Coffee heat rising

Recipes

All Alone and Amok in the Kitchen

by

It’s Saturday night and a great deal of work has been done: Blog post written; a jungle of obscure paperwork shoveled off desk, dining-room table, kitchen counter and into wastebaskets or file folders; furniture dusted; floors vacuumed, then floors dustmopped, then floors steam-cleaned; bathrooms cleaned; jeans ironed (yeah…, I know!); stained clothing destained and laundered; dog hair shaken out of bedding; bed made; dog, terrorized by vacuum cleaner and floor steamer, lured back into the house and fed; Mrs. Micah’s miracles observed in awe from afar…ahhh, it’s gone on and on.

So here I am in glorious solitude and ravenous.

The other day I picked up a bag of wild-caught mahi-mahi at the Costco, and that’s what I’ve been craving all through the past workful few hours. Scrounged in the fridge, the freezer, and the backyard: found a little basil, a little tomato, a pile of rice, a bag of peas, a container of blackberries, and w00t! a lifetime supply of pitted kalamati olives. Here’s what came down:

Greek-style Hawaian Fish Filet for One:

You need:

one piece of fish, defrosted
a handful of fresh basil, chopped
one large tomato or about three or four Campari tomatoes, coarsely cut up
about a half-dozen pitted kalamati olives, coarsely chopped
sprinkling of feta cheese

1 cup uncooked converted rice
2 1/2 cups water
butter

frozen peas
more butter

Put the rice on to cook: bring the water to a boil; then add the rice and turn the heat to medium-low. Allow to simmer about 20 minutes, or until the water is absorbed. Then add a blob of butter, enough to make you happy.

Meanwhile,  preheat the oven to 420 or 425 degrees.

Toss the chopped tomato, basil, and olives together. If desired, sprinkle a small amount of salt over this and mix in; but remember that the olives and the feta are salty and so take it easy with this!

Place the fish filet on a baking pan (lazy housecleaners should line the pan with aluminum foil or baking parchment).

Smother the fish with the tomato-olive mix.

Sprinkle some feta cheese over the top. Drizzle some olive oil—about a tablespoon or two—over the entire affair.

Place the fish in the oven and allow to cook until gently done through. No need to overcook.

As the fish comes close to being done, zap the peas and butter in the microwave for about a minute (or less, depending on amount) to defrost and warm.

Arrange these wonderful things attractively on a plate, take to the dinner table, and enjoy!

After gorging on this, prepare dessert:

Incredibly Bad for You Blackberry Delight

a handful of fresh blackberries
turbinado sugar
heavy cream
nutmeg

Place blackberries in a small bowl. Sprinkle crunchy sugar (turbinado sugar) over the top. Pour a generous amount of heavy cream over this. Sprinkle more crunchy sugar over the top, and then sprinkle some nutmeg on top of that. Serve with whatever remains of the wine in your glass or, if you must, a cup of tea or coffee.

Salut!

How the Crockpot Scalloped Potatoes Worked Out

by

So there was that scheme to cook up a mess of scalloped potatoes in the crockpot, so as to simplify my contribution to the Christmas Eve potluck down at the Cult Headquarters. Alerted by Frugal Scholar to the likelihood that milk and cheese would curdle during the long cook, I sent out intelligence feelers across the Web. One, count her, (1), authoritative writer offered a true scalloped potato recipe, complete with white sauce and cheese, and claimed it worked well. Everyone else said if you put dairy in a crockpot you’ll end up with curds and whey.

Well, I liked Stephanie O’Dea’s basic idea, which she billed as au gratin rather than scalloped and to which she added walnuts and sage. I happen to have a sage plant that’s struggling to survive the winter frosts and a bucket of Costco walnuts in the freezer. But given the wackiness of the Christmas schedule, I really didn’t want to take a chance on ruining several pounds of potatoes and being left at the last minute with nothing to take to the chivaree.

So… I decided to substitute a velouté sauce—in effect, a white sauce made with chicken stock instead of milk—and then add the gruyère topping at the last minute. This worked pretty well. Here’s how it fell out:

To make enough to choke a horse:

• several pounds of potatoes, peeled
• about four handfuls of walnuts
• four to six fresh sage leaves, minced or finely chopped
• one large yellow onion
• butter in abundance
• olive oil
• 2 Tbsp flour
• 2 cups flavorful chicken stock
• salt and pepper
• a cup or more of grated gruyère (or other) cheese

I happened to have a box of College Inn’s “White Wine and Herbs Culinary Broth,” according to the ingredients panel your basic chicken stock with wine added. It tastes more like they used sherry—their “wine” must be cheap and sweet—but it’s pretty good. But you could use just about any broth, fresh or canned, wine-spiked or not.

Slice the potatoes and onions fairly thin—I used a mandoline for both, creating potato slices about 1/8 inch thick, but if you used a knife, about 1/4 inch would be fine.

Skim a frying pan with olive oil and sauté the onions until they’re just starting to carmelize. In a small frying pan or wide stockpot, melt some butter and toast the walnuts. When the onions are beginning to brown, add the sage and stir to mix well.

Le sauce velouté
Le sauce velouté

Make the sauce velouté: melt a couple tablespoons of butter in a saucepan. Add a like amount of flour. Stir over medium heat until the butter foams, but do not allow to brown. Add the chicken stock and heat over medium high heat, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens.

Generously butter the crockpot’s ceramic pot. Starting with potatoes, layer in the ingredients this order: potatoes on the bottom, dabs of butter, another layer of potatoes, layer of onion/sage, half the toasted walnuts, half the sauce; layer of potatoes, dabs of butter, layer of potatoes, remaining walnuts, layer of onion/sage, remaining potatoes, remaining sauce.

Cook on “low” about 5 or 6 hours.

A half-hour before serving, remove the cover, sprinkle the gruyère over the top, and replace the cover. Allow to cook until the cheese melts.

Ours cooked about six hours. I think that may have been a bit too long for Idahos, because the result, while extremely tasty, was somewhat mushy. Next time, I’d use boiling potatoes (red or white), which should hold their shape a bit better. Stephanie’s recipe calls for cooking the dish on “high” for just three hours; this also might solve the overcooking issue.

I’m fairly certain that you could get away with pouring a cup or so of heavy cream over the top at the time you put in the cheese—about a half-hour before serving. Even though the potatoes are very hot by then, I very much doubt the cream would fall apart in a half-hour. But since I had to sing at the 8:30 service as well as the midnight eucharist, SDXB would be bringing the potful of potatoes to the intermission potluck; setting him to experimenting with cream minutes before he had to haul the stuff to the car…well, that would’ve been asking for trouble.

Although it wasn’t a pretty dish, it really tasted very good, and the diners left little to bring home.

Under construction...
Under construction...

Ginger-Pineapple Punch

by

This is one of SDXB’s specialties, something he found years ago in a newspaper under the title “Ivory Coast Ginger Punch.” It’s easy to make and incredibly delicious.

Here’s the original recipe:

4 cups unsweetened canned pineapple juice
4 cups water
1/4 pound fresh ginger, scrubbed and cut into one-inch chunks
1/2 cup lemon juice
3/4 cup sugar

Mix the juice with two cups water in a large bowl. Whir the ginger in a blender with the remaining two cups of water.  Pour the puréed ginger and water mix through a wire strainer into the pineapple juice, squeezing as much liquid as you can from pulp.  Discard pulp.  Add lemon juice and sugar to taste. Pour the punch into a pitcher and cover; chill about two hours or as long as overnight. To serve, stir and pour over ice to serve.

Personally, I’m less than fond of canned pineapple juice, which has a metallic flavor, so I came up with this variant, using frozen juice:

a large container of frozen pineapple juice
water
about 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar
juice from one or two ripe lemons
a good-sized chunk of ginger, cut up into 1/2 to 1-inch chunks—the more, the zingier

All these measurements are to taste, BTW. For example, pineapple juice starts out pretty sweet, to my mind, and so I don’t think it needs 3/4 of a cup of sugar(!). But if you’re a steady soda pop drinker, you may want it sweeter. Experiment.

Put the pineapple juice in a blender. Using the empty juice container as a measuring cup, add a container of water. Add the sugar and the ginger. Now purée the bedoodles out of it. Purée as though after tomorrow there will never again be a blender in this world. Once the combination has morphed into a smooth liquid, pour it through a strainer into a pitcher. Using the back of a spoon, press the liquids out of the solids that collect in the strainer.

Add three more containers of water. Taste. If you like, add a little more water. Squeeze one or two juicy lemons into the punch. Stir. Taste again. Add more sugar or lemon juice, to taste. If you have a lime, some fresh lime juice also is nice.

This stuff is irresistible. It’s great for kids and teetotalers as is. You will find, though, that it calls out for rum. Use caution! It’s so easy to swizzle down that spiking this punch could put your guests face forward on the floor.

Woulda sworn I had a photo of this, but noooo….  So here’s a Christmas photo. All the neighbors have their Christmas lights out, but the hands-down favorite is the Burning Bush. Every year this guy climbs up on a skyscraping ladder and wraps his tree from its topmost limbs to the base of the trunk in layers of lights. He has so many lights wound around the tree that he can change colors: one night it’ll be blue, another green, another white…  This particular evening, he had several colors on at once.

Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas!

Share your favorite Christmas recipe!

by

What’s your all-time favorite holiday dish? It could be an old family recipe or something postmodern, an all-day production or no-muss-no-fuss.

Give a Christmas gift to all your blogging friends: share your all-time favorites for holiday meals. If you’ve posted it on your blog, leave a link in the comments below. If not, either post and link or simply type your recipe into your comment.

If we get enough good ideas, I’ll try to get us into the Make It from Scratch carnival.

My choice? IMHO one of the best parts of Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner is real brown gravy.

Image: Riki7, Wild Turkey. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons.

Christmas Recipe: Crockpot scalloped potatoes, hold the canned soup

by

On Christmas Eve the choir performs twice, once at the 8:30  p.m. service and then again at the 11:00 service, a full-throttle bells-and-smells Eucharist. In between the two events we entertain ourselves with a  potluck dinner.

Since M’hijito and I are entertaining 15 people at my house on Christmas Day and since SDXB will be spending Christmas Eve here, I cast about for something to take to the potluck that wouldn’t require much work. The crockpot is the likeliest candidate for a work-saving tool here, but I’m not fond of recipes that entail dumping canned mushroom soup (icky!) over chicken and cooking it to death. So I think I’m going to adapt and combine a couple of recipes to create a fresh variation on scalloped potatoes for the crockpot.

See the update of this recipe here.

Check this out:

2 pounds potatoes, sliced
1 large yellow onion, julienned
butter
olive oil
about 2 cups flavorful white sauce (see below)
1 cup shredded gruyère cheese
paprika or New Mexico red pepper flakes (mild)
finely chopped parsley
salt and pepper

To julienne the onion, peel it and slice it vertically, then slice again vertically, at a 90-degree angle to the original slices. Skim a frying pan with olive oil. Carmelize the onions by sautéeing them gently until they’re lovely and brown. Season mildly with salt and pepper to taste.

Grease the inside of the crockpot container generously with butter or olive oil.

Layer the sliced potatoes and the carmelized onions into the pot. Spread the white sauce evenly over the top. Dot generously with butter, then add more pepper and, if desired, salt. Cover the pot and cook the potatoes on low for seven or eight hours or on high for three to four hours. About a half-hour before serving, remove the lid and sprinkle with cheese and a little paprika for color. Replace the lid and allow the potatoes to continue cooking until the cheese is melted in. Finally, sprinkle minced fresh parsley over the top.

To make 2 cups white sauce:
See the comments for a discussion of the sauce!

4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons white flour
2 cups milk, or combination of milk and good chicken or beef stock
dollop of sherry
nutmeg
salt and pepper
paprika (optional)

Melt the butter in a large saucepan. Add flour and stir well to combine. Cook gently over medium-low  heat until the butter and flour foam up. Don’t allow the flour to brown.

Add the stock and stir over medium-high heat until them sauce is hot and thickened. Add nutmeg to taste: 1/8 to 1/4 tsp. Add a couple tablespoons of dry sherry. Add salt and pepper to taste. A little paprika will give the sauce some extra zing.

Mwa ha ha! For the last potluck, someone got to the sign-up sheet before me and claimed the very dish I planned to bring. Last night, though, I managed to grab the sheet first. While this will not be as staggeringly impressive as Cheryl and Doug’s traditional home-smoked salmon, it should at least be reasonably tasty.

Image: Vicente Gil, Adoração dos Magos. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons.

Sons

by

What a marvelous thing a young man is, and so much the more marvelous if he’s your son. Not that a daughter isn’t a marvelous creature, too; only that when all you have is a son, he is indeed extraordinary.

Shortly after I hit the “send” button throwing open the gate to my escape from the Great Desert University, M’hijito happened to call on the phone. It was 7:30 or 8:00 p.m. I was just sitting here in front of the computer, stunned and unable to move. To my great delight, he asked if I would like to come down to his place for dinner!

Hallelujah.

When I got to his place, the air was fragrant with the scent of frying onions. The lights were on, the heat was running, the house was warm, wonderful music was playing, wine was poured.

My god, can that kid cook!

Not only that, but he can repair plumbing. In the course of his culinary exertions, the garbage disposal blocked and both sinks backed up. In moments he had the trap under the sink apart, drained, fixed, and back together. Voilà! Problem solved.

Back to the stove: He made this incredible mirepoix, in which (once it was cooked down) he broiled pieces of steak and lamb. The result was a deep brown sauce, so flavorful: sweet from the onions, rich with carrot, celery, mushroom, wine…unbelievable. As if this were not enough, he braised some brussels sprouts he had bought fresh, then blanched and frozen. And he served up a magnificent salad. And lots of good red wine.

Defies belief.

M’hijito’s Steak Mirepoix

You need:

• a good, heavy, oven-proof frying pan
• olive oil
• wine
• one onion
• a carrot
• a stick of celery
• a half-dozen cremini (or other) mushrooms
• about 1/2 glass wine
• salt & pepper
• a couple of pieces of beef filet, or a couple of lamb chops, or both

Coarsely chop the onion, carrot, and celery. Slice the ‘shrooms. Skim the bottom of he pan with olive oil. Place the onions, carrots, and celery in this and cook over moderately fast heat until the onions are well softened. Regulate the heat and stir frequently, so that the vegetables don’t scorch. As the onions are getting pretty well softened, add the sliced mushrooms. Stir, continue to cook until the veggies are golden and well cooked. In this last stage, add a little wine, stirring well to combine. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Fire up the broiler. Preheat it well. Season the meat with salt and pepper.

Place the steak or lamb in the pan amid the cooked veggies. Run it under the broiler. When the top side is seared, flip the meat over and sear the other side. Cook to taste, preferably rare.

Serve the meat with the cooked-down mirepois spread over it as sauce.

Ambrosia!