cake will fall”. What admonishments might usually fall on deaf ears are heard –every child wants a cake to turn out right!

In the South, cakes are revered as the finest example of a cook’s finesse in the kitchen. Southern states – even regions within states – have their own type of cake that sets them apart: the Lane Cake with its brandy and raisins from Alabama, Lady Baltimore Cake from Charleston, South Carolina and Appalachian Stack Cake – a favorite where I am from! Its story is as interesting as the cake is good; mountain settlers used to bake a layer for a stack cake to take to a wedding in the community - the resulting height of the cake being a measure of both the bride’s popularity and the support of the community for the marriage.

The part of Tennessee where I was raised also prides itself for lovely sponge cakes that are made in the Spring when the strawberries start to ripen. I am from a community very close to Strawberry Plains, Tennessee – aptly named for both the wild strawberries in the area and the cultivated ones now grown there. When strawberries are in season, families drive to strawberry farms and pick the small, sweet berries that must be eaten, frozen or made into jam almost immediately as they are so perishable. It is a tradition in our family to bake a sponge cake in a half- sheet pan, turn it out while warm onto a powdered sugar dusted kitchen cloth and roll it up to cool. When cool, we gently unroll the cake and spread it with whipped, sweetened cream and fresh strawberries and roll it back up and chill for a few hours.

Here is our family recipe for Strawberry Sponge Cake:

5 eggs, separated

1 teaspoon vanilla

½ teaspoon salt

1/3 cup sugar

1/3 cup cornstarch

1/3 cup all purpose flour

powdered sugar -about 1/2 cup

fresh strawberries, sliced

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease and line a half-sheet pan and cover with parchment paper. Grease the paper and lightly flour. Beat the egg whites and add the salt and continue to beat until soft peaks form. Slowly add the sugar and beat until stiff but not dry. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks until foamy and add vanilla: set aside. Spoon the whites over the yolks and sprinkle the flour and corn starch on top. Fold gently until blended and then spread in pan. Bake for about 10 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.

Using about ½ cup of powdered sugar, dust the cloth all over. Turn the sponge cake onto the towel and carefully remove the parchment paper. Roll the cake from the long side and let it rest for a minute or two then unroll it and let it rest for a few more minutes and then roll it up and let it cool completely. Unroll and spread with sweetened whipped cream and fresh strawberries and roll again. Cut with a serrated knife and serve.

2010-03-23T17:43:00.000-07:00

I don’t know what is more overwhelming in my house – the kitchen gadgets or the Legos.

It’s surprising the way Legos turn up everywhere I go. They are more persistent than beggar lice – those tiny sticky seeds that stick to your clothes when you walk though a pasture before its mown. At home they turn up in the laundry, the bathtub, the dog’s water bowl (poor Gussie), in beds, in the car and, yes, in the kitchen.

That’s part of life with three little boys.

Another great part about having boys is all the surprises. Charlie, my five year old, is great with surprises. Everyone who knows Charlie (or knows about Charlie) soon realizes that he was endowed by the creator to have a special verve all his own. He is what my 93 year old grandmother calls “lively” and what we call “trouble” and about 1000 times a day I ask myself, the dog, the cat and whomever else might be listening “Where is he?”. And the answer to that is typically going to lead to some sort of surprise.

If you read down two blog posts from this one, you will see the lovely little zoo creature muffins I made with the Nordic Ware pan I love so much and if you watch Talk of the Town you will see those same little muffins looking so inviting on camera. Charlie was in the kitchen with me when I made those cute little muffins. He helped me crack the eggs. He helped me mix the batter. He helped me spoon the batter into the pan. He watched carefully the entire time the pan was in the oven asking me to turn on the light so he could see the muffins bake. He checked to see if they were cool enough to decorate. He watched me decorate. He asked, “Will they all be on T.V.?”

“Yes”, I said, “but when I come home you can eat one or two”.

“I really want the one that looks like a lion and the one that looks like a elphalant, and the one that looks like a hippotomouse”.

“That’s a lot”, I said. “You might want to share”.

“Tell the T.V. people they can have the whale. I don’t like whales.” He wandered off to the living room where his dad was watching basketball.

The next day was the T.V. segment. Prepped, the muffins looked so great on a cake plate. Leland, the host for the segment checked the muffins out. I told him he was welcome to try one. He declined and so did the camera crew. I packed the muffins up and brought them back home. I knew Charlie would be happy.

He was. I told him he could have his choice after lunch. “I’ll have the green elphalant”, he told me decisively. “ It’s the one with the red Lego in the middle.”

2010-03-22T14:44:00.000-07:00

You’ve heard the expression “Like a kid in a candy store”? That was me last week in Chicago for the 2010 International Housewares Show. Imagine more housewares companies than you could ever dream under one roof with over 60,000 people attending and what you have is a veritable world’s fair of kitchen gadgets.

Today I had to pick just a few of those items to show on T.V. for Talk of the Town. It is always difficult to decide what to show, especially when I have a house filled with kitchen gadgets and it's a challenge to decide what to use in my own home, much less take to T.V. viewers.

Here is the variety I chose for today and why I chose these products:

- Why? It Chops! It Stirs! And, you know what – it works! I wrote about this in an earlier post and I keep pulling this gadget out every single time I have any ground meat to cook. For $6 retail it is an item that most of us will pick up and find ourselves using again and again.

Takeya Infused Water and Tea Pitchers

We all need to drink more water and these pitchers are awesome for infusing water with fresh fruit flavors without adding any chemicals or sweeteners. The BPA free plastic has a high level of clarity and will not cloud, the design is attractive (not cheap looking), and the cap is designed to hold the fruit back from the pouring spout so you can pour without blocking. It also seals air tight.

Toss and Chop chopped salad tool – Anything that makes putting a salad together quickly is going to be a great gadget. The Toss and Chop has micro-serrated edges so you never need to sharpen this tool and it works on everything from carrots to tomatoes to lettuce to eggs. The bowl is extra nice - the perfect size for a large salad for two or side salads for four.

Cuisipro Apple Corer – because you can take the core out of an apple in 10 seconds when you're hurrying to pack a lunch box. Enough said. Also, all Cuisipro products have a 25-year warranty!

The Nordic Ware Zoo Critters Muffin Pan – Because I want cupcakes and muffins to bake evenly and look cute. Also, Nordic Ware is made in the USA, it is highly durable and known for quality and value.

Chef’s Planet Berry Measuring Colander – Who thinks of these things? A colander that measures by cups with a handle and a special bottom edge that you can use upside down to drain a can of tuna instead of pressing the tuna fish top down and risk cutting off a finger. Brilliant!