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!

Candied Nuts

Left to my own devices, I usually use walnut halves, but I've also done it with pecans.  Probably wouldn't work so well with almonds or peanuts.

1/2 cup water
1 cup sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp salt
Some vanilla--It's hard to use too much.  Just give it a good splash
2 to 2 1/2 cups nuts

Put the water, sugar, cinnamon, and salt in a small saucepan and bring it to a full boil.  Then bring the heat down so that the syrup is boiling but not in danger of boiling over.  You may need to move the pan on and off of the burner quite a bit while you're doing this--the boiling-but-not-boiling-over range is pretty small.  Keep the syrup at that temperature until it reaches the soft-ball stage.  If you've got a candy thermometer, good for you!  Soft-ball is 235-240 degrees Fahrenheit.  If you don't... yeesh, you can do it by sight--the bubbles get more numerous, longer-lasting, and closer together, but if you've never done this before, getting a candy thermometer is probably your best bet.

Once you've reached the soft-ball stage, remove the syrup from the heat, add a splash of vanilla, stir the whole mess a bit, add the nuts, and then stir like crazy until the coating on the nuts lightens in color.  Spread out the nuts to dry on a piece of parchment paper.

Garden Gimlet

This is a reasonable approximation of the Garden Gimlet at Sea Salt.  Of course, any suggestions for improvements would be welcome.  Proportions for a single gimlet are as follows:

1 shot gin
1 shot basil syrup
juice from 1 lime
juice from 1/2 cucumber
some amount of ice

The basil syrup and the cucumber juice could probably use some further instructions, so here they are:

Basil Syrup

If you buy fresh basil at the supermarket, chances are you've had the experience of buying one of those big boxes of basil, using about a quarter of it, and having the rest go bad in your refrigerator.  Instead, I suggest the following: take one cup of sugar, one cup of water, and whatever basil you have left over.  Put them all in a pot and bring the whole mess to a boil until the sugar dissolves.  Remove from heat and let steep for about 30 minutes.  Remove the basil.  Ta-daaaa!  Basil syrup.

Cucumber Juice

This is legitimately a pain unless you have some sort of fancy juicer.  I don't, so I've only done this a couple times.  Peel the cucumber and chop it into pieces.  Put the pieces in your food processor and... process them...  You want to turn the cucumber into mush.  Once you have mush, strain it through a cheesecloth to get juice.  There's got to be a better way, but so far I've been too lazy to figure out what it is.

Vegetarian Black Bean Chili

Largely cribbed from Deborah Madison's Green's Cookbook, but Deborah Madison is way more hard-core than I am, so she does things like make her own chili powder and peel tomatoes.  I mean really.  Peeling tomatoes?  Who has the time?  Also, I often forget the salt.

It seems that chipotle chilis come from a can.  You do not want to use the entire contents of this can.  Usually I'll open a can, take the chilis I need, and save the rest in the freezer in little plastic baggies.  If I'm feeling adventurous, I'll throw the leftover adobo sauce into the chili.  Though you want to be careful. If you use the cayenne, a strong chili powder, spicy paprika, two chipotle chilis, and pour in the leftover adobo sauce, you get something quite hot.  If you want a particularly mild version, use one chipotle chili and no cayenne.

2 cups black beans
1-3 bay leaves, depending on freshness
4 tsp cumin seeds
4 tsp oregano
4 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
3 tbsp chili powder
3 tbsp vegetable oil
3 yellow onions, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced or squished through a garlic press--man I need a garlic press
1/2 tsp salt
1 28 oz can tomatoes
1-2 chipotle chiles, chopped

Soak the beans overnight.  Or, if you're me and you've forgotten to soak them overnight, cover them by a couple inches with water, bring them up to a strong boil, then turn the heat off and let them sit for an hour while you chop the vegetables.  Drain them and cover them with fresh water, this time adding the bay leaves, and bring them up to a gentle simmer.  Check on them periodically to make sure they're still covered with water, and give them a stir to keep them from sticking to the bottom of the pan.

Toast the cumin seeds in a sauce pan over medium heat.  When they're starting to color a little bit, add the oregano.  Shake the pan to keep the oregano from scorching.  You're waiting for a strong smell that is not yet a burning smell.  Note: this smell exists for about fifteen seconds before the oregano actually burns--you do not want the oregano to burn.  Once the oregano is starting to smell, turn off the heat and add the paprika and cayenne, shake it all together in the pan for another few seconds, then dump it into a spice grinder (or coffee grinder) and give it four or five two-second pulses.

Heat the vegetable oil in a pan over medium heat and add the onions and the salt.  Cook the onions until they stop tasting like raw onions. Raw onions are gross. Now add the chili powder, ground spices, and garlic and cook for another five minutes.  Add the tomatoes and chipotle chilis, and if you have just opened a new can of chipotles, go ahead and throw in the adobo sauce.  Simmer this mixture for another fifteen minutes.  Then find some way to transfer this into the pot with the beans.

Continue to simmer the whole thing together until the beans are soft enough to be edible.  The longer the chili simmers, the more the flavors combine and the better it will be.  Deborah Madison suggests another hour or so, but you're probably pretty hungry by now, so let's compromise and call it fifteen minutes.

Bow Ties With Sausage, Beans, and Kale

The pasta, not the popular men's accessory, but feel free to make the substitution, and by all means let me know how it goes.  This is largely Jeanne Kelley's recipe from http://www.cookinglight.com/, but I made a few edits.  Among other things, her recipe called for canned cannellini beans.  I'm sure that would work just fine, if I weren't a huge snob.

1 cup dried cannellini beans
1/2 lb bow tie pasta
2 tbsp olive oil
2 onions, chopped (I use yellow onions, because they are cheap)
1/2 lb hot Italian sausage (about 3 links), cut into bite-sized pieces
1/3 cup julienned sundried tomatoes
6 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
1 cup chicken broth
1/2 tsp dried basil
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes (or half of one of Papa's little red chilis)
1 bunch kale

Soak the beans for at least four hours--I never remember to soak them overnight, but four hours will do it.  Start water for the pasta and for the beans.  Both need to cook for about fifteen minutes.  If you time it just right, everything comes together at the end.

Heat the olive oil in an electric skillet.  Add the onion, and cook until it starts to soften just a little bit.  Add the sausage and sun dried tomatoes, and cook until the sausage is browned on all sides.  Add the garlic and cook for one minute more, then add the chicken broth, basil, oregano, and red pepper flakes.  Add the kale, stir until it wilts in, and then cover and simmer for five more minutes, or until the kale is soft enough to eat.  Add the pasta and beans and you're good to go.

Chicken à la King

Nothing special about this. More solids than most cookbook versions. Check them out if you just want sauce with the occasional chicken morsel. Sort of like Chicken and Mushroom Bisque.

I'm assuming you have leftover chicken. If you do, compare yours to the amount here and adjust the other amounts accordingly. If you're planning to make this starting with raw chicken...um, I don't know, I never have. Cook it first, I guess.

1-2 tbsp. butter
1 cup sliced mushrooms
1/2 red bell pepper or 1/4 cup pimientos, chopped

2 tbsp. butter (see note below)

3 tbsp. flour

1 cup chicken broth

1/3 - 1/2 cup cream

1-2 shakes Tabasco (optional)

~2 cups cooked chicken, cut into small bite-sized pieces

1 egg yolk

2-3 tbsp. dry sherry

If you've never cooked with red pepper before, remove the seeds and the whitish ribs on the inside. And the stem end.

Note: There are two places where you use butter: to sauté the mushrooms and pepper, and to make the roux. I know standard recipe practice would be to just list butter once and then give instructions about which part to use when, but I just can't keep track of that. I always end up dumping all the butter in at the first point and making some kind of mess. So I listed them separately.

Sauté the mushrooms and red pepper in butter. When the mushrooms are done, the pepper will still have a little crunch, which is fine. Or, use pimientos instead of red pepper and say goodbye to crunch. Set aside.

Melt the second bolus of butter and heat to foaming. Add the flour and whisk to get a roux. You only have to eliminate the raw flour taste, but I go further to brown the roux lightly so the dish leans very slightly in the direction of New Orleans. If you keep going the roux will become dark brown and eventually burn. Stop before that.

Add the stock and stir until the sauce is thickened. If you start with cold stock, it can take forever to thicken, so here's what I do: I put the stock in the microwave before I start making the roux. Then I cook the roux until the stock is boiling. Then when I pour the stock in, the sauce thickens in like twenty seconds. Blend in the cream. Season with salt and pepper and (optionally) Tabasco.

Add the mushrooms and pepper back in and add the chicken. Beat the egg yolk in a bowl and mix in a spoonful at a time of the sauce. This is supposed to keep the egg yolk from scrambling if added directly to the sauce, which sounds gross so I've never tried it. Once you've added two or three spoonfuls of sauce, blend it back into the pot. Add the sherry just before serving. If you have some parsley, sprinkle it over each serving, but Genevieve and Elizabeth hate that.

Serve over rice. I won't judge you if you want to impress somebody by using puff pastry. Toast is also OK, particularly for leftovers. Noodles too, but don't push it, huh?

Veggie Tourtière

I don't know whether I'm actually allowed to call this dish tourtière, but I made it working largely from a tourtière recipe, so I figure the name fits. Recipe for pie crust still forthcoming.

1/2 pound mushrooms, chopped finely

1 medium onion, chopped finely

1 cup frozen corn

2 tbsp butter

Salt and pepper

2 large potatoes, mashed

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon allspice

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

Pastry for 1 two-crust, nine-inch pie

Sauté the onions and mushrooms butter. Add to the mashed potatoes, along with the corn, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves. Cook on low heat until warm, adding water if necessary to keep it moist. Pour into pie shell, cover with pastry, and bake at 375 degrees for about an hour or until brown.

Tourtière

This is the recipe that Maman sent me about a year ago, and it works fairly well. I subbed in a pound of ground pork and a pound of meat loaf mix last night. I suspect that the actual proportions of the meat has very little to do with the success of the dish, though if the meat you use is too lean, you may have some issues with dryness. My advice is to keep a can of chicken broth on-hand to toss in if things start looking too dry, but you probably won't need it. Recipe for pie crust forthcoming.

1 1/2 pounds ground pork

1/2 pounds ground beef

1 medium onion, chopped finely

Salt and pepper

2 large potatoes, mashed

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon allspice

1/4 teaspoon cloves

Pastry for 1 two-crust, nine-inch pie

Cook the meats in their own juices until they're a uniform grey color. Don't brown the meat. Add the onion, salt, and pepper. Simmer on low heat until the onion starts to look soft and cooked. Maman's recipe says one hour, but I've found that this is overkill. Ten to fifteen minutes should be plenty. Add the potatoes to the meat and add cinnamon, allspice, and ground cloves.

Allow to simmer, covered, on low heat for about half an hour, stirring occasionally to avoid burning. (If it looks like it's getting unpleasantly dry, add some chicken broth, but not too much or the crust will sog.) Note: I used this half hour to start the pie pastry. Making the pastry takes more than half an hour, but you can use the extra time to let your filling cool a bit so it will be easier to put into the pie shell.

Pour the filling into the pie shell, cover with pastry, and heat in 375° oven for 1 hour or until brown.

Clam Shaush Pashta

Dudes! This is actually my recipe!

OK, so out in the real world, its Linguine con Vongole, and it's supposed to be made with genuine clams. You have to deal with the shells, and drain out all the sand, and all that. Thank you, I'll have the nice people at the restaurant do that, most of the time.

Or, at the other extreme -- and it's not like there's much in between -- it's a can of Snow's clams with the packing juices and "1/4 teaspoon dried parsley". And maybe some cream on the odd theory that a "white clam sauce" must require it.

So I'm going to be snotty and plebeian at the same time here. Canned clams, but real ingredients. No sand, but actual preparation. There is a middle ground where you buy cooked (maybe frozen) clam meat at your local shellfish purveyor, but unless you live in Oakland or your Trader Joe's happens to have it, go with the can.

If you've got a bigger crowd, you can stretch the same sauce over a pound of pasta. If you've got a really really big crowd, start doubling up on the cans of clams and bottles of juice, until you get to such a huge crowd that you need those giant cans (clams and juice both) that are weirdly labeled something like "#2". Just keep the proportions roughly correct, and remember that you'll need a HUGE pot to boil the pasta in and a very large pot just for the sauce.

3/4 lb. pasta
2 tbsp. olive oil
2-3 anchovies, mashed
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped
A few shakes dried red pepper flakes
1/2 cup white wine
1/2 tsp. dried basil
1 8-oz bottle clam juice
1 10-oz. can whole baby clams (I use Geisha)
1/4 cup fresh basil leaves, chopped
1/8 cup fresh parsley, chopped
Grated Parmesan or Asiago cheese (optional)

I've put pasta first in the ingredients because if you use some really gnarly thick pasta, you'll have to get it going before anything else; on the other hand, if you use capellini (and this dish does work with capellini), you need to throw it in at the very last minute, when the sauce is all but done. Anyway, boil the water first. You never know; someone might have a baby.

Chop/mash the anchovies and pop them into a skillet (9 in. or so). Press on them with a wooden spoon or silicone spatula to flatten them out. Then add the olive oil and turn the heat on low while you prepare the other ingredients.

When the anchovies have pretty completely dissolved into the oil, add the garlic and turn the heat up a little. Then just keep stirring until the garlic smells cooked instead of raw. It will look a distinctly awful greyish-brown at this point.

Add the wine and turn the heat up to a full boil. Add the dried basil and the pepper flakes. Stir regularly. You're ready to move on when enough of the wine liquid has boiled off so that it's thick and soupy. Careful: if you turn your back on it for two minutes at this point the remaining liquid will boil off and you'll have burnt crap at the bottom of your skillet and be stuck with takeout Chinese.

Add the clam juice and about a third of the fresh basil. Keep the heat high, stirring until you get back to the soupy appearance again. At this point you can add pasta cooking water (don't forget to scald yourself pulling it out of the cooking pasta) to thin the sauce and then boil down more. This cycle can go on for hours if you have a thick pasta that requires long boiling; make sure you have a friend check that you haven't just gone into a coma.

When the pasta is within about three minutes of being done (for capellini, about two minutes before you put it in), add the clams and the second third of basil. Keep the heat high and add water as necessary.

Drain the pasta (but do not rinse) and return it to the pot. Now, if you are confident that the amount of sauce matches the pasta exactly, add the sauce to the pasta along with the remaining basil; otherwise, dress the pasta with a little olive oil, add the remaining basil to the sauce, and get everyone to table. (And turn the burner under the sauce off!)

Serve with parsley and optional cheese sprinkled over the top.

If you find you have too little sauce, you can add a little more pasta water and boil vigorously for a minute. This even works with the dregs of the sauce, maybe adding a little more olive oil as well.

Other optional additions: olives, capers, cheese in the sauce. You can add a tablespoon or so of butter to get a slightly thicker and richer sauce. Earlier (about when you add the clams), some claim a tablespoon or two of vodka smooths the sauce out, as long as you boil it enough to cook away the hard alcohol. If you must add vodka, I think it is probably better to add it to the guests rather than the sauce, but whatever.

Pasta with Feta Cheese and Cherry Tomatoes

This is from...well, what? It's called Pasta, the publisher is Hermes House, which is an imprint of Anness Publishing in London, and Jeni Wright is listed as the Contributing Editor. It's a wonderful collection of pasta recipes. But good luck finding it.

The Anness Publishing website says that Hermes is the imprint "...for non-trade sales, promotional sales and customised publishing for major customers" and assures us that "...products can seldom be supplied from stock..." This is the publisher promising you can't get it, let alone Amazon or Alibris.

Your best bet appears to be to time-travel to 2006 or so, when it was on the shelf at Pegasus Books in downtown Berkeley, and buy the copy before I did, thereby causing a rift in the space-time continuum. Or at least erasing this blog post.

Spaghetti (all quantities negotiable, see below)
2 tbsp. olive oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
8-12 cherry tomatoes, halved
pinch nutmeg, optional
3-6 oz. feta cheese
1-2 tbsp. chopped fresh basil
4-8 pitted and halved Kalamata olives

For this recipe, everything is up for grabs. Cherry tomatoes vary in size and juiciness, and you rarely can just go buy 8, as the original recipe suggests. The original recipe calls for 3 oz. of pasta, but I've found this much sauce will easily serve for twice that much. And feta cheese also comes in non-negotiable discrete hunks. I suggest you see which of these limitations affects you, and just try to adjust everything else.

Heat the olive oil, and then cook but do not brown the garlic (a minute or so). Add the halved cherry tomatoes and cook on fairly high heat for a minute or so. You want the cherry tomatoes to wilt and give up some of their juice. At this point you can mix with cooked and drained spaghetti, stirring in the feta, basil, and optional nutmeg (I'm not a fan) afterwards, or you can add the cheese and basil and cook another minute. If it doesn't look saucy enough, add a few tablespoons of the reserved pasta cooking water (you did reserve some pasta cooking water, didn't you? Don't you always reserve some of the pasta cooking water?), and serve with the pasta. Olives scattered on top of each serving, maybe with a little more chopped basil and grated Parmesan or Asiago if you're a real cheese nut.

If you cook this too long with the feta cheese, it will disintegrate and you'll have sort of a cheese sauce dish. It's not bad, but I like it better with the discrete chunks of feta.

Paul's Favorite (Pasta w/ Salami & Summer Squash)

This is another recipe from the late Jeff Smith, the Feudal Frugal Gourmet. I'll start with something very close to his original and then discuss modifications.

2 tbsp. olive oil
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced or minced
2 small summer squash (zucchini, crookneck, etc.), cut into matchsticks
1/4 lb. dry-cured Italian salami, cut into matchsticks
1 tbsp. capers, drained and chopped
1/2 cup cream
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 lb. fettucine or other pasta, cooked
Grated parmesan, asiago, or other hard cheese

Try to get a decent Italian salami (it seems to be correlated with spelling it "salame", if that helps). In the Bay Area, Gallo, Molinari, and Columbus all sell "chubs", the stick of salami wrapped in some kind of paper and covered with a gray-white moldy substance. Elsewhere in the country, your mileage may vary. If you are desperate, you can cut prepared salami slices for this, but the result is a lot greasier. If you can only find German salami, abandon all hope and look at the variations below.

Heat the olive oil and saute the garlic in it just briefly. enough to be able to smell the cooked garlic, not so much as to brown it. Add the summer squash and saute, stirring regularly, until nearly tender, under 3 minutes. Add the salami and capers and some pepper, and stir for another minute at most. Add the cream and simmer until the sauce is reduced to your taste. Serve over the pasta, with the grated cheese on the side.

This makes a lot of sauce for 1/2 lb. of pasta; I routinely made this much -- maybe adding another squash and a little more cream -- to serve with a full pound of pasta. You can stretch the sauce by simply adding more cream; you may have to if you reduce it too far. This can be a vegetarian dish if you replace the salami with another squash or two.

For a slightly more upscale version, use 2-4 oz. of pancetta instead of salami; chop the pancetta finely and start off by cooking it in the pan on low until it is browned and the fat is rendered. Then remove the pancetta and use the fat, with olive oil added only as necessary, and proceed with the dish. Put the browned pancetta bits back in with the capers.

Maman's Red Sauce with Meat

The Maman dictated this recipe to me as I was about to go off to the store. There were a couple gaps, but we filled them in as we went along and this is the complete version.

This is a very simple version of a ragu, and it can be fancied up with different ground meats (including Italian sausage meat) or even with a piece of braising meat, which you would brown, cook until extremely tender, and then shred back into the sauce.

2 tbsp. butter
1 large onion, finely chopped
1 green pepper, membranes and seeds removed, finely chopped
2-4 cloves garlic
1 lb. ground beef or other meats
1 28 oz. can tomato puree
2 6 oz. cans tomato paste
2 tsp. dried basil leaves (or about 4 tsp. fresh)
2 tsp. dried oregano
1 tsp. freshly ground fennel seeds (optional)
1/2-1 cup red wine

Melt the butter in a large skillet, dutch oven, or stock pot. Saute the onion and green pepper until the pepper is soft, about ten minutes. The pepper should fade to a dimmer green along the way. Add the garlic for the last couple of minutes, just until you can smell it among the cooked onion and pepper smell. You can optionally take out the onion/garlic mixture while you brown the beef.

Add the beef and stir to brown evenly, breaking it up as you go. Drain fat if necessary and then add the tomato puree and paste. Stir in the seasonings and turn to low. Add about 1/2 cup of the wine, with more or water added as you go along to keep the sauce thinned to your taste. You need to stir it often enough -- and add enough liquid -- so that it does not stick to the bottom of the pot, where it will scorch and, if you are so foolish to then stir it up, ruin the entire batch. (Alternately, you can use a crockpot for the simmering, in which case the bottom doesn't scorch, but the edge of the top gradually develops a burned crust that will take you two hours to clean off. Or transfer to the oven at 350° to simmer.)

It will be perfectly edible after a half-hour or so, but it will get better over the next couple of hours. Some people say you should always put the entire sauce away for a day and reheat it for best results. OK, but what did you eat the first day?

If you open a bottle of red wine to use in the dish, you can drink some as you cook, but try to avoid drinking so much that you forget about the sauce and go to bed.

Serve over pasta. Leftovers can be frozen in small containers (one or two cups), or (special bonus recipe) combined with fresh or leftover cooked pasta -- macaroni, penne, and fusilli all work fine -- in a ratio of about 2 cups cooked pasta (1 lb. dried pasta = 4 cups uncooked = 8 cups cooked) to 1 cup sauce and baked in a casserole somewhere between 350° and 400° for about a half-hour. Top with grated mozzarella, and if you really want to push the whole Fake Lasagne thing, put in a layer of ricotta in the middle.

Final note: some find this recipe a little thin on meat. If so, you can remedy by:

• carefully cooking down so there is less liquid;
• using a little more ground beef (say, another third of a pound); or
• adding one uncooked Italian sausage, removed from its skin and crumbled in when you brown the beef.

Simple Chili

I'm not sure whether this recipe appears exactly somewhere else. It's easy to remember, anyway.

The fact that we serve it over pasta is a nod to Cincinnati chili, which I made a version of for a while. But everyone told me to stop and we retreated to this more basic rendition. Except that it still gets served over pasta.

The choice of chili powder and of optional fresh or dried chile gives you a lot of room to adjust the heat. Standard supermarket chili powder is pretty bland, and name brand powders may be hotter and more flavorful. McCormick's makes a Chipotle chili powder that's reasonably fierce for a supermarket product. In some markets you can find powdered chile, which has no other spices (salt, oregano, and cumin are typical). You can even buy some dried chiles, remove membranes and seeds (or not, if you are extremely brave), roast them in the oven or a dry frying pan until they start to crisp, and then use a spice grinder to make your own freshly powdered chile, whose flavor should be very bright. If you do this, add in a little more cumin and other seasonings to taste, and consider additional salt.

2 tbsp. butter
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic
1 lb. ground beef
1 tbsp. chili powder
1 tsp. ground cumin
1 fresh or dried chile (optional)
1 14-1/2 oz. can diced tomatoes
1 14-1/2 oz. can cooked kidney beans
Tabasco or other hot sauce to taste
Condiments: grated cheese, raw onions or shallots, minced jalapeno, etc.

Melt the butter in a large skillet, dutch oven, or stock pot. Saute the onion until translucent. Add the garlic for the last minute or two. If you prefer, you can take out the onion/garlic mixture while you brown the beef.

Add the ground beef, breaking it up with a spoon or spatula while stirring it so that it gets evenly ground. You may add the chili powder and cumin while browning it, but if you're using a very fatty ground beef and will have to drain it after browning, you may want to wait.

Drain the beef if necessary, add the onions and garlic if you removed them, and add the seasonings if you haven't already, including the optional minced fresh or dried chile. Add the diced tomatoes with their juices and adjust to a simmer. Cook for a half-hour or so, though you can leave it there essentially forever, maybe adding a little water or beer from time to time to keep it from getting too thick.

About ten minutes before serving, drain the kidney beans well (I rinse them off in a strainer) and add to the pot. If you prefer a less separate bean flavor, add them sooner. But if the beans sit in the chili for hours, the whole thing will start to melt into an indistinct chili-ish mass. Which is fine if you like that.

Serve over pasta, if you like, with such condiments as appeal to you passed around at table.

Genevieve's Fravorite (Ground Beef Stroganoff)

This one came from a cookbook I don't even own anymore: the edition of Fanny Farmer just before Marion Cunningham took it over and got all fna-fna (Susan please correct spelling) "We don't cook with Campbell's soups." It's cool, Marion had the right idea; I'm still a little ashamed of this 50's era dish.

All the same, Genevieve has fed it to many of her friends (secretly, and only leftovers, at first; I think she knew I wouldn't volunteer to make it for strangers), and declares that they, as well, consider it food.

2 tbsp. butter
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic
1 lb. ground beef
1/2 lb. mushrooms, sliced
1-2 tbsp. flour
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1 can Campbell's "Healthy Bequest Request" Cream of Mushroom Soup
1 cup (8 0z.) sour cream

I use a 12-inch non-stick electric skillet to make this. If you don't have one, you probably should just go buy one. 11 inches would do, but a round 12-inch skillet is 31 sq. in. shy and a bit too shallow as well.

How much garlic flavor you want is a choice. You can chop the garlic finely and include it in the last couple minutes of cooking the onion for a distinctive, strong flavor; or you can put peeled cloves on toothpicks for most of the cooking process and fish them out at the last minute for a much milder flavor. Unpeeled would probably be milder still.

Heat the butter and saute the onion until translucent. If desired, include chopped garlic for the last minute or so. If you want to keep the onion flavor separate, remove it and set aside. Put in the ground beef and turn the heat up, breaking the beef up as it cooks. When it is all cooked, you may drain some of the fat if you like.

Stir in the mushrooms and flour (less if you drained fat off, more if you didn't). Lower the heat and cover the skillet, cooking for about five minutes, or until the mushrooms start to look cooked.

Stir in the cream of mushroom soup and return to low heat. This is one of the two places you could return the onions, if you removed them. It will take fifteen or twenty minutes for the whole thing to come together.

Check the seasoning, and add salt and/or pepper to taste as necessary. This is the other point at which you could return the onions. Stir in the sour cream. Some like it thoroughly mixed in, some like it stirred less, kind of streaky. Cook it only briefly and don't let it boil with the sour cream.

Serve over rice. I know, I know, regular beef stroganoff is over noodles. Get it through your head, this isn't regular beef stroganoff.