Enchiladas!

I first made enchiladas from Deborah Madison's recipe in The Greens Cookbook, which is excellent!  Unfortunately, it is also labor-intensive, as it involves making both tomatillo sauce and black bean chili from scratch, and if you're super hard core, you'll also make your own chili powder.  This is the version of enchiladas that I make these days, when I rarely have time to spend six hours in the kitchen.  

Apologies for the lack of measurements.  The number of enchiladas you should make is the number that can fit into your glass baking dish.  This dictates the number of tortillas you should use, and the amount of filling you'll need.  I've included my recipe for taco chicken here, but you could also use my non-hard-core version of the black bean chili, or really anything you'd enjoy having inside an enchilada.

Taco Chicken:

2 chicken breasts

1 jar salsa (I use Safeway Select chipotle salsa.)

Put the chicken into a slow cooker or pressure cooker along with the jar of salsa.  Either slow-cook on low heat for 8 hours, or pressure cook on the meat/stew setting.  (It comes out a bit better if you actually slow-cook it.)  Remove and shred the chicken, and put it in a mixing bowl.  Add back the cooking liquid about a half cup at a time until you get the flavor and consistency you want.

Enchiladas:

1/4 cup vegetable oil

tortillas

canned enchilada sauce

shredded jack cheese

filling

As a one-person job, this involves a lot of frantic hand-washing, since rolling the enchiladas will get your hands covered in sauce.  It's much better done assembly-line style, with one person frying the tortillas and another person managing the fillings.

Preheat the oven to 400°.  Pour some enchilada sauce into the bottom of a glass baking dish, and tilt to coat the bottom and sides.  Get out two plates, and pour enough sauce into one of them to completely cover the bottom.  That's your saucing station.  Add more sauce when it goes dry.  The other plate is your assembly station.

Pour your vegetable oil into a skillet.  You should always have a shallow pool of oil at the bottom of your skillet—add more if it starts to look too dry.  Heat the oil over medium-high heat until a drop of water sizzles when it hits the surface.

Fry the tortillas for about 40 seconds per side.  Coat each tortilla on both sides with sauce and move it to the assembly station.  Add one or two spoonfuls (who am I kidding—one handful) of filling, a spoonful (smaller handful) of cheese, roll up the enchilada, and place seam-down in the baking dish.  Repeat until you run out of space.

When the baking dish is full, pour in the remaining sauce, top with any leftover cheese, and bake for twenty minutes.

Susan's Papa's Stuffing

I asked Papa for his Thanksgiving stuffing recipe, and he told me that he uses the one from the Fanny Farmer cookbook.  When looked for it, I found a recipe for sausage stuffing with no sage and no celery, and recipe for sage stuffing with celery and no sausage.  So I threw together everything from both recipes and called it a night.  When I checked with Papa later, he said something along the lines of "Oh yeah, now that you mention it, I think that's what I do too."

The classic sausage to use is Greg's Famous from Ver Brugge, but things labeled "country sausage" or "breakfast sausage" will be pretty close.  For bread, I recommend letting a good batard go about one day stale and then peeling the crust off and cutting it into cubes a little over a centimeter a side.  But I've also done it with a fresh loaf of Safeway Select French bread and it was almost as good.

2 tbsp butter
1 onion
3 ribs celery
1 lb sausage
1/2 cup parsley, finely chopped
4 tbsp sage, finely chopped
8 cups bread cubes

Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat.  Add the onion and celery, and sauté until the onion is soft.  The celery will still be pretty crunchy.  (I usually chop up the herbs while I wait, popping back to the stove to stir every couple minutes.)  Add the sausage and cook, stirring occasionally until the sausage is done.  Add the sage and parsley and stir to combine.

If the bread cubes fit in your skillet, you can add them, stir to get them coated with buttery-sausagey goodness, and either serve it or... stuff it into something?  The bread cubes do not fit into my skillet.  So I dump the whole mess into my largest mixing bowl, pop on the lid (my largest mixing bowl has a lid) and shake it like crazy for about ten seconds.  Same effect, more fun.

Date Whirls

Date-Nut Filling

1 1/4 cups chopped dates

1/2 cup water

1/2 cup sugar

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1/2 cup chopped nuts

Combine all ingredients in heavy saucepan over low heat.  Cook until dates are soft and filling is thickened.

Cookies

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

2 eggs

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1 recipe date-nut filling

Cream butter thoroughly.  Add sugars gradually and cream until light and fluffy.  Add eggs and vanilla; beat well.  Sift dry ingredients and blend into creamed mixture.  Chill dough thoroughly.  Divide in half, roll each portion into rectangle on floured pastry cloth to a 1/4 inch thickness.  Spread with Date-Nut Filling.  Roll as for jelly roll and chill thoroughly.  Cut into thin slices, place on greased baking sheet, and bake in moderate oven (375 degrees) for 8 to 10 minutes.  Store in a tight container or wrap in foil and freeze.  Makes 4 dozen cookies.

Meat Loaf

This is a scaled-up version of Fanny Farmer's three-meats recipe.  I think the veal improves the texture, but if you can't find ground veal or feel sorry for the baby cows, by all means use  fewer meats.

For stuffings and some other foods that use bread crumbs, I like to still have sizable pieces of bread, pea-sized or even dice.  For this, I like them very fine.  If you want to use fine dried bread crumbs like panko or gluten-free substitutes like oatmeal, you may want to cut down the quantity a bit.

This is a recipe where you want the onions very finely diced.  Might even use a few seconds in a processor.

3 cups bread crumbs
2 medium onions, finely diced
3 eggs, beaten
1-1/2 lbs. ground beef
1 lb. ground veal
1/2 lb. ground pork
3 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
2-1/4 tsp. dry mustard
2-1/4 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. freshly ground pepper
1 cup plus 1 oz. whole milk (I'm just scaling up ingredients here.  Put in however much you want.)

Preheat oven to 350°.  Find a huge bowl and mix everything together with your hands.  I generally go in this order: liquids, seasonings, crumbs, onions, meats.  Split it into two big loaves and freeze one.  Or put it into ramekins or muffin tins for individual servings.  (Shot glasses just don't do well in the oven.)  Bake it for an hour.  

You may notice I didn't mention any topping.  Most of America puts on some combination of catsup, brown sugar, barbecue sauce, and Sriracha to keep the top from browning.  But who doesn't like a browned top on a meat loaf?  It may have been my omission of that topping that made The Maman decide I was worth keeping on.  

Certainly wasn't my fashion sense.

Eggnog For Two

Somebody needs to post a decent one-egg recipe for eggnog.  This is more eggnog than I can drink myself, but it's a good amount to split.

1 egg
1 dash salt (a teeny tiny bit---don't go crazy)
3 tbsp sugar
3 tbsp bourbon
2 tsp rum
1/3 cup milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup cream

Put two medium-size glass bowls in the refrigerator.  You'll thank me later.  Separate the egg and set aside the egg white and one teaspoon of the sugar.  Now you're ready to get started.

Beat the egg yolks together with the salt and 8 tsp of sugar (Um... that means the rest of the sugar.)  Beat furiously for several minutes, or go at it for abut a minute with an electric mixer.  You're looking for a sort of fluffy yellow texture.  Add the bourbon, rum, milk, and vanilla.

If you haven't done so, wash the beaters of your electric mixer---if there's any yolk on them, your egg whites are doomed!  Take one cold bowl out of the refrigerator and beat the egg whites.  Add the remaining teaspoon of sugar when they're starting to bubble up, and keep beating them until you get stiff peaks.  Rinse the beaters, get your second cold bowl, and go after the whipped cream.  You're going for stiff peaks there, too.

Finally, go back to your yolk-milk-booze mixture.  Fold the egg whites in, and then the whipped cream.  You're done!  Pour it into two glasses and top with nutmeg if you're feeling classy.

Risotto

Not only am I shamed by the fact that Susan has submitted the last 54 entries to the blog, but on my recent visit to Genevieve in Arezzo she made a perfectly good risotto in what is certainly one of the ten worst-equipped kitchens in the industrialized world.  Non-stick pans?  Nope.  Measuring cups?  Well...she does have some dog food scoops, calibrated in some units unknown to me.  And the amount of fiddling required to have her stove actually operate?  And yet she slapped together a rib-sticking risotto that took care of me straight through to the undistinguished breakfast I had the next morning at the Florence airport.

So the temptation is to just list a bunch of ingredients with no quantities, and say "You work it out; Genevieve did".  But then I am reminded of the legendary version of Paul's Favorite that Paul put together with no quantities, and I think maybe it would be best to at least put some guidance in.

But don't be confused.  Risotto is one of the most flexible dishes you can make.  Since you just keep adding broth or water until it's done, there's none of this "exactly 2 cups...don't lift the lid" stuff that haunts most rice recipes.  The only rigid requirement is: stir it like a mofo, start to finish.  I know, I know, there are 29,000 "no stir risotto" recipes on the Internet.  Ignore those people, they are making rice.

The reason I haven't put this recipe up so far is that while you can make just plain risotto, you generally don't. You make chicken risotto, or asparagus risotto, or skate liver risotto (Just kidding. No clue whether skates have livers.)  But all these turn out to be mostly covered by a recipe for Stuff Risotto that involves one extra instruction: "Dump Stuff in".  I'll indicate a couple below à la Mark Bittman, but they're just there to get you thinking.

Another reason I haven't posted it is the fact that it is not a traditional Durst Pinette family favorite, served to the kids since childhood.  It was still a new recipe to me when I pulled it out of...um, thin air... one recent Christmas.  And I am still contending with the Maman's concepts of when it's done.  (More about that later.)  But given that this blog has been entirely overtaken with Susan's recipes from twenty minutes ago, I probably shouldn't worry about it.

OK, here we go:

1-4 tbsp. butter, olive oil, or whatever (let's say you should probably use some kind of fat)
1/2 - 1 onion
1 cup arborio or carnaroli rice (see warning below)
1/2 cup white wine
3-6 cups chicken stock, vegetable stock (whatever that is), or water
Another tablespoon or two of butter
1/4 cup Parmigiano or other grating cheese

Warning on the rice: you see boxes in grocery stores that say "Risotto", but which turn out to be more than just rice; they're some prefab version of the whole thing, and in general there's way too much salt and a whole pile of freeze-dried miscellany.  If you can throw all that stuff out, the rice might be acceptable.  But honestly, in that case, maybe try it with just regular rice.  Or maybe just throw the towel in and make regular rice.  No shame in that.

Warning on the cheese: if you use honest-to-God Parmigiano-Reggiano, you'll get little stringy filaments of cheese that pull loose from the rest in serving or picking up a forkful, and wow, that is great.  But if you use Asiago or Pecorino or Grana Padano or Parminder Nagra, it'll still taste fine.  There will just be slight differences in texture.

So get your stock or water simmering on a back burner.  I don't understand why, but whatever amount you choose, it won't be enough.  You'll be at the end and running out of it just when you want one more ladleful.  Add some water as it starts getting low.

Plop in the fat.  I've used as little as 1 tablespoon for a cup of rice, and Giulano Bugialli wants you to use 4, plus one of olive oil.  Make it relate to the amount of rice.

Once the fat is hot, saute the onions for a while.  Don't brown them, but they should at least lose much of their crunch.  Then stir in the rice.  1/4 cup makes a nice personal risotto, and when I use the big risotto pan at home, I often use 2 cups.  Much more than that, you're kind of running a restaurant, why are you paying any attention to this blog?  Stir it and cook it at least until everything's mixed well, but for best results, you want the rice kind of translucent and just about to start browning.  Browned is bad, but "toasty" is OK.

Then put the wine in.  This is the only cold liquid you'll put in.  And while it's optional, it contributes a lot to the character of a risotto.  Obviously, adjust the amount depending on how much rice.  Stir until there's very little liquid left.

At this point you put a ladleful (say, 1/2 cup) of simmering broth in at a time, and stir it until the liquid's mostly gone and the increasingly creamy bit in the bottom of the pan leaves tracks when you stir it.  Then another ladleful.  And another.  So the long day wears on.

At some point you'll think you're done.  Taste the rice.  In fact, start tasting it at like ten minutes; there will be a chalkiness to the rice, and you want to keep adding liquid and stirring until that's totally gone.  At that point it's a matter of taste.  Some recipes want you to stop while there's still a very chewy center to the rice kernels, and at the other extreme you've essentially made congee.  The Maman likes it at that extreme; though I'll never really know, since I have yet to make a risotto where she doesn't say "I would have liked it cooked a little more".

Last, mix in the cheese, and maybe a final bit of butter.  Again, quantities to taste.  None is one extreme; Cheese Risotto is the other.

A couple of examples of Stuff Risotto:

Mushroom Risotto:

Saute some mushrooms.  Make them interesting for best results: trumpets, or chanterelles, morels, which are great.  But don't combine forty mushrooms.  Pick one, though maybe add in some dried porcini.  Soaked in very hot water for fifteen or twenty minutes, then chopped fine (that was all we had at Genevieve's).  Strain the water (cheesecloth if you've got it), and use it as some of the risotto liquid.  Dump the mushrooms in just before the final cheese and/or butter.

Shrimp Risotto:

Dump shrimp in at the last minute.  If you're lucky enough to get fresh unshelled shrimp -- it's still fine with Trader Joe Frozen Shrimp -- take off the shells first and make a broth from the shells (boil 'em for fifteen or twenty minutes, onions, celery optional).  Then use that broth as the liquid.

Final note: Risotto à la Milanese is plain risotto with saffron steeped in the broth.  It's yellow!

Bagels!

So for the first year and a half that I lived there, I was thoroughly convinced that New Jersey was the land of a thousand bagel snobs and no good bagels.  It was October of my second year when I finally got someone to take me to a bagel shop where they declared the bagels to be "good."  And I've gotta admit, there's a difference.  I'm told (by bagel snobs) that to make good bagels, you need really hard water.  Here in Tucson you could basically stand a spoon in the water, so it seemed like bagels were worth a shot.  I'd be interested to hear how this recipe comes out elsewhere.  I suspect that the hard water thing is probably a myth, but I haven't put any effort into testing this hypothesis.

Basic Recipe

2 cups water
1 package yeast
1/2 cup vegetable oil
4 tsp salt
6-8 cups flour

Chocolate Chip Bagels

Cut salt to 1/2 tsp
1 package mini semisweet chocolate chips
2 tbsp cocoa powder
5 tbsp sugar

Pumpkin Bagels

Cut salt to 1/2 tsp
Cut water to 1 cup
1 can pumpkin puree
5 tbsp sugar
Some cinnamon, cloves, allspice, ginger, nutmeg.  Maybe a teaspoon ish of each?  Sorry---I don't really measure anymore when I play with pumpkin pie spices.

Blueberry Bagels

Cut salt to 1/2 tsp
Cut water to 1 cup
1 pint blueberries, fresh or frozen
5 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp vanilla

Instructions

First, wake up those yeasty-bugs!  Heat your water up to 105-110 degrees Fahrenheit and sprinkle the yeast over the top.  Stir to break up any clumps, and then let it rest for ten to fifteen minutes, until it starts to bubble up a little bit.  While you wait, bring any additional wet ingredients (pumpkin puree or blueberries or whatever) up to about 100 degrees so they don't cool your dough down too much.  Add three cups of flour, and the other ingredients, and blend until smooth.

Slowly add two to three more cups of flour, until you have a dough that you can handle with your hands without getting it stuck to your fingers.  Turn it out onto the counter (your counter's clean, right?) and knead for a minute or two.  Let it rest for about ten minutes, and then knead for another ten minutes, adding flour as you go whenever the dough starts to feel sticky.  You could end up adding a lot of flour here, especially if you're dealing with blueberries.  The kneading pops the blueberries, adding more moisture to the dough, so you need more flour to absorb it.  Actually, you should probably budget an extra five minutes of kneading to the blueberry dough to account for this, but it's worth it, because blueberries!

Once you're done kneading, spray a large bowl with cooking spray, put your ball of dough in the bowl, and spray the top with cooking spray to keep it from drying out.  Put plastic wrap over the top of the bowl to make it air tight, and put it someplace warm.  (In Tucson, we have such a place.  We call it "outside.")  Let the dough rise for about an hour.  I believe that it is traditional to say "until double in bulk," but I don't think anybody actually knows what that means.

While your dough is rising, get a pot of unfiltered water onto the stove to boil.  You want it boiling by the time your dough is done.  Also, preheat your oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Now that your dough has risen, you get to punch it!  This is far and away the best part of dealing with yeast doughs.  Uncover it and give it a good solid punch right in the middle.  Then turn it out onto the counter and squish it back down to its original size.  Bagels do not need a second rise, so you should start shaping them right away.    Rip off roughly plum-sized lumps of dough, roll them up into a ball, and then use your thumb to punch a hole in the center.  This takes practice---most of my bagels are still kind of ugly, but super tasty!

Put your bagels into the boiling water about five at a time (more or fewer depending on the size of your pan---just don't crowd it).  They'll float to the top.  You want to give them about three minutes on one side, then flip and give them three minutes on the other side.  Get them out of the water and onto a cookie sheet.  You can do an egg wash at this point if you want, especially if you want to put seeds on top, but it's not necessary.

Pop them in the oven for 15 minutes, and you'll have bagels!  Yay bagels!  Bagels bagels bagels!