Tomato Season

It’s the height of tomato season here in North Carolina, and people are wondering what in the world to do with the flood of tomatoes. We don’t have that problem, because instead of a garden, we have what we call outdoor pets – deer and racoons. But we have had gardens in the past, and I’ve had to deal with the tons of tomatoes issue, and have some ideas.

First, let me tell you what I’m having for lunch today. It’s absolutely my favorite sandwich, and I only have it two months out of the year, because the only time to eat it is when you have real tomatoes – good, ripe, local slicing tomatoes. I like Brandywines the best, but a good German Johnson is delicious, too. Peel the tomato, cut it into bite sized chunks, and pull out the seeds. Salt it lightly. Cut an avocado in half (don’t peel it first – that’s doing it the hard way), separate the two halves, which will leave the pit in one half, then take your largest sharp knife and whack the pit with it, which will embed the knife into the pit. Twist the pit out of the avocado half and knock it against the side of your trash can to remove the pit from your knife and throw it away. Then take a paring knife and slice the meat of the avocado – still in the peel – into strips. Use a large spoon to remove the avocado from the skin and place the slices on a plate with the tomato pieces. Next, take a nice piece of pita – I like whole wheat – gently tear it in half, and, even more gently, separate the sides so you have a pocket. Spread some mayonnaise on the inside. Put some tomato and avocado pieces inside the pita, and top with whatever type of bean sprouts you like, preferably one of the smaller, thinner varieties. Now that’s a sandwich.

But that only takes care of one tomato. For Roma or other sauce tomatoes, you can, of course, make sauce. I wash the tomatoes and slice them in half. Then I saute chopped garlic, onion, carrot and celery (including the leaves, which have lots of flavor) in olive oil. Once they’re translucent, I add the tomatoes, skins and all, then add oregano, thyme, basil, salt, pepper, and a little bit of sugar to balance the acidity of the tomatoes. If it’s pretty dry, I’ll add some water, and cook slowly for a couple of hours, adding water as needed to keep it from burning. Then I’ll run the entire mixture through a food mill, which strains out the skins and the vegetable solids and makes a nice smooth sauce. I’ll freeze this in one or two cup containers. (If you don’t have a food mill, go get one. It’s the only way to make acceptable mashed potatoes.)

That only leaves the slicing or juice tomatoes to contend with. You can make juice from them. If you have a juicer, you can run them through that. Or if you have a food mill, you can cut them in chunks and run them through that, although it’s not the most efficient way to make juice. But what I really like to do is make tomato soup. When I was in college, the women of the church I grew up in put together a cookbook as a fundraiser. It’s a typical mid-70′s church cookbook, but I think a really good example of the genre, with some great recipes, one of which is for tomato soup. I love the balance of flavors in this soup and have made it many times over the years. It was designed to be sealed in canning jars, although I never really trust canned tomato products – I think there’s not enough acidity to make them really safe. But it freezes beautifully, which is what I would recommend doing with it.

Tomato Soup

2 gallons tomatoes
1 bunch celery
6 onions
1/4 cup salt
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup flour

Cook tomatoes, celery and onion together until tender. Run through sieve or food mill. Add sugar and salt to juice. Mix butter with flour. Drop into juice, mix in well, and cook for 20 minutes. Stir constantly to thicken.

Pour into containers and freeze.

Unlooked for blessings

I have a confession to make. For the last few years, as I have felt gradually worse and worse, I’ve been a bad gardener. I mean, a really bad gardener. I’ve let my herb garden, that I worked so hard to establish, go wild, and blackberries bushes and wild grapevines have taken over. However, it has proven one of my favorite quotes, which has been attributed to Aaron Burr, which is “Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow, because something may occur which may make you regret your preliminary action.”

That something is wild blackberries, which I love, and which are ripe right now. I pulled into my parking space when I got home from work today, and they called my name. I happened to have a small box in the car, so I got out and picked a bunch of blackberries before I even went inside. (The herb garden is right in front of my parking space.)

Picking them was a little bit of an adventure. First, there was negotiating the blackberry bushes themselves, with their nasty little thorns. There are also rose bushes in the herb garden, which also have lots of nasty little thorns (no surprise, since blackberries are actually members of the rose family – and yes, they ganged up on me). But the wild grapevines turned out to be helpful, because they’ve twined around everything, making nice thornless handles that let me pull blackberry canes to me without having to grab them. And the lavender and rosemary that are growing under and around all of this smelled wonderful as I was picking the blackberries on this beautiful summer afternoon.

I don’t know why, but domesticated blackberries taste nothing like wild blackberries – they’re bland and don’t have the tang and bite of wild blackberries. I don’t know if that’s because they’ve bred for size rather than taste – which wouldn’t surprise me, as that seems to be what happened with strawberries – but I don’t even bother buying blackberries in the store. But wild blackberries are a real treat.

When I was a kid, we used to go on blackberry expeditions and bring back buckets full of them, along with countless mosquito bites and sunburns, all so worth it. They’re delicious eaten straight out of hand, and I love them over cereal, but the best way to eat them is in blackberry pie.

My mother used to make insanely delicious blackberry pies. I don’t remember her ever using a recipe for them, and from my memory of them, I think all she did was add a little sugar to the berries, put them in a pie shell, top them with a streusel topping, and bake them. I’ve never tried to make one before, and I didn’t really get enough berries for a whole pie, but I did get about two cups, which is enough for a tart, so that’s what I’m trying tonight.

I washed the berries well and picked over them to remove any caps that came in with the berries, then let them dry. I have some soup bowls that are oven safe that make nice deep dish tart pans, so I lined one with pie crust. I sprinkled a little white sugar and a little cornstarch over the berries and mixed them by hand. (The cornstarch is to thicken the juices as the tart bakes.) Then I poured the berries into the crust lined bowl.

To make the streusel topping, I mixed light brown sugar and all purpose flour, then cut in butter. I used roughly equal amounts of sugar and butter and a little less flour. I then added oatmeal, about the same amount as the amount of flour. Note that when you do this, don’t use quick-cooking oatmeal – use the kind that takes 5 minutes to cook. The other stuff dissolves into mush and the topping won’t have the texture you want. Also, streusel is not rocket science – the amounts can vary and you’ll still have a nice streusel. And, if you have them and you want to, you can add chopped nuts, pretty much any kind of nuts you want. I like pecans or almonds, but I don’t see why any other kind of nuts won’t work.

If the idea of being this off-hand with the amounts scares you, there are at least a million recipes for streusel topping on the internet. Go look one up and use its proportions. I actually ended up making a little more than I needed for this particular dish. I just tossed the extra. (For those of you who freak at the idea of throwing away food – and you know who you are – relax, it was only a couple of tablespoons.)

I crumbled the topping over the berries and put the dish (on a baking sheet in case it boiled over) into a 400 degree oven for 35 minutes. It smelled fabulous while it was cooking. Once I took it out, I let it cool for about 30 minutes, then ate about half of it. It tasted exactly like I remember my mother’s blackberry pie tasting, which was a very nice surprise, because I didn’t think I’d get it right on the first try.

I suppose I really do need to get out there eventually and grub out the blackberry bushes and the wild grapevines and all the other things that have grown up in the herb garden that really shouldn’t be there, but I kind of hate to lose the blackberries. Ah, well – I guess that’s the price of civilization.

Fajitas!

We had friends over for dinner last Tuesday night and we had fajitas, which are one of my favorite dishes to make. I went to grad school in Texas and one of the best things I learned there (aside from how to drink margaritas) was how to make fajitas.

There is some disagreement about the origin of the dish we know as fajitas, but it seems to be pretty clear it originated in the border region between Texas and Mexico. When I first encountered fajitas in the early 1980′s, they were still mostly found at backyard barbecues and hadn’t yet made the jump to every Mexican restaurant in the country. (Come to think of it, in the early 1980′s, there weren’t a lot of Mexican restaurants across the country. I don’t think we had more than maybe two here in Winston-Salem at that time – a far cry from the much larger number we now have.)

One point that everyone agrees on is that the meat originally used for fajitas was beef – skirt steak, to be exact. Once upon a time – up until about 1984, that is – skirt steak was a cheap cut of beef. It’s tough, coarse in texture, and very, very chewy. It’s also, as so many tough meats are, very flavorful. What it’s not is easy to find. If you can’t find skirt steak, try to find something that is similar. Brisket works well, as does flank steak. And yes, I know that there are people in this world who make fajitas from chicken and even shrimp, but I don’t invite them to my house for dinner, so let’s stick to the beef.

Fajitas are grilled beef rolled up in a flour tortilla with other stuff. Here’s a list of some of the other stuff (you may use any or all, or other stuff that you might like):

Grilled or sautéed onions and bell peppers (red bell peppers are really, really good in this)
Shredded cheese
Pico de gallo (the traditional choice, although salsa is a good substitute)
Refried beans
Sliced avocado
Pickled jalapeno rings
Sour cream

Here’s the other thing that goes with fajitas:
Margaritas (seriously important)

Other than preparing the meat, making fajitas is really, really easy. Unless you’re making your own pico de gallo (which is an uncooked relish of tomatoes, peppers and onion, which requires a whole lot of chopping), preparation mostly consists of putting ingredients in serving bowls and putting them on the table. You need to slice the onions and peppers, then sauté them, which I do over high heat in olive oil, but that’s pretty elementary.

Preparing the meat is not difficult, but it takes time. First, there’s the marinade. Pour a bottle of beer into a large ziplock plastic bag. (I like to use a Mexican beer, such as Corona or Tecate because they taste citrusy to me.) Add the juice of two limes, two garlic cloves, minced, and a bunch of Worcestershire sauce. (How much, you ask? I don’t know – some. Seriously – five or six good shakes of the bottle. It’s not rocket science, and you can’t do it wrong.) Gently shake the bag to blend the ingredients, then add the meat. Seal the bag, squeezing all the air out as you do. Put it in a bowl or on a plate and place it in the refrigerator overnight.

You have two choices for cooking the meat – you can grill it or you can smoke it. Which one you choose depends on a number of things. How much time do you have? Not much time? Grill it. Lots of time? Smoke it. What’s the outside temperature? Under 75? Grill it. Over 75? Grill or smoke.

Smoking the meat means cooking it over low heat for a long time using smoke as a flavoring agent. The low, slow cooking will help tenderize the meat, which is good since you’re using a tough cut of meat. However, if you don’t have time to smoke it, you can grill it. You’re going to slice the meat into strips anyway, and if you slice it across the grain, you’ll make it easier to chew, so the fact that it’s tough to start with is minimized by the slicing.

What do I do? I really like to smoke meats, so if I have time, I smoke it. If not, I grill it. One day, I’ll do a post about smoking versus grilling, but not today.

Once you’ve grilled or smoked the meat, cover it with foil to keep it warm while you sauté the onions and peppers. Once they’re done, slice the meat – against the grain (VERY important) – and serve.

Fajitas are messy. You load a lot of stuff into a tortilla then try to eat it without dripping it all over yourself, with varying degrees of success. I usually serve them on the deck and hand people lots of paper towels or even kitchen towels. And, since tasty adult beverages such as beer and margaritas have usually been involved, drippage can be a problem. Just be prepared.

And speaking of margaritas, they are essential. Cook’s Illustrated Magazine ran a recipe several years ago that makes the best margaritas I’ve ever tasted. You remove the zest from 3 lemons and 3 limes, then juice the fruit. Mix the zest and the juice with 1/4 cup sugar. Pour the mixture into a jar, close it and put it in the refrigerator overnight. The next day, strain out the zest and add 1 cup Triple Sec and 1 cup good tequila. (Not great tequila, but do use a good tequila. Make sure it’s a 100% agave tequila, but don’t go so far as to use an añejo – that’s overkill.) Take a slice of lime and rub it on the rim of a margarita glass (or a martini glass – or a wine glass, for that matter), then dip the rim of the glass in salt. Add ice to the glass and pour in the margarita mixture. Then go sit down and enjoy it. Trust me, it’s a fine margarita.

Smoking Ribs

Go ahead – make the jokes. Yes, it’s hard to roll them and light them. No, Topps doesn’t make papers big enough. Go ahead – I’ll wait.

There. Got it out of your system? Good. Then let’s proceed to the serious business of smoking ribs.

First, what kind of ribs are you going to smoke? Pork, obviously, but that still leaves the choice of baby back ribs or spareribs. My usual choice is spareribs, because they’re much meatier, but you need 4 hours to smoke them, and I only have a couple of hours. Baby back ribs are good, and they do have the advantage of cooking faster, needing only two hours to smoke. I did find some gorgeous baby back ribs at Reynolda Farms Market, so that’s what I’m cooking today.

I always start with a dry spice rub the night before. The rub I use is a mixture of dried spices, from a recipe of Alton Brown’s. I made a batch of it three or four years ago, and I’m still trying to use it all up. I use this same spice rub for ribs and brisket, but since I only smoke things 3 or 4 times a year, it’s taking me a while to use it up. I take the ribs out of their packaging and put them in a large baking dish, then sprinkle the dry rub all over both sides and pat it in to the surface of the meat. Then I cover the baking dish with plastic wrap and let the ribs sit in the refrigerator overnight. I take them out of the refrigerator about an hour before I want to start cooking them so that they can come to room temperature before they go on the grill.

About 30 minutes before I want to start cooking, I put a bunch of hickory chips in a bowl of water to soak. They are going to provide the smoke. I use different types of wood for different meats. I like hickory for ribs and for pork shoulder. It’s the traditional barbecue wood for North Carolina barbecue. For smoked brisket, I use mesquite. And for smoked turkey breast, I like apple wood, which is a lighter tasting smoke, suitable for the lighter flavor of turkey. Hickey or mesquite are way too aggressive for turkey. Soaking the wood chips keeps them from burning and instead makes them produce lots and lots of smoke, which flavors the meat. The chips will eventually burn, once they dry out, but first they smoke, which is exactly what you want.

You can also get wood chunks, which are exactly what you’d think – big chunks of wood, rather than smaller chips – but I find that they never really get wet enough all the way through and you get more flame and less smoke from them, so I prefer chips.

Smoking is a little bit like braising in that you want to cook something at a low temperature over a long time to make it tender and succulent. The key to good smoking is temperature control. I smoke in a large charcoal grill, which is rectangular in shape and has a vent in the body at one end and a vented smokestack in the top at the other. I can control the temperature by opening and closing the vent and the smokestack. The less oxygen which reaches the coals, the lower the temperature. It also has a thermometer in the lid which tells me the temperature inside the grill. Using natural hardwood charcoal, I build a small fire in the side of the body closest to the vent. I place the ribs on the grates on the other side of the body of the grill, under the smokestack. I add soaked wood chips to the fire and close the lid. The movement of the heated air through the smokestack (that’s the Bernoulli effect for all you Vocal Ped people out there) pulls the heated air and the smoke across the ribs, slowly cooking and flavoring them.

Smoking in a grill like this means you have to constantly tend the fire. So I sit on the deck with a tasty beverage, communing with nature (Oh, look – there’s mama raccoon! And two flies just landed on my table, apparently engaging in an act that would get them arrested if they were humans and doing so in public.) and enjoying a lovely afternoon and keeping an eye on the fire. You want to avoid open flames, add charcoal often enough to keep the fire going but never letting it get too hot, and add wood chips frequently.

About half an hour before the ribs are done, I’ll start slathering them with barbecue sauce. I have a recipe for a nice tomato based sauce that I like, but I’ve been awfully busy the last few days (hello – it’s Easter Monday – I’ve been singing a lot), so I’m cheating and using doctored Kraft barbecue sauce, which is just fine. I’ll step up the heat a bit so that the sauce will glaze nicely. Once that’s done, I’ll take the ribs off the fire, and using a cleaver, cut them apart between the bones. Then, making sure there’s a good supply of wet kitchen towels, Terry and I and our guests will proceed to gnaw the bones clean, chasing the ribs with potato salad, baked beans, and rice and corn salad, followed by strawberry ice cream, made from the first local strawberries. Yum.

Unusual Ice Cream Flavors

My friend Stephanie is the queen of homemade ice cream. She has one of those great little Cuisinart ice cream makers with the canister that goes in the freezer, which makes about a quart of ice cream in 20 minutes and does a very good job of it. It’s not hand-cranked ice cream, but I don’t have the slave labor of five very competitive kids that my parents did to make hand-cranked ice cream. “Hey! Let’s see who can turn it the longest!” We always fell for that.

Anyway, Stephanie comes up with great, creative, and very tasty ice cream flavors. My favorite is one she calls Nuclear Winter, which is a Philadelphia style vanilla ice cream (which means some mixture of milk and cream, with sugar and flavorings and no eggs) with crushed Atomic Fireballs mixed in. I love Atomic Fireballs (are you reading this, Teri?) and surrounding them with ice cream just makes them that much better.

Which got me thinking about the combination of hot, sweet, and dairy. I knew I liked hot and dairy together – I love Mexican food, with peppers, cheese and sour cream. How could you miss by adding sweet into the mix? Thinking along those lines led me to chocolate, which, of course, came from Mexico in the first place, and is used as an ingredient in savory foods in Mexican cooking. So I thought what if you were to add peppers to chocolate ice cream. Seemed like a great idea to me.

So I went out to the internet and searched for a recipe that did that and I found one. This particular recipe has you make a bittersweet chocolate ganache by bringing half and half, in which you have placed a jalapeño pepper which has been stemmed, seeded and sliced, to a boil, then stirring in chopped bittersweet chocolate. You stir to melt the chocolate and mix it in well, let it cool, then refrigerate overnight. The next day, you strain out the pepper. In a separate bowl, you beat eggs and sugar until they’re light and fluffy, then mix in the chocolate mixture, cream and pecans. Then you freeze it into ice cream.

It was a huge disappointment. The jalapeño imparted no heat whatsoever and only a mild vegetal flavor, which was mostly covered by the chocolate. The chocolate fell out of the suspension and turned gritty in the ice cream. It was kind of a disaster.

But I still liked the idea in theory. So I did some research. There is a Good Eats episode in which Alton Brown makes chocolate ice cream. He addresses the chocolate issue by using cocoa instead of chocolate because it stays in suspension. I had thought of that myself and was glad to have his corroboration. For his chocolate ice cream, he also uses a custard base (one in which, as opposed to Philadelphia style ice cream, you do use eggs), but I really like the Philadelphia style, because it taste lighter and fresher to me, so I decided to use his Philadelphia style recipe for vanilla ice cream as my starting point. For the chocolate, I used the same amount of cocoa that he uses for his chocolate ice cream.

I then turned to the pepper. What would give me the most bang for the buck in terms of pepper flavor. With most herbs, when you want concentrated herbal flavor, you turn to the dried version. I have a recipe for Honey Lavender Ice Cream (more about it later), which calls for steeping dried lavendar flowers in hot cream and half and half for 20 minutes to extract the flavor. I decided to do the same thing with dried red pepper flakes. Being a serious fan of heat, I started with a teaspoon.

I also wanted some vanilla to round out the flavor. Vanilla is originally from Mexico and Central America, so it’s part of what was beginning to emerge as a unified theme of flavor for this ice cream. And I just happened to have a bottle of Mexican vanilla that someone had recently given me. If you’ve never used it before, real Mexican vanilla (there are a lot of imitation Mexican vanillas out there), has a very different, more robust flavor than vanilla made from Madagascar vanilla beans.

So I had an ice cream with Mexican vanilla, chocolate, and hot red peppers. What was I going to call it? Easy. Aztec Ice Cream. Here’s the recipe.

2 cups half-and-half
1 cup whipping cream
1 cup minus 2 tablespoons sugar
1.5 ounces (by weight) cocoa powder
1 teaspoon dried red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon Mexican vanilla extract

Combine all ingredients except the vanilla in a large saucepan and mix thoroughly. Place over medium heat and bring just to a simmer. Turn off the heat, cover and let sit for 30 minutes. Strain mixture into lidded container, stir in vanilla, and refrigerate overnight to mellow flavors and texture.

Freeze mixture in ice cream freezer according to unit’s instructions. Once the volume has increased by 1/2 to 3/4 times, and reached a soft serve consistency, spoon the mixture back into a lidded container and harden in the freezer before serving.

When you eat this ice cream, the first thing you taste is chocolate, with a nice creamy mouth feel from the dairy. (I used Homeland Creamery cream and half and half. It’s a regional dairy and their products are very creamy.) When the ice cream gets to the back of your mouth, the heat hits and it finishes with a wonderful back of the throat burn, which the cream helps to put out. It’s a little like a roller coaster ride in your mouth.

Now, about that Honey Lavender Ice Cream. The recipe is from Gourmet and it can be found on Epicurious.com, so I’m not going to post it here. It’s also a Philadelphia style ice cream. In this case, it’s sweetened with honey and flavored with dried lavender flowers. You mix cream, half and half, and honey in a pan, then pour in the lavender flowers, and bring the mixture to a boil. Turn the heat off and let it steep for 20 minutes. I can’t tell you how incredibly good it smells while it’s steeping. Then you strain the flowers out, put it in the refrigerator overnight to cool, freeze it, let it harden in the freezer, and serve. To my taste, the combination of honey and lavender makes it taste a little like cough syrup, but it’s a wonderful flavor and very unusual. It also taste incredibly summery because of the scent of lavender. (For people in Winston-Salem, I found dried lavender flowers at Fresh Market.)

Pound Cake

I had a meeting tonight which ended with a potluck dinner. It’s been a pretty busy week, and I had a very short window in which to make something to take for the dinner, and no time to shop for ingredients. So with only about a half an hour to put something together and only staples from which to make it, I decided to make a pound cake.

The recipe I use for pound cake comes from the cookbook the church I grew up in put out in the mid-70′s. My mom was the head of the committee that pulled it together, and I remember typing lots of recipes (on a typewriter – a manual typewriter, yet) for it when I was in college. It has some great classic recipes in it, including this pound cake recipe. The woman who submitted it was the meanest old lady I’ve ever known (seriously – she scared me to death), but she could really cook. As I recall, the original recipe lists the ingredients, and says something like “Mix all ingredients. Bake at 300 until done.” And I’ve pretty much done that, with not a whole lot of care about how I mixed all the ingredients, then dumping the mixture into whatever pan it would fit in, and baking it at 300 until it was done. And it was pretty good, although very dense and heavy.

However, probably 20 years ago, I came across an article on pound cakes in Southern Living magazine, which talked about how traditional pound cakes, which use no chemical leavening agents, should be mixed to ensure lightness and lift. The method they prescribed was to beat room temperature butter (and DO NOT let me hear you use the “m” word anywhere near a pound cake) for at least 2 minutes with a stand mixer at high speed. Then slowly add the sugar and beat for another 5-7 minutes at high speed until the mixture resembles whipped cream. Stop and scrape down the sides of the bowl as you need to, but don’t underbeat at this stage. You want the sugar to dissolve into the butter and to lose its graininess and you want to beat a lot of air into the mixture, because it’s this air that will give the cake its lightness.

You then beat in the eggs one by one, mixing in only until the yellow of the yolk disappears into the batter. Add the flavorings and the flour, again mixing only until the flour is lightly mixed in. Pour the batter into a greased and floured tube pan or loaf pan and bake at 300 for one hour.

Here are the ingredients:

1 cup of butter
1 2/3 cups sugar
5 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon lemon extract
2 cups flour

Today, I just happened to have a banana which was at the banana bread stage, so I peeled it, broke it up in pieces, and tossed it in just before the eggs, beating it with the butter and sugar until it was mixed in thoroughly. I’d never done that before, and I didn’t know how it would do, but it was great. This cake is never dry, but it made it even more moist, and brought a nice flavor along with it.

Sometimes, I’ll make a citrus glaze to go with this cake. I’ll squeeze the juice from a couple of oranges and a couple of lemons, mix them with some sugar and some butter, and cook it down until it’s syrupy. When the cake comes out of the oven, I’ll turn it out of the pan onto a plate, then use a skewer to poke holes in the top. Then I’ll slowly pour the glaze over the top, letting it soak into the holes. You can add a little Grand Marnier or Amaretto or Frangelico – or pretty much any liqueur – to the glaze too, if you like.

This pound cake is great just by itself. It’s also a nice delivery vehicle for sliced strawberries and whipped cream, or peaches, or ice cream and hot fudge sauce, or anything else you can think of to pour over it. It’s like the little black dress of desserts. You can dress it up, dress it down, and take it anywhere.

Inspiration at the grocery store

So, I’ve had bronchitis for what seems like forever and I haven’t felt like cooking or eating and I certainly haven’t felt like writing about it. But, aside from a lingering cough, I’m feeling better, so on the way home from work today, with no students waiting for me, I stopped off at this wonderful store which sells local meats and produce to see what I could get to throw together something for dinner. The only problem with a local produce place is that it is the depths of winter, so the pickings are fairly slim. But they are getting some lettuces in, and they had some wonderful sets of three big plants of leaf lettuce bundled together. They also had some nice red bell peppers – greenhouse grown, I assume – and some pears. So there’s a nice salad.

The meat cooler was full of all sorts of choices of local meats – lots of different cuts of steak, hamburger, some gorgeous chicken, sausages, country ham, bacon, different cuts of pork – but I wasn’t really sure what I wanted. The next cooler over had eggs, butter and cheese. And then I saw it – truffle butter. North Carolina actually has the beginnings of a truffle farming industry, and these were local truffles. There were also some very nice portobello mushrooms. And I had some Arborio rice at home. So I decided to make risotto.

So I had two dishes – mushroom and truffle risotto and a salad. Along with that, I thought I’d serve pork chops. I like the way pork tastes with mushroom risotto, and there’s a simplicity to grilled pork chops that would nicely balance the complexity of the risotto.

So I had my menu. I got two pork chops, the truffle butter, two red bell peppers, a group of three lettuce plants (different varieties), a pear, and a portobello mushroom. At home, I had the Arborio rice, half an onion, some Parmesan cheese, frozen homemade chicken stock, some white wine, and the ingredients for a balsamic vinaigrette.

For the risotto, I chopped the onion, one of the bell peppers, and the mushroom, and thawed the chicken stock and brought it to a simmer. I melted a couple of tablespoons of butter and threw in the onion for a couple of minutes. Then I tossed in the red bell pepper and the mushroom and cooked them until the mushroom had released all its juices. I then poured in probably half a cup of white wine and let it cook down until it was almost gone. I added a cup of rice, stirred it all in with everything, and added half a cup of simmering chicken stock and stirred it all up again.

Then I followed the standard risotto technique of adding in another half cup of stock each time the risotto got dry, stirring frequently. The risotto absorbs stock quickly at the beginning, then absorbs it less quickly as it cooks. After adding the first bit of stock, I put the pork chops on my little cast iron stove top grill to cook.

After about ten minutes, as the risotto needed less attention, I put the salad together. I pulled leaves of the three different kinds of lettuce off the bunches, washed them, tore them into bite sized pieces, and spun them dry in my salad dryer. I washed the second red bell pepper and cut it into bite sized pieces, discarding the seeds and ribs. I washed, peeled, cored, and seeded the pear and cut it into bite sized pieces, then put all the ingredients into salad bowls.

To make the balsamic vinaigrette, I put salt and pepper, balsamic vinegar and olive oil into a half pint sized canning jar, closed it and shook it to combine, then poured the vinaigrette over the salad. I took the pork chops off the grill and put them onto the plates. When the risotto had cooked for about 20 minutes, I tasted a little bit to make sure that the rice was cooked until it was done, but still had a little bite to it. I then put the truffle butter into the risotto, stirring it until it melted and was thoroughly mixed. I then threw in a handful of Parmesan cheese, again mixing it in thoroughly, then plated it with the pork chops.

This actually turned out to be the best risotto I’ve ever made. I hadn’t used bell pepper in risotto before and it worked really well. The sweetness of the pepper was good, but the tartness also worked well to balance the earthiness of the mushrooms, truffles and the rice itself. It really brightened the flavor of the dish and rounded out the flavor very nicely. I’ll do that again.

Here’s the salad:

And here’s the risotto and pork chop:

On Pickled Jalapeños and Pimiento Cheese

As a southern cook, I am required to be able to make certain foods – fried chicken, biscuits, corn bread, etc. Pimiento cheese falls into that category. There are people in this world who think that pimiento cheese is a comfort food and should taste primarily of mayonnaise – insipid and creamy. I am not counted among them, as the title of this post should perhaps indicate. No, I like my pimiento cheese to be challenging and strongly flavored.

I start with vinegar and salt and pepper. I start by making an apple cider vinegar reduction – I pour 3 or 4 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar into a small saucepan, toss in some salt and pepper and reduce it to about half its starting volume, then let it cool. Then, using the meat grinder attachment of my KitchenAid mixer, I grind undrained pimientos and extra sharp cheddar cheese. Yes, you can use a food processor for this step, but you just don’t get the right texture. It’s like eating hamburger that’s been ground in the food processor – it’s okay, but it’s just not right. You really need a meat grinder.

I used to have a big metal meat grinder that clamped onto the kitchen counter. I have no idea what happened to it – I must have lost it in a move at some point. It did a great job and it was a lot of fun to use. But the KitchenAid grinder attachment does a great job and it’s a lot easier. You just don’t get that same connection to the work, though.

Once the cheese and pimiento have been through the grinder, I pour in the vinegar reduction. That and the undrained pimiento juice help mix everything together. Then I add just enough mayonnaise to bind it all together. This is the point where individual taste comes into play. Put as much or as little mayonnaise in as you like. Taste it. If you want creamy and bland, put in a lot of mayonnaise. You can also use mild cheddar. If you want strong flavored, put in less and use a sharp or extra sharp cheddar. My preference is extra sharp cheddar and as little mayonnaise as possible.

So where do the pickled jalapeños enter the picture? My very favorite thing to do with pimiento cheese is to put it on a saltine cracker and top it with a pickled jalapeño ring. And where do I get them? Why, I pickle them myself, of course. Oh, yeah, that’s the other thing good southern cooks are expected to be able to do. We’re expected to be able to put things up. Jams and jellies, pickles – if it can go in a Mason jar, we’re supposed to know how to put it there and keep it from spoiling.

I actually don’t can much, not because I don’t like canning – I find it a lot of fun to do – but because I never eat anything I preserve. Except jalapeños, which grow very well around here. We grew them one year and I canned enough of them to last for five or six years.

The basic process for pickling jalapeños is this. Take very fresh jalapeños, wash them and let then drain dry. Slice them into rings, discarding the stems. Pack them into clean, sterilized canning jars. Pour boiling brine over them. Cover them with sterilized canning lids. Screw on the lids and let them seal.

Now, what does all that mean?

Clean, sterilized canning jars: Use jars that are designed to be used by home canners. Go to the grocery store or to Target or Roses or Wal-Mart and buy canning jars. Don’t use old mayonnaise jars or anything else like that unless you want to end up with botulism. Just don’t do it. I don’t care if your aunt or your sister or your grandmother always did it. They’re lucky they’re not dead. Just go buy canning jars. Do it. Now. Don’t argue with me – you should know better than that.

For jalapeños, half pint jars (8 ounces, or one cup) are a good size. You can only eat so many of these things at one sitting. Put them in anything larger and they’ll go bad in the refrigerator waiting to be eaten.

Before you can, wash the jars very well in very hot, soapy water. Running them through the dishwasher is best, but if you don’t have a dishwasher, wash them by hand in the hottest water you can stand. Rinse them in equally hot water. Put them in a large stockpot or a canner in water to cover and bring the water to a boil. Boil the jars for at least 10 minutes. You can then reduce the boil to a simmer. Leave the jars in the water until you are ready to fill them with the jalapeños and the brine.

So what is a brine? In pickling, a brine is a salty and/or acidic liquid which can also contain herbs or spices which will preserve the food. Both salt and acid provide an environment which is inhospitable to organisms which can cause food to spoil and cause illnesses in humans, such as botulism. The brine that I use for pickling jalapeños, which can be used for pickling all sorts of other things, is:

1 quart vinegar
3 quarts water
3/4 cup pickling salt

This is a pretty plain brine. If I were going to make cucumber pickles, I’d use something with a little more flavor to it. But since jalapeños bring plenty of flavor of their own, it works nicely for them.

So we have the sliced jalapeños, we have the sterile jars, and we have the brine ingredients (which we are going to combine and bring to a boil). We pack the sliced jalapeños tightly into the jars, and pour in the boiling brine. Then we top the jars with the lids.

The what? Canning jars come with two part lids. There is a flat lid that fits on top of the jar and a screw-top ring that holds the lid in place. The flat lid has a gasket that insures that the lid will adhere to the jar and form a seal. The screw-top ring holds the lid in place until the seal forms. As the contents of the jar cool, they contract in size, forming a vacuum, which strengthens the seal. Once the seal is formed, you can remove the screw-top ring and the seal will continue to hold.

So once you have put the jalapeño slices in the jar, poured in the brine, placed the lid on the jar, and screwed on the ring, move the jar to an out of the way place and let it sit to cool. The lids all have a dimple that points up at first, but it will pop down as the contents contract. Part of the fun of canning is hearing the dimple pop down. That’s one way you can tell that each jar has sealed. Any jar that still has the dimple pointing up has probably not sealed and needs to be refrigerated and used fairly soon. And if you have any doubts, you can test a jar that has cooled. Remove the ring and see if the lid is loose. If it is, store it in the refrigerator and eat it soon. If you can’t move the lid, you should be okay.

Store the sealed jars in a cool, dry place. This is what basements are made for. If, after time, you notice any discoloration, or, heaven forbid, you see mold, discard the jar unopened. Don’t take any chances. If you open a jar and it doesn’t smell right, throw it out. In all the years that I have canned things, I’ve never had anything go bad. But I’m very careful about making sure jars and lids are sterile, and I don’t take any chances. If you want to try canning, do, but read up on it and be careful. Like so many things in cooking, it’s not hard, but you do need to do each step correctly. If you do, you’ll be rewarded.

Christmas Dinner in the Rearview Mirror

So, Christmas was nearly a week ago, and I’m just now getting around to writing about it. But that’s okay – the weeks leading up to Christmas were so insane that it took a good week just to come down from it all. We were fortunate enough to have two guests for Christmas dinner, which was a blessing, as guests almost always are. Here’s the menu:

Filet mignon with red wine sauce
Brussels sprouts with toasted hazelnuts
Sautéed mushrooms in cream
Scalloped potatoes
Fiery cinnamon cranberry sauce
Crème brûlée

The filet recipe is one I found in Bon Appetit probably 25 years ago and have made over and over since. I remember it was from a February issue because it had something chocolate with raspberries on the cover for Valentine’s Day. It’s a fabulous recipe which is really very simple. You marinate the steaks overnight, then sauté them and make a pan sauce, with one little twist. First the marinade, which is red wine, some cognac, chopped shallot, and chopped fresh thyme. I always marinate in ziplock bags, because I think you get the most complete coverage that way. Put in the marinade ingredients, then the steaks. Zip the bag almost all the way closed, then carefully work out all the air. Finish zipping it closed, then put the bag into a bowl (in case of leaks) and put it in the refrigerator overnight.

The pan sauce is based on a reduction of the marinade and beef stock. For six servings, the recipe calls for 3 cups of red wine, 3 tablespoons of cognac (which I frequently leave out), 3 shallots and 1 teaspoon of thyme in the marinade. Remove the steaks from the marinade, scraping any clinging bits of shallot and thyme back into the marinade as best you can, put the marinade into a pan and boil it down until it’s reduced to about a cup. Add 4 cups of good beef broth and boil the whole thing down until it’s reduced to about 1 1/4 cups. So that’s roughly 7 cups of liquid reduced to 1 1/4 cups. It makes an intense sauce. That pre-reduction is the twist to the simple pan sauce.

While the sauce is reducing, you’re going to pat the steaks dry so that they’ll brown well, and sauté them to whatever extent you like in a mixture of butter and oil. This is always challenging in our household, because I like mine barely dead and Terry wants his really well done. I usually end up butterflying his to make sure they’re done enough. It’s been my experience that filet mignon, because it has so little fat, does not conduct heat well and takes forever to cook well done. So if you’re cooking them for people and have someone who wants theirs well done, start early. Start with a hot pan so you get a good crust, but then really back off the heat so you get the interior done without turning the exterior to shoe leather. And, even liking mine as rare as I do, it surprises me how long I have to cook them.

Once the steaks are as done as you want them, transfer them to a plate and tent them with foil to keep them warm. Pour the reduced stock/marinade mixture into the sauté pan and scrape well to pick up any fond which has developed in the pan. That’s concentrated flavor and you don’t want to miss any of it. I like to reduce the sauce a bit further at this point – I want it to be thick and not a great volume. Just before you’re ready to serve, swirl in just a bit of butter to finish it. This dish was a big hit, as it has always been for me. It’s a go-to recipe when I want something very dressy to serve.

The brussels sprouts won another convert. (Yay!) One of our guests was there for the first time and he was a real skeptic who has never liked brussels sprouts. But he was game about it and tried them and really liked them. So chalk up another win for the fabulous brussels sprouts recipe. It has to be the toasted hazelnuts. How can you not like something with toasted hazelnuts all over it?

I tried a new scalloped potatoes recipe. Scalloped potatoes were not part of my life growing up. In fact, I don’t remember my mother ever cooking them. And I had found okay recipes, but never one that really did it for me. Until this year. And this one was absolute simplicity. I have the iPhone app for Mark Bittman’s cookbook How to Cook Everything, which is a fabulous free app. (If you’re not familiar with Mark Bittman, go RIGHT NOW to the NY Times website’s dining and wine page and read some of his columns. I think he’s one of the best people out there right now writing about food.) I looked up his recipe for scalloped potatoes, which is the height of simplicity. Peel and thinly slice potatoes. (I had always sliced them with a knife before, but this time I used the slicing side of my box grater. I was afraid they would be too thin, but I discovered that really thin slices just might be the essence of incredibly good scalloped potatoes. Remember, I didn’t grow up with them, so this is all fairly new to me.) Heat up cream (until it’s hot, he says, which is all he needs to say). Put a layer of potatoes in a dish. Sprinkle the potatoes with salt, pepper, and chopped fresh thyme. Top it with a layer of shredded Gruyère or Swiss cheese. Alternate layers of potatoes and cheese, sprinkling each layer of potatoes with salt, pepper and thyme. When you’re done, pour in enough cream (or half and half or milk) to come 3/4 of the way up the potatoes. Put it in a 375˚ oven for 45-50 minutes. I couldn’t find a Gruyère or Swiss that looked good to me, so I used Jarlsberg. I cannot begin to describe to you the cheesy goodness of this dish. It was potato perfection. I thought the steak was good (and it really was), but this might have been my favorite dish of the meal. I think this dish is what little potatoes dream of growing up to become. I want more of it right now just thinking about it. Thank you, Mr. Bittman, for making my Christmas so cheesy good. The important proportions for this recipe are a pound of potatoes, 1/2 cup of cheese and 2-3 cups of cream, half and half, or milk.

Those of you who read about the Thanksgiving dinner may remember that I made the same cranberry sauce for it and was disappointed because it wasn’t really hot. The recipe calls for 1 12-ounce bag of fresh cranberries and “a hot pepper”, which is pretty non-specific. I didn’t have many choices available at Thanksgiving – all they had in the store were jalapeño, serrano and habañero. I knew the jalapeño would be too mild and the habañero would be too hot, but thought the serrano might be just right. Alas, not hot enough. So this time, I was pretty determined it would be hot. I happened to get my produce for Christmas dinner at Whole Foods and they had a pretty good selection of peppers, so I got 4 little green Thai peppers. Not as hot as if they had been red, but plenty hot enough. As before, I made a simple syrup with sugar and water and cooked the peppers, this time cut in thirds instead of whole, and two cinnamon sticks for ten minutes. Then I added the cranberries and cooked for another ten minutes. I tasted it at that point and decided that, yes, indeed, it was plenty hot, and fished out all the pieces of pepper I could, as well as the cinnamon sticks, poured the sauce into a dish and let it cool overnight. By the next day, it was wonderful. It wasn’t painfully hot, but it was very cinnamony, and had a wonderful initial heat and a great back of the throat afterburn that was hot, but not painfully so.

We had a very rare white Christmas – 5 or 6 inches of snow eventually fell before stopping the next morning – so we got to look out the dining room window on a beautiful white landscape while sharing this meal with wonderful friends. And what better way to end it than with fire. That’s right – we pulled out the propane torch (not one of those wussy little kitchen torches, but a real propane torch) to caramelize the sugar for the crème brûlée. I love doing that – I like fire anyway, which, yes, is a little scary – but it’s so much fun to watch the sugar magically change color as you move the fire over it. And then you get to eat this wonderful concoction of cream and egg yolks with the crunchy caramel on top. What’s not to like?

I write this on New Year’s Eve, our last day at the beach. We’re going to have steak and baked potatoes and steamed vegetables with a nice red wine for dinner, then pack up to come home tomorrow. (We found a great little wine shop down here – Grape and Ale – where we got a wonderful bottle of Cabernet for $6. Frugal AND tasty.) So we’ve all survived another year – although this one was by the fingertips at times – and I hope you all have a lovely New Year’s Eve and a happy, peaceful and prosperous 2011. More to come in the New Year.

Dinner at the beach

Gentle (and patient!) readers – actually, not quite as patient as I had feared you needed to be. I thought I hadn’t posted since Thanksgiving, but I find it’s not quite that bad. Nearly, but not quite. It’s been so busy that not only have I not had time to write, I haven’t had time to cook to have had anything to write about! But now that we’re through the holidays, that should change.

I will eventually write about Christmas dinner, which was lovely, but tonight, I want to write about dinner at the beach. That’s right – the beach. Did I mention that we’re at the beach? (And yes, we have a housesitter, so anyone who is scanning blogs to find out who’s away from home so they can rob houses better not try ours! A housesitter and four ferocious guard cats. Okay, a housesitter. Who can dial 911 with the best of them. Oh, like we have anything anybody wants to steal anyway. Four ferocious guard cats maybe. You can have Taylor – she pees on everything.)

So we’re at the beach. We’re staying in a house which has a fairly well stocked kitchen – lots of tools, fairly decent pots and pans, a (gasp!) Jenn-Air grill. That’s been fun so far. A microwave, which I don’t have at home. Yes, I hear the shouts of dismay across the blogosphere – “No microwave?” The core problem is not that I don’t have a microwave – it’s that I don’t have any counter space and I hate to give any up for an appliance I just don’t use all that often. I do miss it for two things – bacon and asparagus, which are both great in the microwave. But I digress.

So we were at Lowes Foods down here today and I found some really beautiful sea scallops at half price. Usually a bad sign, but they looked fresh and I couldn’t smell anything off at all in the fish section. So I got a pound. When I packed to come down here, I tossed all sorts of things in a grocery bag in the kitchen, so I had a really odd assortment of stuff. I had three lemons, two oranges, some fresh ginger, a head of garlic, a shallot and every liquor bottle we had (because you never know what drinks you might want to mix at the beach). I had picked up some carrots and broccoli at the store and had brought some rice with me from home.

Now I used to be the queen of cooking rice, but then some friends gave me a rice cooker three or four years ago. Now I can’t remember the proportions for cooking rice manually. So we had gummy rice with dinner. And the microwave here doesn’t seem to cook evenly. It got one slice of bacon out of six done this morning for breakfast and about the same ratio of vegetables done correctly for dinner. But the scallops were fabulous.

They were labeled chemical free. I had read an article on the Cook’s Illustrated website about sea scallops this afternoon in looking for a way to cook them. Apparently, they’re frequently treated with sodium tripolyphosphate to increase their shelf life and retain moisture. CI says you can tell if they’ve been treated by putting them on a paper towel on a microwave safe plate and microwaving them for 15 seconds. If they’ve been treated, there will be a sizable wet spot around the scallop on the paper towel. If not, the towel will be dry. I tried this, and the towel was dry. i was happy to know that Lowes was telling me the truth, as it’s my favorite grocery store.

CI recommends putting the scallops on a couple of layers of paper towels and covering them with a couple more layers for 10 minutes to dry them off well, salting and peppering them on both sides, then cooking them for 1 1/2 to 2 minutes on one side, then about 1 1/2 minutes on the other side in a hot pan in oil and serving them with lemon juice or a sauce. I did pretty much that – I probably cooked them a little longer, as Terry likes his seafood very well done, and I’m not any too fond of underdone seafood myself. Oh, and I used butter rather than oil. There’s a surprise.

I let them dry while the rice cooked, and it was well worth the time, because they browned beautifully. They were absolutely gorgeous. Then I started looking around for something to make a pan sauce from. I decided to deglaze the pan with some Myer’s rum, then tossed in some minced garlic and fresh ginger, followed by the juice of one orange. I let it reduce some, then finished it with some butter. I strained out the garlic and ginger before pouring the sauce over the scallops. It made a nice sauce. It had a lot of flavor, but straining out the garlic and ginger kept them from overpowering the scallops. The rum and orange worked well together, and the butter evened the flavors out nicely. Even with the gummy rice and the unevenly cooked vegetables, it was a pretty good dinner.

As a side note, for Christmas, Terry gave me two sets of videos of Julia Child’s The French Chef series, which I’ve been watching while on vacation, which has been fun. It’s hard to remember that there was a time when she actually had to introduce the subject of herbs because people didn’t use them. “This is basil – you can get it dried at the grocery store. If they don’t carry it, you can ask them for it. Or it’s very easy to grow yourself.” Wow. i swear she said that. And I remember when it was a big deal and really fancy to use something like that when you cooked. It’s amazing what a difference 50 years can make.

Speaking of which, happy birthday to my big brother on his not quite 60th birthday.