Food Friday

Food Friday: Cabbage is the New Kale!

January 17, 2020 by Jean Sanders Leave a Comment

All hail the cabbage! Humble. Long-lasting. Tasty. Crunchy. Overlooked. Packed with Vitamin C and calcium. (Red cabbage is loaded with anti-oxidants.) So long, kale! You have outstayed your welcome.

I’m still flushed with enthusiasm for New Year’s Resolutions, which always include saving money and eating better. And I’d like to cut down on my carbon footprint. Luckily the grocery store is under 2 miles away, but if I only head in there once or twice a week, it is better than making a daily errand destination. It’s bad enough that I am going to stop off at Target later…

A cabbage is cheap, and packed with nutrition, as well as being versatile and large. The last cabbage I pulled out from the heap weighed 4 pounds, just brimming over with meal potential. You can easily spice up your weekly menu without spending lots of money. And cabbage doesn’t have to be just the stinky accompaniment to corned beef once a year. There are lots of new and enticing ways to prepare cabbage. I’ll bet you that right this minute someone in Park Slope is experimenting with an artisanal bespoke organic cabbage smoothie, infused with saffron and CBD.

Here is a lot of practical and basic info from the geniuses at Bon Appétit: https://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/tools-test-kitchen/article/cabbage

When winter rolls around we tend to think of oven-baked meals as a way to keep the kitchen cozy and our little bellies full. Whenever we do pork chops I always think of cole slaw and apple sauce as good side dishes. Samsin Nosrat (Of Salt Fat Acid Heat fame https://www.saltfatacidheat.com) has a better idea than my mother’s 1950’s Hellmann’s mayonnaise-inspired slaw dish. You should try this: Samin Nosrat’s Bright Cabbage Slaw. It incorporates cabbage and apples, without the fat and calories from nostalgic mayonnaise. It is a bright treat on a dark winter night. https://www.pbs.org/food/recipes/samin-nosrats-bright-cabbage-slaw/ You can pretend you are in California. (This is originally Michael Pollan’s recipe from Chez Panisse.)

Nigella’s Sweet and Sour Slaw is a little more time consuming – it might be perfect for a Saturday night meal, and it is quite festive and tasty. http://www.sweetpaulmag.com/food/nigellas-sweet-amp-sour-slaw

Now you can take your new knife skills and try something fun for Taco Tuesday: Not Your Traditional Korean Tacos. Our friends at Food52 always have a tasty and clever solution for dinner, and these fresh Korean tacos will set you apart from the salt-laden Old El Paso-recipe dependent households. https://food52.com/recipes/17897-not-your-traditional-korean-tacos

An even more sophisticated take on cabbage and wraps comes from Bon Appétit: One-Skillet Hot Sausage and Cabbage Stir-Fry with Chives. https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/one-skillet-hot-sausage-and-cabbage-stir-fry-with-chives Mr. Friday is always buying Italian sausage, and we wind up using it just for sausage and pepper dishes, or as pizza topping. This adds another meal to our burgeoning repertoire for 2020.

And where would we be in the midst of winter without a scrambler recipe? That is, a recipe where everything is already on hand; in the fridge, in the pantry, in the larder, ready to roll: Pasta with Cabbage, Winter Squash and Walnuts. This will take care of a lot of leftovers, particularly that half bag of walnuts from the Christmas baking. No need to go out in the snow! https://food52.com/recipes/78397-pasta-with-cabbage-winter-squash-and-walnuts

Cabbage probably won’t ever be the fleek media darling that kale was, but it is always dependable. Like an old friend, or an old pair of jeans. You remember it fondly and it soothes your soul.

“Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”-Mark Twain

Food Friday: New Year’s Resolutions

January 10, 2020 by Jean Sanders Leave a Comment

I’m going to check back in three months and see if the enthusiasm I currently feel for for all my new 2020 rules of clean living are still true. It’s easy today, ten days into the new year to be proud of my new, adult approach to life. But as my daughter, the former Pesky Pescatarian has observed, sagely, that all this adulting is hard work.

Luke the wonder dog and I have been taking two walks every weekday. It’s been easy, so far. Sure, it’s been chilly in the mornings, but bright and sunny in the afternoons. No excuses have been sought. I’m trying to maintain that lofty goal of 10,000 steps a day, and so far, every day this week we have been successful. I don’t know what we will do on a rainy day, though. Luke hates to get his feet wet in the rain. Never mind that he loves pools and oceans and rivers. No; he does not like to go out in the rain. I’ll have to leave him here while I go off trekking.

Dry January is a little trickier. This is the second year that Mr. Friday and I have joined in Dry January – no alcohol for the month. We didn’t realize how much we like that glass of cheap white wine when he comes home at night, or choosing the right wine to pair with Friday Night Pizza. This abstinence is good for the liver, pocketbook and waistband. I’ve lost 2 pounds since Christmas, which included inhaling city blocks of créme pat in the Christmas cream puffs and acres of homemade peppermint bark. Plus a whole flock of Champagne; some really nice Veuve Clicquot Rosé, too. Weight-wise, it has been an excellent New Year, so far. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/06/793895415/dry-january-the-health-benefits-from-taking-a-break-from-alcohol

My dentist is sang froid and easy-going. She is just pleased that I wander through every year. Her martinet of a dental hygienist is another story. Every 6 moths I get Miss Minchin’s soul-crushing assessment. She knows that I don’t floss every single bloody night. Not so in 2020! 9 for 9! So far! And I replaced the head of my electric toothbrush on January 1. Who says I am not serious about oral hygiene?

Santa brought me a nice pile of books that I haven’t been able to find at the library, so I will not be indulging in an impulse buys on Amazon for a few months. I even tidied up the stack of waiting books on my bedside table. Now, if only the New York Times would call to see what I am planning to read this year. Among them are: Virginia Woolf’s Garden, Nigella Lawson’s At My Table, Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, Penelope Lively’s Life in the Garden, Nigal Slater’s The Christmas Chronicles, Donald Hall’s On Eagle Pond, and The Old Success by Martha Grimes. Murder, gardens, food, poetry, gossip and more food. (I’m thinking I might re-read Little Women, too. I know just where my well-thumbed copy is, too!)

Which brings us to the kitchen. For the most part our kitchen is fairly well organized. There are drawers dedicated to potholders and trivets, rolls of aluminum foil, parchment and waxed paper. A drawer for baking tools: cookie cutters, measuring spoons and cups, offset spatulas and icing bags. A drawer for tea towels, another for silverware, one for matches, straws, razor blades, twist ties, and other rarefied junk. There is just one for all the key cooking utensils. Mr. Friday and I have a lot of repeat items. I have two turners I like, thin and sleek and metal. He prefers a few of icky, clunky black OXO silicone pancake turners. I like an old fashioned, easy-peasy cork screw – he likes a fancy battery powered one. (Luckily that isn’t an issue this month!)

We have two sets of indoor cooking tongs, and an outsized pair for outdoors. We have cheese graters, micro-planers and a nutmeg grater. We are down to one garlic press, and one can opener. Several slotted spoons. Lots of sterling serving pieces. A basting brush. Two cooking forks we got from our mothers, that are exact matches, which makes us suspect they were both acquired through the assiduous application of child labor pasting S&H Green Stamps into books, as we both have vague recollections of being entertained as tots…

My next character improvement is going to be organizing this shambles of a kitchen drawer. Wish me luck. Luke says it is going to rain this weekend…

“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.”
-A.A. Milne

Food Friday: Sick as a Dog

January 3, 2020 by Jean Sanders

It has become a holiday ritual that is almost as predictable as the ball dropping in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The holidays end, and one of us gets sick. It was my turn this year. We had a fine and festive Christmas with the young marrieds, cooked and ate and repeated the process surely more than three times a day, if my snug waistbands are any true indicator of the epicurean pleasures we experienced. And now the holidays are over, and we have all of 2020 to consider – Leap Year and all.

I guess we partied a little too hearty. My cold has mushroomed into massive congestion, sneezing and coughing. There are multiple Kleenex boxes in every room of the house. I am not a pleasant sight, just a noisy series of barking coughs and wet sniffles.

Imagine what the our homecoming was like for poor Luke the wonder dog, newly sprung from the kennel, as he tied the apron bow, and got out the cookbooks so he could make some chicken soup to hurry my healing process. He’s such a good dog. This is a reminder to be kind to our faithful companions! And since we can’t teach an old dog new tricks, luckily for us, Luke knows his way around the kitchen. These are the words that he dictated to me, as he stood on the stool, chopping vegetables and measuring out cups of rice, listening to The Splendid Table, where he has garnered a surprising breadth of culinary knowledge.

“A word to the wise: you are going to need chicken soup sooner or later this winter. And, no, it will never taste as good as your mother’s. It will ward off the flu, and will ease the aches and pains of that miserable head cold. And soon, you will feel right as rain.” (I wonder if it is only Luke who is partial to clichés or if all dogs are prone, like food writers?)

I can see Maurice Sendak will hovering behind Luke, proudly, as he measures out the rice. And soon we will be slipping on the sliding ice, sipping our own chicken soup with rice. Maybe Luke will end up with Max and the Wild Things, stirring soup on a well-drawn pen and ink stove.

Luke recommends:
Homemade Chicken Stock

Ingredients
1 deboned chicken carcass, including skin
OR 1 whole chicken (do not give the poor dog a bone, no matter how eloquent he is, or how mournfully he looks at you)
6 quarts water
6 garlic cloves, smashed
2 carrots, roughly chopped
3 celery stalks, roughly chopped
1 small onion, chopped
1 tablespoon butter
4 black peppercorns
1 bay leaf
Salt

1. Use a large stock pot, and add butter and chicken over medium heat. Brown them a little bit.
2. Add all the rest of the ingredients, and bring to a boil.
3. Boil for 3 minutes, then turn heat down to low.
4. Cover, and simmer for about 3-4 hours, stirring every once in a while.
5. Once it’s a golden color, strain and let cool. Put in the refrigerator overnight, then skim the fat off the top.

Chicken Soup (not completely homemade – but sometimes a dog is on deadline and life has to go on)

Olive oil
Half an onion, minced
2 carrots, finely diced
Bay leaf
A sprig of fresh thyme, or a few shakes of dried
2 quarts chicken stock
1 cup uncooked, long grain rice (or, if you are a noodle family, have your wicked way with them)
2 cups shredded, cooked chicken
1. Heat the olive oil in the bottom of a large, heavy-bottomed skillet.
2. Add onion and carrot, and sauté until soft, 5-7 minutes.
3. Add bay leaf, thyme, and chicken broth, and bring to a boil.
4. Reduce to a simmer and add rice and chicken.
5. Let soup bubble, stirring occasionally, until the rice is cooked through, about 15-20 minutes.

Note from Luke:
This will be much better than Lipton’s Chicken Noodle dried-powder and freeze-dried chicken bits! And certainly better than Campbell’s. Have you ever looked at those pinkish chicken nubbins? Well, you were probably feverish and anything warm was going to do the trick.

And now, thanks to Luke, you have a nice, comforting stash of stock in your freezer, and you are ready for that rainy, sneezy, sniffling, no-good, terrible day. I remember the glory days, back in elementary school, when I could stay home, bundled up on the sofa with a blanket, a pillow, a box of Kleenex and jelly glass of ginger ale with a bent paper straw. I reveled in spending a feverish day napping in front of the black and white TV. If you are lucky when you succumb to this year’s stay-home-from-school cold maybe Bewitched and The Dick Van Dyke Show will be on YouTube someplace. Or you can catch up with Season Three of The Crown!

Luke has taken good care of me. Mr. Friday has gone back to the serenity of his office, and I am tottering around the house starting to take the Christmas decorations down. But later this afternoon, Luke and I are going to curl up on the sofa, catching up on the Christmas movies we were too busy to watch last week. Happy New Year!

“If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater suggest that he wear a tail.”
-Fran Lebowitz

Food Friday: Happy New Year!

December 27, 2019 by Jean Sanders

This is a slightly updated repeat of a column I wrote last year for New Year’s Eve. We are off gallivanting around, and will be back in the new year, full of new resolves and recipes. Happy New Year, Gentle Readers!

This New Year’s Eve I am kicking back with gin and Champagne (probably Prosecco because we are starting a New Year’s Resolution Budget). We will fire up the Acorn TV and watch a couple of episodes of the original Upstairs, Downstairs. There is nothing that makes me feel like a schlubby, self-indulgent, middle-aged, middle-class American faster than Upstairs, Downstairs.

Prosecco or Champagne? It’s a personal choice. I am hugely impressed by a stately bottle of Veuve Cliquot, and would probably serve it to Mr. Hudson, the butler from Upstairs, Downstairs, if he ever came to call. But I find a pretty orange label on a bottle of Mionetto Prosecco just as appealing. Lady Marjorie, also from 165 Eaton Place, would never comment on the lower price point. She would be pleased just to loosen her corset stays and have a second glass. And then Lady Marjorie will tell me to relax, and to enjoy myself a little bit. “You never know when disaster will strike,” she confides. (Lady Marjorie went down on Titanic, so she has some experience with life changing moments.)

Mr. Hudson would tell me to pull up my bootstraps. The Christmas cookies are almost gone. In the meantime, it is Friday night, and it has been a long week. It’s the last time to indulge in 2018. Instead pouring a glass of my usual cheap winter Malbec, I thought I should test some seasonal, perhaps New Year’s Eve-ish cocktail recipes, to get back into the holiday spirit. These are crowd pleasers, but they require a little planning.

“The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love is like being enlivened with Champagne.”
– Samuel Johnson

French 75s

“Hits with remarkable precision.”
-Harry Craddock, The Savoy Cocktail Book

2 ounces gin
1 ounce lemon juice
1 spoonful extra fine sugar
Champagne

Shake the gin, lemon juice and sugar in a cocktail shaker filled with cracked ice until chilled and well-mixed and then pour into tall glass containing cracked ice and fill up the glass with Champagne. This clever cocktail was said to have been devised during WWI, the kick from the alcohol combo being described as powerful as the French 75mm howitzer gun.

“Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of Champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.”
-Winston Churchill

Champagne Cocktail

In a Champagne glass add a teaspoon of sugar and enough Angostura bitters to melt the sugar. Add a tablespoon of Grand Marnier or cognac and mix in with the sugar, bitters mix. Add a “fine” quality Champagne and stir. Float a slice of thin orange on top. This is what Ilsa and Victor Laszlo sipped in Casablanca.

“Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.”
-Mark Twain

As always, our festive friends at Food52 have some delightful ideas for nibbles to help soak up some of the bubbly we are sure to be drinking on New Year’s Eve. http://www.food52.com/blog/2807

On a recent trip to food-forward-thinking-Charleston, friends ordered the Aperol and Prosecco cocktail, because they are oh, so trendy. I did not realize that this is the most popular cocktail in Italy. And now it can be one of yours, too!

Aperol and Prosecco

3 parts chilled, dry Prosecco
2 parts Aperol
1 splash soda

Serve with on the rocks in wine glass or rocks glass
Garnish with a slice of orange (this makes it practically health food!)
http://www.eater.com/2014/10/21/7020183/the-story-of-the-aperol-spritz-a-classic-italian-cocktail

This is very pretty, and so seasonal: pomegranate mimosas. Yumsters. http://www.delish.com/cooking/recipe-ideas/recipes/a46968/pomegranate-mimosas-recipe/

“My only regret in life is that I didn’t drink enough Champagne”
-John Maynard Keynes

And the best of both worlds: a Black Velvet! Champagne and Guinness. This drink is simply equal parts stout and sparkling wine, and to be honest, there are some who will never understand its appeal. But to fans, this is a perfect special-occasion drink, particularly suited to mornings and late afternoons. I had my first on a gelid night in London, at Rules, in Covent Garden. Divine.

Black Velvet

4 ounces (1/2 cup) chilled Champagne or Prosecco
4 ounces (1/2 cup) chilled Guinness Extra Stout

Pour the Champagne into a tall glass. We first had ours served in heavy pewter tankards, but at home we eschew the delicate flutes for a sturdy rocks glass. This is not an effete drink. It is robust, and fills your hand with determination. Be sure to pour the Guinness on top. (This is important: Guinness is heavier. If you pour the sparkling wine second, it won’t combine evenly, and will need to be stirred. I shudder at the thought!)

Enjoy yourself this weekend. Happy New Year! Loosen those corset strings. And let the games begin, again, on Wednesday.

“Why do I drink Champagne for breakfast? Doesn’t everyone?”
-Noel Coward

Food Friday: Holiday Gift Guide

December 20, 2019 by Jean Sanders

’Tis the season to be jolly, and generous, and thoughtful, and creative. While being mindful of your budget, and considering other people’s delicate sensibilities and constitutions. I will refer you to your local independent bookstore where recommendations will be helpful and insightful.

When we renovated this house we added two walls of built-in bookcases, one in the living room and one in the kitchen, because we live with books. I come from a family of readers and writers and book lovers. This week’s illustration is one of four shelves devoted to our cookbooks. Sometimes the books are grouped thematically – Jamie Oliver’s stands next to The River Café Cook Book because he got his start working at the River Café. Mark Bittman and Amanda Hesser bookend the shelf because of their New York Times connection. The well-thumbed Lee Bailey’s Country Desserts falls open to favorite, oft-baked Flourless Chocolate Cake. I still refer to the book, even though I bake a flourless chocolate cake a couple of times a year, and have done so every year since 1985.

Using the internets for finding recipes is convenient, but hardly as evocative as the grease-flecked pages of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which is on another shelf, just out of the frame above. I don’t have recipe cards tucked into my own mother’s old copy of Google. I can’t dog ear or underline important directions that I overlook when I am in a hurry. Sometimes it is important to mix all the dry ingredients together FIRST. Or that an egg should be beaten before adding it to the mixture. I tend to be hasty in the kitchen, and do better with a paper version of the dish I am trying to produce than with a webpage that needs to be refreshed every few minutes. One of these days I will memorize Mark Bittman’s easy peasy pizza dough recipe, since I whip up a batch almost every week, so it is a signal that the weekend is about to begin when I get his book off the shelf on a Friday morning, and it opens to the very spot I seek.

And thus the holiday theme for this week’s Food Friday. Gift giving. Not gifting. What a terrible word! Please promise me that you will give book gifts.

You can start with the newest edition of Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. The Basic Pizza Dough recipe can be found in my edition of the book on page 178. This is a wonderful book to give to youngsters just starting out – or to have as a handy dandy reference, or to give to someone who does not subscribe to The New York Times. I have the tenth anniversary edition – but a new and improved 20th anniversary edition is now in print. (Mr. Friday found this copy on a remainder table! Always a bargain hunter, our Mr. Friday.) https://www.markbittman.com/books

Vivian Howard’s Deep Run Roots is a beautifully designed book. She must have developed high production values when doing her PBS show A Chef’s Life. Her recipes are just as charming and quirky as the program. We cooked Scarlett’s Chicken Rice a couple of weeks ago, and froze several containers to have for winter weather insurance. https://www.vivianhoward.com/deep-run-roots

Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table was a revelation! I had always thought she was a baker. I hadn’t realized her versatility until a friend cooked the most impressive Chicken in a Pot for us. Amazing. It introduced us to another portal in the universe that leads to garlic and preserved lemons. And the fact that a screwdriver is a key cooking utensil lends the dish a certain bit of je ne sais quoi. For sure. https://doriegreenspan.com/book/around-my-french-table-more-than-300-recipes-from-my-home-to-yours-5/

While not a cook book, this new book is rather charming memoir by New York Magazine restaurant writer Adam Platt. It was a throughly enjoyable bit of armchair travel and fine dining: The Book of Eating. I always read his reviews in New York, not that I will ever dine in any of the eateries he reviews, but it feels as if the opportunity ever presents itself, I will be au currant and prepared for discussions about farm-to-table, fois gras, New Age crabmeat pithivier, or even “elegantly sliced hamachi crudo.” Here is an excerpt: http://www.grubstreet.com/2019/10/in-defense-of-wasp-cooking.html

Speaking of charming – this is a British podcast that I have been enjoying while walking Luke the wonder dog: Table Manners. Jessie Ware and her mother Lenny cook warmly satisfying meals for a panoply of talented guests, while discussing creative projects, books, movies, food, travel, Uber ratings, and final meals in a fairly ribald manner. (Spoiler alert – F bombs are dropped, but with cute British accents.) https://play.acast.com/s/tablemanners

I hope you will stroll into your local bookshop and will rummage through the cookbooks for all your nearest and dearest this festive season. Holiday meals can be minefields: it is good to have protective armor and reference books. No screens at the table, please. And another key to easing your holiday burdens – books are easily wrapped. Plus, one size fits all – you can always squeeze one more book onto a shelf.

Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and happy holidays!

“This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook — try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!”
-Julia Child

Food Friday: Holiday Chips and Dips

December 13, 2019 by Jean Sanders

It’s Friday the thirteenth, in December, and I haven’t quite recovered from Thanksgiving yet. I am still finding stray Legos in odd places, and I just threw away a baggie brimming with some gelatinous remnant of endive. Boxes of Christmas decorations litter the guest room floor because we still haven’t gotten around to buying a tree, let alone decorating it. I am just a little disorganized and frazzled. I could use a good cocktail party.

I require no witty banter. I don’t like fancy cocktail parties that call for panty hose and intricate finger food. Who really needs toast points, coated with egg, with a dab of caviar? Manicure? Me? Preposterous! I like the kind of gatherings where everyone has thrown out their vegan-keto-intermittent-fasting mentality, and we are all grouped around a bowl of Knorr’s (or Lipton’s) onion soup dip, shoveling and excavating with Ruffles. Yumsters. Who has time to be precious with puff pastry? Bring on the chip and dips. And throw in some nuts and Cheetos, please.

The Disappearing Act

This evolved from your basic 1950s onion dip for what I imagined to be John Cheever-y kinds of cocktail parties. I think it is a step up the slippery evolutionary kitchen slope because I use Knorr soup mix, which sounds imported, no? Regardless of the shopworn cliché and conceit, this dip is very popular with our guests, whether they be guzzling the French 75s or clinking their icy bottles of Coke.

Makes 2 cups
2 cups sour cream
1 package Knorr’s onion soup mix
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon fresh thyme, finely chopped
2 tablespoons green onion, finely chopped
Mix all the ingredients together and chill until it’s time to serve. Excellent with veggies, but much better with big fat crunchy kettle fried chips.

If you would like to bypass all the sodium and preservatives in the store-bought mix version, and you have a time to fuss, you can make this Alison Roman version from the New York Times. They say the prep time is about an hour and fifteen minutes:

Sour Cream and Onion Dip
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 pound yellow onions (about 3 medium), thinly sliced
2 shallots, thinly sliced
Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper
1 cup sour cream
1 cup full fat Greek yogurt or sour cream
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 clove garlic, finely grated
Olive oil, for drizzling
¼ cup finely chopped chives

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat.
Add onions and shallots and season with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onions are softened and starting to turn a nice golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes. Reduce heat to low and continue to cook, stirring often to make sure the onions don’t stick along the bottom of the skillet. Cook until onions are a deep golden brown and reduced by about half their original size, another 45 to 55 minutes. Resist the urge to turn up the heat to make them caramelize faster. It will lead to burning.
Transfer onions and shallots to a cutting board and finely chop. Place in a large bowl along with sour cream, yogurt, lemon juice and garlic. Season with salt and pepper.
Transfer to a serving bowl and drizzle with olive oil, season with pepper and sprinkle with chives.
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1019040-sour-cream-and-onion-dip?

For once, Martha has an easier way. A little compromise, although you do have to cook a lot of bacon.
Loaded Baked-Potato Dip https://www.marthastewart.com/1535444/loaded-baked-potato-dip

With this dream recipe you can forgo the dip. Think of the time you can save!
Garlic Parmesan Potato Chips

I tried it out on the neighbors last year at our little New Year’s Eve fête, and it was hoovered up in record time.

1 12-ounce bag of potato chips (the store brand is the best value!)
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
3 tablespoons dried parsley flakes.
3 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
4 cloves garlic
In a small sauce pan, or frying pan, warm the 3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. Add the 4 cloves of garlic-pressed garlic. Cook at a low heat for 3 minutes, until fragrant. There is nothing like garlic to make the house smell homey and divine. Let the oil cool for about 5 or 10 minutes.
Put the chips in a large, shallow bowl. Drizzle with the garlic-infused oil. Toss the chips, gently. There is nothing worse than tiny little mingey bits of chips when one is trying to impress… Add the parsley and half the Parmesan cheese.
Warm the oven to 350°F degrees.
Put the chips on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Warm in the oven for about 7 or 8 minutes. Put the chips back in the original shallow bowl, scatter in the rest of the cheese, and toss. Serve warm. Yumsters.

How about stepping up your hummus game, and making it from scratch, too? There is nothing wrong with buying hummus, and serving it straight from the container, but if you are having a little soirée, wouldn’t it be nice to be smug, and swan around knowing you are serving homemade hummus? That is something you will never see in a Hallmark Christmas movie. Don’t forget the pita.

Homemade Humble-bragging Hummus

1 garlic clove
Juice of 1 lemon, about 1/4 cup
3 heaping tablespoons of tahini
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/3 cup of olive oil
2 (15-ounce) cans chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1 pinch of cayenne pepper

Drop the garlic clove into a food processor and add the lemon juice. Add the tahini on top and the salt and cumin. Process until the mixture looks peanut-buttery, about 1 minute. Stream in the olive oil, a little at a time, with the motor running. Process just until the mixture is smooth and creamy. Add the chickpeas and process for about 3 minutes, scraping the sides of the bowl as you go, until the chickpeas are completely blended and the hummus is smooth and uniform in color.

Go out into the back yard and looks for greens and pinecones. I added some holly sprigs to a big, shallow bowl of whole, fresh cranberries with a fat white pillar candle to be our holiday centerpiece. You can get creative with citrus fruit and even a pineapple, depending on your need to strive. Chill some Prosecco, warm up some mulled wine, have some holiday cheer ready for your dear friends, who want come in from the cold.

“After all, what is your host’s purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they’d have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.”
-P. J. O’Rourke

“Without peanuts, it isn’t a cocktail party.”
-Julia Child

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Food Friday: Home-baked Goodness

December 6, 2019 by Jean Sanders

After a joyous and fattening Thanksgiving I have waddled back into the kitchen to confront the next round of holidays which are headed toward us at an alarming pace. Our neighbors seemed to have put up their Christmas lights while still gnawing on turkey legs. I have not been quite so swift, but I have purchased a pungent evergreen wreath from a local civic group, decorated it with sprigs of holly and some spangly gold star ribbon, and hung it on the front door. I have also moved the unsightly, out-of-season-overnight mums to the back yard where I will transplant them if the weather cooperates this weekend.

Looking at the calendar is sobering. Hanukkah starts on the twenty-second, and Christmas arrives just three days later. I’ve got to start thinking about the annual rite of cookie baking. It seems early to contemplate holiday baking – especially when I am still eating leftover Thanksgiving turkey for lunch every day. But there is no denying facts; in three weeks we will be wondering how the time flew by so fast.

I am thinking about the cookies I need to mail to our far-flung friends and family, and even more to take around to the neighbors, not to mention those for personal consumption. I like to send cookies that will evoke memories, like Proust’s madeleines. Just before Thanksgiving I sent my brother a box of home-baked gingersnaps, which remind us of our mother. Store-bought gingersnaps are never as poignant, or as crisp and deelish. He said he sat down, poured a big glass of cold milk, and immediately scarfed down three cookies. When was the last time that you ate three cookies without guilt? Childhood, when calories were never considered. And as long as Mom kept pulling sheets of warm cookies out of the oven on cold winter afternoons, we would continue eating gingersnaps. Not delicate little ladylike nibbles. Full-throated, passionate chomps of warm molasses-infused, sugar-crusted, pliant discs of deliciousness. Dinosaur-sized bites. Yumsters.

Baltimore has its own Proustian trigger: the Berger cookie. I have included links to several recipes and histories of the Berger cookie. You need to work out the size and heft and the proportions for yourself, but I don’t care for the bitsy Oreo-sized versions. I am baking English muffin-sized Bergers. They will be epic and Brobdingnagian. The ratio of chocolate frosting to the cake-like cookie will be impressive. These are cookies we ate when we were college students. When a whole row of Oreos could be consumed in one sitting. When we laughed at calories. It is the time of the year to revisit our misspent youth.

So it that spirit – use the heavy cream, and not sour cream. Eschew the corn syrup. Layer on the chocolate, accept your plangent wisps of nostalgia, and bake some new, giddy memories. (And do not cheat and buy Bergers from Amazon. You have to have some standards!)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-berger-cookie-is-baltimores-gift-to-the-chocolate-world-6918029/

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/berger-cookie-baltimore-health-regulations

https://sweetlittlebluebird.com/copycat-recipe-baltimores-famous-berger_20/

https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/copycat-berger-cookies/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2019/12/02/if-a-brownie-and-a-sugar-cookie-had-a-baby-it-would-be-this-berger-cookie/

https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/baltimore-berger-cookies-recipe

Peppermint variation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/chocolate-peppermint-cookies/10391/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/19/proust-madeleine-cakes-started-as-toast-in-search-of-lost-time-manuscripts-reveal

“I cannot go any further without mentioning my favourite biscuit of all time, now sadly, tragically, extinct. The oaty, crumbly, demerara notes of the long-forgotten Abbey Crunch will remain forever on my lips. I loved the biscuit as much as anything I have ever eaten, and often, in moments of solitude, I still think about its warm, buttery, sugary self.”
― Nigel Slater

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Food Friday: Training for the Big Day

November 15, 2019 by Jean Sanders

Have you put your Thanksgiving schedule together? What are you serving? Who’s coming? Do you have dozens of count-down and to-do lists for shopping, cleaning and prep work? What? No? Neither do I. I am not quite ready to think about Thanksgiving, as much as I like a good leftover turkey sandwich. Surely there is still plenty of time to think about centerpieces and green beans and stuffing and pumpkin-themed desserts.

I have given minimal thought to the tablecloth, and polishing some of the ancestral silver. Red and white tablecloth or cheerful harvest yellow print? I’ve idly mulled over dessert ideas, and have even ordered some individual tart pans, just in case I try that Pomegranate Cranberry tart recipe I saw someplace. (https://dessertfirstgirl.com/2018/11/cranberry-pomegranate-curd-tart.html#) I’ve bookmarked the recipe on my laptop. I hope. And wine. I’m wondering if we should have some sparkling wine this year instead of the usual (predictable) Beaujolais Villages. Maybe we should have both.

But, like Katie Scarlett O’Hara, I will think about that another day. Because we still have a few more dinners to slog through before the Big Day. Twelve more dinners. Pizza will be the answer a couple of times; we really have to put on our thinking caps for the rest.

Mindful that we should be trying to leave a smaller carbon footprint behind as we make our way in the world, we are eschewing private jet travel, and eating less red meat. So we are experimenting with poultry dishes. We are always happy to see what variation on chicken we can think of next; roasted, fried, stir-fried, in a salad, with rice, soup, stewed in a pot, jerked, kabobbed, Parmesan, marsala-ed, schnitzled. Mr. Friday has a colleague who lives a charmed life in Portugal. He is always eating delectable local foods, and regaling us with his adventures in fine dining. He is like a character in A Year in Provence or the Durrells of Corfu. I fully expect him to go truffle hunting next. He shared this pheasant recipe with Mr. Friday, which we prepared last Sunday. (Actually, Mr. Friday did all the work, I sat at the kitchen counter and provided witty banter.)

Luis’s Pheasant
(This is more of an outline)
Bird, let’s say a pheasant size, cut in pieces
4 small onions
2 garlic cloves
1 bay leaf
Thyme
Cream (we used a pint of heavy cream)
Butter
1.5 deciliters of Port wine (3/4 of a cup) or a similar wine (somehow sweet and with 18-20% alcohol)
Salt, pepper

Use a covered, oven-proof casserole pan.
On the stove top, melt the butter, real butter and be generous.
Brown the chicken pieces in the melted butter, turning them, until the skin is golden brown.
Then, take them out.
Replace them by the finely chopped onions, stirring until translucent.
Pour the wine over the onions. And continue to stir for a few minutes.
Add the chicken.
Cover with cream, which should cover all the pieces.
Then add the garlic (smashed, not chopped), the bay leaf, the thyme, salt and pepper as you prefer.
Put in oven, let’s say something around 220º C (425° F ) and let it cook for around 40 minutes.
You can use different birds from the same family, like chicken, quail or partridge.
It works even with commercial chicken.
Thyme is very important – be generous using it.

We served the pheasant with mashed potatoes (with generous lashings of butter) and asparagus and green salad. Also with candles and an amusing, yet modest, red wine. It was a revelation that our grocery store even carried pheasant! And as tasty as this dinner was, I think we could have pulled it off with chicken just fine.

We enjoyed the novelty of cooking pheasant, but it was shockingly expensive: $21 for a 2 1/2 pound bird. While still less expensive than a restaurant meal, it was an eye-opener. Last night I tried this Food52 Chicken Pot Pie recipe, which I prepared with chicken I prudently (and frugally) already had in the freezer. On sale, too. I think this recipe will adapt nicely for leftover turkey. https://food52.com/recipes/81853-best-chicken-pot-pie-recipe. And I was delighted to see that our boring old middle-of-the-road grocery store carried the essential chicken-flavored Better Than Bouillon called for in the recipe, which I can see will have many uses later on this winter when we are searching around for new poultry recipes.

Polish the silver and iron your table linens this weekend. Next week we’ll get to the heavy lifting for Thanksgiving.

“What a marvelous resource soup is for the thrifty cook – it solves the ham-bone and lamb-bone problems, the everlasting Thanksgiving turkey, the extra vegetables.”
-Julia Child

“If you think about a Thanksgiving dinner, it’s really like making a large chicken.”
-Ina Garten

Food Friday: Duck Fat Alchemy

November 8, 2019 by Jean Sanders

Cooking with duck fat is a new concept for me. Call me a convert. In my quest for the most perfect and delicious, hot and crunchy potato dishes I have tried corn oil, vegetable oil, olive oil, peanut oil and bacon fat. I have finally discovered magic in a bottle. (Actually, magic in a jar, delivered courtesy of Amazon, but that is a superfluous detail.) With the Waterfowl Festival taking off this weekend in Easton, now seems like a good time to extoll the wizardry that is duck fat.

The other night I parboiled a peeled Russet potato, which I had cut into wedges. Once they were fork-tender, I drained them in a colander, and patted them dry with paper towels. In the large and heavy cast-iron skillet I melted two tablespoons of duck fat that I had scooped from a glass jar that the UPS guy had delivered that afternoon, in the dark, at 5:30 PM. (It is going to take us all a long time to get used to the clock change, we agreed.)

The fat melted quickly at a lower medium heat, and bubbled and began to fill the kitchen with an enchanted aroma. I dumped the potato wedges into the sizzle, and stood expectantly, watching the transformation begin. I turned the wedges carefully, after I saw the bottom edges turning golden sienna. And after a few more minutes of delicate and obsessive fussing, I scooped the potato wedges out of the fat, and onto another paper towel. A mere dusting of Maldon salt was the only seasoning. And I spooned the perfectly golden brown wedges onto the dinner plates alongside the sausages, peppers, onions and garlic bread. (There was a green salad already on the table as well as a couple of glasses of an inexpensive Cabernet.)

The duck-fried potato wedges were divinely light and crunchy, and absolutely deelish. And best of all, they stayed warm through the meal. They were the soothssayingly crisp foil to the soft and slick peppers and onions. They were magical fried potatoes. Not from a freezer bag, or a store, or a fast-food drive-through. They weren’t doused in chemical preservatives. They were adult fries, with spell-binding panache. (Though no truffles.) Go get some duck fat. Right now.

Through my extensive research into the perfect homemade fried potatoes I have experienced many failures, but I think using duck fat is going to ratchet up my game considerably. There is much pleasure to be derived from homemade culinary triumphs; simple pleasures are indeed the best.

This was the impetus for my duck fat experiment: https://www.myrecipes.com/extracrispy/how-to-cook-with-duck-fat which might give you more practical information than my anecdotal paean.

And because fries are delicious, and necessary for a fulfilled life, but aren’t very photographic, I tried them again for breakfast this morning, topped with beauteous eggs for this week’s illustration. Mr. Friday drove away with a smile on his face. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee3hWLMUvD8

Waterfowl Festival goers: you probably know how to do this already, but here is a short video about conjuring up your own duck fat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkWeKp-Elvw

You’ll have more time on the weekend for frying up bacon and tomatoes, and here is an impressive breakfast to prepare before a weekend filled with retriever demonstrations, waterfowl calling, diving dogs, decoy appreciation and beer tasting: https://www.food24.com/Recipes/duck-fat-egg-toastie-20170612

“It is easy to think of potatoes, and fortunately for men who have not much money it is easy to think of them with a certain safety. Potatoes are one of the last things to disappear, in times of war, which is probably why they should not be forgotten in times of peace.”
― M.F.K. Fisher

For all things Waterfowl Festival 2019: https://www.waterfowlfestival.org/

Food Friday: Baking for Downrigging Weekend

November 1, 2019 by Jean Sanders

You might need light sweaters and extra calories this weekend if you are going to walk around Chestertown and enjoy the spectacle that is Downrigging Weekend. Your mother was right, and breakfast is still the most important meal of the day, so start it off with something tasty. Keep the pencil shavings and twigs for during the week, and gobble up some hearty apple-sultana cinnamon swirls.

Halloween is over, and you have managed to avoid eating too much chocolate, for which we in the Spy Test Kitchen salute you. I gave out more Snickers bars this year than I inhaled, for once. I think I am still conditioned by my otherwise pleasant childhood. My mother was the strange one on the block who handed out boxes of raisins. Can you imagine the shame? While Mom was imposing her sensible vision of order on the neighborhood, I was dancing from house to house, scarfing up as much exotic candy as I could get. Other households doled out wonderful candy bars unfamiliar in our house: Baby Ruths, Butterfingers, $10,000 bars, Dark Hersey bars, Clark bars, and Three Musketeers. Such loot! And I lived in a home where boxes of Sun-Maid raisins were the Halloween treat. My mother should have just handed out toothbrushes. If she were still alive, she probably would be enthusiastically giving out bags of organic kale chips to all the little ghosts and alligators and Hermione Grangers who would have come knocking on her door.

I do not mean to disparage raisins completely, but every once in a while, it seems perfectly reasonable to enjoy a kid holiday; something extraordinary and special. But Halloween was yesterday. And now it is November. It’s time to sail forward on the healthy and homebaked path to righteousness and good health. And to enjoy the Schooner Sultana and downrigging. http://downrigging.org There will be tall ships and blue grass music, and all that Chestertown has to offer.

I cannot find sultanas in our grocery store, so I substituted golden raisins, but you can use raisins, golden raisins, sultanas or currents in these recipes. https://www.thekitchn.com/whats-the-difference-between-raisins-sultanas-and-currants-223285 Do not substitute those leftover Snickers bars. Pass them this way.

Your kitchen will smell wonderful and autumnal while you are baking apples, raisins and cinnamon. This is excellent preparation for Thanksgiving, which is just around the corner. http://www.pbs.org/food/recipes/apple-sultana-cinnamon-swirls/ Mary Berry will approve, and if you do a good job, you might even get to stay in the bakeoff tent for another week.

I just love the mechanics of rolling and cutting the dough for these cinnamon rolls. I scarred my children with store-bought Pillsbury cinnamon rolls that popped out of a canister. These are much more delicious, and haven’t been hermetically sealed and are not doused in preservatives. https://www.recipegirl.com/no-yeast-apple-cinnamon-rolls-with-maple-icing/ Mom might approve.

Of course, Food52 always has good ideas: https://food52.com/recipes/24943-grandma-bercher-s-cinnamon-rolls Have a couple of cinnamon rolls, don your sweater, and take to the Chestertown streets. Watch out for the geese.

“We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea – whether it is to sail or to watch it – we are going back from whence we came.”
-John F. Kennedy

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