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Recipes

1950s Yankee Lasagna: 21st-Century Update

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So there I am in the Sprouts on Conduit of Blight Blvd, where I stopped off early this morning to pick up a few items I’d forgotten yesterday whilst shopping at AJs, the world’s most expensive high-falutin’ grocery store. While I was wandering around in there, what should I find to my delight but a display of perfect, radiant, photo-ready eggplants.

Hot dang! Eggplant lasagna, said I to my Self. The stuff will supply several meals, and these eggplants are too gorgeous to pass by. Not feeling inclined to buy two (a lifetime supply for one person), I picked up a zucchini to supplement it.

And hence to the kitchen, to cook up an impromptu dish of fake lasagna, something that tastes much like the real thing but is actually…you know…good for you.

We’re starting with my mother’s plain old Yankee spaghetti sauce: probably came from a recipe in a newspaper or a magazine.

My mother was considered a good cook in her day…friends loved to be invited to our house for breakfast or dinner. Good housewives mined Lady’s Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, and the women’s section of the daily paper for recipes. She had quite a collection. Truth to tell, though, she wasn’t crazy about cooking as a craft or as some kind of art. To her mind, cooking was drudgery, much like scrubbing the floors and hauling the laundry out to the clothesline. Soon as we got back to the United States and she discovered “convenience” foods (which didn’t exist in Aramco’s company commissary), we had TV dinners two or three nights a week.

As a young adult, I learned to cook, as did most of my friends, from Julia Child.  But still…there are some things you don’t forget. This is decidedly not a Julia Child sauce!

In any event, it would never have entered my mother’s mind to make lasagna with eggplant.

Alas, I did forget to buy ricotta at the Sprouts, and there was no way I was about to traipse back out in the traffic to get it. Or cottage cheese, which was my mother’s answer to ricotta (which no one ever heard of in 1955). Decided to substitute Greek yogurt, which I did indeed have in the fridge: another something my mother never heard of. Greek yogurt, that is; not the fridge.

Nor had she ever heard of fines herbes or herbes de Provence. The main herbs women of her time had were thyme, rosemary, marjoram, sage, oregano, and bay leaves. And dried parsley. I never saw fresh parsley until I was in graduate school. “Garlic” would have meant garlic powder or garlic salt.

She would not have used actual tomatoes. She’d have used Hunt’s tomato sauce plus about half a can of Hunt’s tomato paste. The only canned tomatoes you could get in those days also came from Hunt’s; they were lumpy soggy things, packed in red water. She would not have added wine, because she didn’t have wine.

Few Americans had wine in those days.

As for the cheese: all we had was Kraft. There was no other cheese available in middle-class American grocery stores. For lasagne, my mother used several packages of sliced Kraft fake Swiss cheese. And Parmesan? What you got — and ALL you could get — was that powdery stuff that comes in cylindrical boxes coated in green tinfoil. I dunno what it was. It surely wasn’t cheese. It was just salty stuff. But what you had was what you got.

At the Sprouts, I found a kind of Kraftish knock-off. Not the real fake thing, but better than nothing. What passes for Parmesan casa mia these days is the stuff Costco is peddling in big plastic bags now that they’ve gotten rid of the real grated Parmesan they used to sell in big plastic jars. It’s not very good: if you’re going to try this recipe, buy a couple plastic containers of grated Parmesan from the grocery store’s deli case.

So here’s a way (among many) to do this:

Prepare the eggplant for cooking:

Wash it. Slice it lengthwise into pieces about 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick, or so. Lay these slices on a grate or oven rack laid over the kitchen sink. Sprinkle salt on one side of each piece of eggplant. Then turn the slices over and salt the other side. Go on about your business for a half-hour or more. Then rinse off the bitter liquids that have leached out of the eggplant and dry the slices well on paper towels or a clean kitchen towel.

Sauté the eggplant in olive oil — it takes a lot, because eggplant loves oil and soaks it up with gay abandon. Just brown the slices of eggplant lightly on either side; then remove from the pan and set aside.

Make the sauce:

You need…

  • hamburger
  • an onion, chopped
  • one or two cloves of garlic, chopped or minced
  • a box of Pomí tomatoes (best of all possible choices) or several 8-ounce cans of Hunt’s tomato sauce plus about 1/2 small can of Hunt’s tomato paste, mixed together
  • red wine, if you have it
  • herbs to your taste (I used some dried fines herbes and also threw in some marjoram and some basil from the garden
  • olive oil

Pour enough olive oil into a frying pan to coat the bottom. Sauté the onion and garlic until the onion is transparent and maybe just starting to brown. Lift these out and place them on a plate for a few minutes.

Add the hamburger to the pan. Cook this, stirring occasionally, until done through.

Now stir the onion and garlic back into the pan, combining well with the meat. Add a box of Pomí strained tomatoes or a couple cans of American-style tomato sauce (or more: till you have enough sauce). Add the tomato paste, if you’re using canned tomato sauce. Splash in a bit of red wine. Stir and let simmer slowly while you proceed with the other activities.

You can add a little sausage to the sauce, browned with the burger. Get country style, the kind that comes crumbled up like hamburger. My mother did not, probably because whatever newspaper recipe she used didn’t include it, or maybe because she wasn’t interested in slicing the skin off a bunch of sausages and crumbling them up as they fried in a pan. That much hassle was decidedly not her style.

To compile the fake lasagne, you need…

  • the sautéed eggplant (or eggplant & zucchini, as in my case)
  • the tomato sauce you’ve prepared
  • a container of ricotta, cottage cheese, or (with any luck this will work) Greek-style yogurt
  • sliced ersatz Swiss cheese, the kind that comes in plastic bags in the low-rent section of the grocer’s deli department
  • grated Parmesan cheese (use a decent Parmesan, not the powder that comes out of a cylindrical box)
  • olive oil

Get a rectangular baking dish. If you have a functioning oven (I do not: am using the grill as an oven), preheat it to about 375 or 400 degrees. Oil the dish generously with olive oil.

  • Cover the bottom of the pan with a layer of the eggplant.
  • Then cover that with about half the cooked tomato sauce.
  • Layer the ricotta (or whatever) over the sauce.
  • Layer the rest of the eggplant over the ricotta.
  • Layer the Swissoid cheese over this.
  • Cover the Swiss cheese layer with the rest of the tomato sauce.
  • Sprinkle a whole lot of Parmesan over the top. Really coat it with grated cheese.

Bake at around 350º or 400º for 45 minutes or an hour, until the concoction is hot through and the cheese is seriously melted.

Et voilà! Enough eggplant lasagne à la mode de Yankee to last you for several weeks.

What if you want real fake lasagna? Easy enough. Use the recipe above, but substitute lasagna pasta for the eggplant. Simply boil the pasta until it’s al dente, rinse it in a colander under cold running water, and layer it with the sauce and cheeses. If you want nutrition (why???), layer in some spinach, too.

Sautéed Shrimp in Bed with Curried Spinach

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Long as we’re talking about spinach…

The other day I made the most amazingly delicious dinner: sautéed garlic shrimp over a bed of curried spinach. Ridiculously easy to make, it takes advantage of the cost-saving scheme to freeze fresh spinach, or it can be used on ordinary grocery-store frozen or fresh greens. You could no doubt use kale, chard, or other kinds of greens in this recipe. Try it out:

You need:

  • Enough spinach to serve your diners
  • Enough shrimp, peeled, to serve the same
  • Olive oil
  • Butter (plenty of it)
  • Fresh garlic (one or two cloves, to taste)
  • Herbs to your taste (I used tarragon, but about anything you like is nice)
  • A palmful of pine nuts, if you have them on hand
  • Curry powder*
  • Lemon juice
  • 2 frying pans

Defrost the shrimp and spinach, as necessary. Finely chop the garlic.

Melt the butter in one frying pan. Pour enough olive oil into the other frying pan to coat the bottom surface.

Place the spinach in the frying pan with the butter and sprinkle a small amount of curry over it (or a large amount: to taste!). Stir to incorporate the butter richly with the spinach, and allow this to cook over medium-low heat while you fix the shrimp.

Heat the olive oil over a medium to medium-high burner. Add the garlic and, if you have them, some pine nuts. Cook briefly and then add the shrimp. Sprinkle some tarragon or other herb over it, and cook until the shrimp turn pink and are cooked through. (Don’t overcook.) Squeeze the juice of a fresh lemon over the cooked shrimp.

Distribute the spinach on the dinner plates. Then place the shrimp atop the spinach, distributing them evenly among the diners. Pour the juice left in the shrimp frying pan over the servings.

With a salad or some crusty French bread, this makes a very fine dinner.

*Curry Powder

Commercial curry powders are often very high in salt. If you’re trying to keep your sodium intake under control, you can get a salt-free curry powder from Penzy’s in two versions: sweet and hot. The hot is a little much for my taste, and since I grew up in the Middle East, that is tellin’ you something. The sweet is very good and can be heated up to the extent you like simply by adding as much or as little ground red pepper as desired.

Alternatively, you can make your own, creating a highly excellent spice combo:

  • 3 tsp turmeric
  • 3 tsp coriander seeds or 3 or 4 tsp ground coriander
  • 1/2 tsp whole cardamom seeds, hulled (i.e., get the ones that are not inside the papery pods, which are a nuisance)
  • 2 to 4 tsp cumin seeds
  • 1/2 tsp ground fenugreek
  • about 1/4 tsp whole cloves
  • 1/2 stick cinnamon
  • 1 tsp dry, ground ginger
  • 1/3 tsp yellow or black mustard seeds
  • 1/2 tsp whole white peppercorns (black would probably do)
  • 1/2 tsp crushed red pepper flakes

Measure the ingredients into a blender jar. When everything is loaded into the blender, turn the machine to high and pulverize the bedoodles out of the stuff. It should be reduced to a fine, fragrant powder, with no chips of seeds left. An old coffee grinder that you will not use again to grind coffee beans does the job handsomely.

I’ve bought many of these spices at Penzey’s, an upscale gourmet store, because I didn’t want to drive all over the city. However, if you have some time on your hands, many of the ingredients can be found much more cheaply at Asian or Mexican ethnic markets. Many, too, are packaged by American companies and retailed at ordinary supermarkets and through Amazon. So, by way of stocking up frugally, take a few days and seek out these goodies at decent prices. Try to get whole seeds, which make a much more fragrant, vibrantly flavored product.

Cutting the Lifetime Supply Down to Size

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It’s sitting there on the kitchen counter waiting for me to get up and do something with it: a vast, nay a freaking bushel-sized bag of fresh spinach from Costco. Get up, it calls. Get up, get up, get up!

Okay, I will…whenever I finish this post.

Buying a lifetime supply of fresh, crisp spinach would seem counterproductive for an elderly broad who lives with two beings that do not eat leafy greens. To speak of, that is.

But in fact, it’s a very neat thing to do for yourself.

I dearly love spinach, but the grocery stores where I shop — including Costco — have pretty much ceased selling frozen spinach. Canned spinach…well, dunno what it is, but it ain’t spinach. So this leaves buying and cooking fresh spinach, which is a bit of a PITA when you’re tossing a fast dinner for one on the table.

But if you don’t mind getting the PITA over in one swell foop…it turns out that fresh spinach cheerfully lends itself to freezing.

The trick is to blanche it first. “To blanche” means to drop a veggie or fruit into boiling water very briefly and then immediately drop it into cold water. Or, in this case, pour it into a colander and cool it off under running water from the kitchen sink’s cold tap.

This procedure is absurdly easy.

Get yourself a big pot — in the case of the CC Lifetime Supply, the largest in the house. Fill it about 2/3 or 3/4 full with plain water, place it on the stove, and bring the water to a boil. Place a colander in the sink.

When the water is seething at a good clip, simply drop the spinach (or any other veggie you please) into the water. In a few seconds, a green veggie will turn brighter or deeper green (spinach, chard, kale, and the like will also wilt). Forthwith, pour the veggies and water into the colander, allowing the hot water to pour down the drain. Immediately turn on the cold water and chill the hot veggies down to room temperature or cooler.

If you have another large pot, fill that with ice and water, so is to give yourself a big potful of ice water. Flip the veggies out of the colander into the ice water — this will preserve the bright green color better than cooling with tap water. Actually, if the colander will fit into the pot, just set it directly into the ice water, and then you won’t have to fool with gathering up the blanched leaves.

Now you need to get enough spinach to feed an army into the freezer.

Spread a few layers of paper towels on the kitchen counter. Spread the spinach on the towels in a single layer, and then top with some more towels. Pat these around to absorb water, then roll up the spinach in the layered towels, hold the package over the sink, and wring it, as you would wring out a wet dishrag.

Unroll and distribute the blanched spinach in serving sizes. Place these in Ziploc baggies or refrigerator containers and stick ’em into the freezer.

Now, to serve all you have to do is defrost some of it (I place the baggie or plastic container in some warm tap water; alternatively you could zap it on a microwave’s “defrost” setting), melt some butter in a pan, and warm the spinach in the butter. Add flavorings to taste: nutmeg is good. Tarragon is good. Curry is awe-inspiring.

Mmmm! Baked spinach in cheese!

Yogurtified Fried Green Tomatoes

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How dearly do I love fried green tomatoes? Let me count the ways…

The grocery store on the way home from this morning’s bidness meeting occasionally carries green tomatoes. Today they had some, so…GRAB!

What I failed to grab was some eggs with which to bread the slices. One can just sauté green tomato slices in butter and/or olive oil. But…what a sacrilege. Lightning could slice right through the kitchen ceiling and strike you dead as you commit this crime before the Stove God.

Contemplating this frightful state of affairs, I recalled the pint of yogurt residing on a shelf in the refrigerator door. And I recalled how good fried chicken can be when breaded with yogurt and flour, cracker crumbs, or both…

The plan:

Place about a third of a cup (give or take: three soup-spoonsful) of plain yogurt in a small, wide bowl. Add a splash of water (you’d like it to have the consistency of very thick cream) and mix together well, so as to make a smooth dip.

On a plate, toss several handsful of white flour (okay, probably whole wheat would work, for the health-food aficionados). If desired and youhappen to remember, add a small amount of cornmeal (or a large amount, depending on your mood and your regional preference). Season to taste, in the time-honored tradition of Our Mothers, with salt & pepper. Or not, if you’re trying to avoid salt.

Melt a generous dollop of butter in a pan while fiddling with the rest of this. Turn off the heat if the butter melts before you finish diddling.

Slice the tomatoes into thick slices. Mine were average-sized tomatoes; I sliced each into three pieces. First thinly slice off the top and the bottom, so there’s un-skinned tomato on both sides of each slice.

Turn the heat back on.to medium or the low side of medium-high,. under the pan of butter. If desired, add a splash of olive oil (so healthful!). (But not necessary.) Dip each slice (both sides) first into the yogurt, and then into the flour/crackers/cornmeal/whatever. Set the coated slice into the heating pan. I always put the side with the most cooking area down first, on some theory that must have made sense at the time I dreamed it up, but today…who knows?

Allow the slices to cook over medium to medium-high heat until the first side is richly browned. Gently turn the slices over. Turn the heat down to low, and allow the tomatoes to cook until they are cooked through (definition: “soft and squishy on the inside”).

Serve these as an appetizer, a snack or a side dish for meat, fish, or whatever pleases you. Or as a meal. WhatEVER.

This, folks, is soul food for WT. But your ethnic persuasion matters not. Cooking a tomato through changes its flavor, and the result is ambrosial.

LOL! Run that word past Donald Trump! 😀

Scallop Delight

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I love scallops, having learned how to cook them properly from that august avatar of Bumhood, SDXB. And every now and again, Costco sells packages of wild scallops — especially at the stores in fancier parts of town. So the other day when I was over at the Paradise Valley store, I grabbed a packet of the things.

They freeze reasonably well (in fact, the scallops Costco sells on the fresh-fish counter are “previously frozen”), so buying a lifetime supply is a rational thing to do. Divvying it up into seven scallops per serving (which IMHO is probably excessive) gave me three meals’ worth.

Sauteed scallops are exceptionally delicious when served over carbs: pasta (!!) or rice (!). But I’m going to fat again, so trying to stay away from comfort foods full of flour, rice, and potatoes. So decided to serve these things only with a side of fresh veggies. Ideally, I would’ve coveted a side of roast asparagus. But lacking asparagi and feeling no compulsion to drive out into the homicidal rush-hour traffic, park, dodge panhandlers, stand in line to pay, dodge the bums again, and drive back home, I decided instead to use some of the chard that grows in the backyard. Also residing in the backyard: a crop of fresh, juicy, tree-ripened limes. The result was very pleasing.

So: try this…

For the scallops

Enough scallops for the number of diners (four to six large ones apiece)
Chopped garlic (one clove or more, to taste)
Sprinkle of ground cumin (optional)
Butter
Fresh lime or lemon
White wine (optional)

For the greens

A couple fistfuls of fresh spinach, chard, kale, or whatever lights your fire
Sprinkle of nutmeg
Olive oil
Dash of balsamic vinegar (probably optional)

You’ll want to set up everything for both dishes before starting to cook, because the cooking goes very fast. So first, dry the scallops on some paper towels and sprinkle lightly (if desired) with cumin. Place a chunk of butter in a frying pan. Slice the lime or lemon open, and of course pour yourself a glass of the white wine.

I added some beet and lettuce sprouts culled from an over-enthusiastic new garden crop… Mix & match as desired.

Also, roughly chop the greens. In another frying pan, pour in enough olive oil to lightly cover the bottom of the pan.

Because the greens will take just slightly longer than the scallops, you’ll want to start with them but have the pan for the scallops ready to go.

So, heat the pan with the olive oil over a medium to medium-high fire. Toss in the cut-up greens.

Immediately turn the heat on under the scallop pan so as to melt the butter. Stir the greens while waiting for the butter to melt; as soon as that happens, toss in the chopped garlic.

Stir the garlic around for a few seconds and then add the scallops. Gently cook the scallops over medium- to just barely medium-high heat until they’re cooked through, which will not take very long. Do not overcook. They should just begin to brown, but probably because the butter is browning more than because the shellfish is browning.

At this point, squeeze a generous amount of lime or lemon over the scallops. If you don’t have any citrus, then just splash in some of that white wine you’re drinking. You probably could add the wine with lemon or lime, but I personally prefer one or the other.

Quickly remove the shellfish and the veggies to a plate. Serve with…yeah…the wine.

How can you lose?

Talk about Indian Summer…

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Seriously! It’s 100 degrees on October 17 here.

Actually, it’s kind of a nice day…a dry heat, y’know… 😀 And a mere 100 degrees is not hot enough to overcome one’s second-spring planting instincts:

Sweet little posies, eh? Picked those up this morning at the nursery, while running around in that part of town. Do LOVE that pot! The bulbs I put in there last winter pretty much fried over the summer. So I picked up a dwarf foxglove, a geranium, and a salvia, which kind of pick up the colors in the pot.

Salvia grows really well out in front over the winter (assuming we get a winter this year). So I may go back and pick up a few more to stick in the flowerbed under the olive tree, which remains sadly neglected.

One thing at a time.

Few days ago I stuck some seeds in a few other pots, also out in front:

They’ve already sprouted! Well, actually, only the two pots on the right have sprouted seeds: lettuce and beets. In the center: a baby rosemary plant; on the right, a thyme plant and a volunteer tomato.

I came unstuck in time today, thinking it was Wednesday and not Tuesday. As I’m thrashing around thinking I’ve gotta send out a weekly meeting notice and go buy enough gas to get to the Pima Reservation through the Thursday morning rush-hour traffic and dayum! I didn’t wash the car this morning so won’t be able to see into the rising, GLARING sun tomorrow morning and how could it possibly be time for choir practice AGAIN, it crossed my feeble little mind:

…well…no…wait…it can’t be time for choir practice again.

And… Well. No. It isn’t time for choir practice again. Mirabilis! It’s actually Tuesday!

This left a great deal of time to get stuff done:

  • Strip the bed and
  • Wash the sheets and
  • Wash the blanket and
  • Wash the dog covering and
  • Bang the dog hair out of all the above, in the dryer
  • Wash the bathroom rugs and the doggie floor rags
  • Bang the dog hair of the rugs and rags, in the dryer
  • Drive to the nursery to buy some new posies
  • Dart into Safeway and let them know a telephone scammer is spoofing their pharmacy’s phone number
  • Fly to the pool store and buy 8 pounds of shock treatment
  • Clean the pool pots
  • Thin out the lettuce & beet seedlings
  • Plant the new posies
  • And even write a little on the latest chapteroid of the current noveloid!

Think of that. And it’s not yet 1 p.m.

The other day I made a nice impromptu ratatouille, which served handsomely as leftovers-for-breakfast this morning. Ratatouille, a dish from the south of France, sounds very fancy to the American ear in the same way that anything spoken or written in French sounds fancy (mais non?). But in fact it’s good peasant food, on the order of pot roast or Yankee stew: simple, cheap, and deliciously satisfying.

All you need is a nice little eggplant, a summer squash (any of the thin-skinned variety like zucchini or crookneck), a little onion, a bell pepper, a bit of garlic, and…whatever else you have laying around. Celery is nice to add. Herbs of various callings — I dumped the rest of the herbes de Provence into the stuff, maybe all of two or three teaspoons. Thyme is always good. Whatever. Got some carrots? Good. Mushrooms? Fine. WhatEVER. And you’ll need some tomatoes — either a bunch of chopped up fresh tomatoes or a nice can of your favorite brand of chopped tomatoes.

Coarsely chop the onions and garlic and celery if you have it. Pour a little olive oil in a large skillet. Slowly cook the aromatic veggies until they’re transparent and beginning to brown. This should take about the length of time required to consume a small glass of wine slowly whilst reading the news. Get up a couple of times and stir.

Before sitting down with the wine, though, also coarsely chop the other veggies and set aside. You might want to sprinkle some salt on the chopped eggplant, as this is the traditional way: leaches out extra liquid, which if the eggplant is mature can add some bitterness to the flavor. If you decide to do this, pat the eggplant pieces dry on some layers of paper toweling before proceeding with the post-wine step.

Remove the aromatic veggies from the pan — just spoon them out onto a plate next to the stove.

Add a little more olive oil.

Apply the rest of the vegetables to the olive oil in the pan. Pour another glass of wine and, while beginning to consume this, allow the vegetables to cook a bit, stirring occasionally, until they’re starting to brown a little.

Next, stir the onions, celery, and garlic back into the sauteed vegetables. Carry the wine glass over to the stove. Add the canned or boxed tomatoes. Stir well. Pour part of the wine into this mixture (red is better, IMHO, but either is just fine) and mix together well.

Cover the pan. Turn the heat to medium-low. And just let it simmer for 45 minutes or so until all the lovely flavors are combined.

This is good all by itself, or served over pasta, or as a side for grilled steak, chicken, or fish, or whatever you please.

There’s a full-blown fancy recipe for this in the cookbook. And it’s never too late to buy the cookbook! Want a hard copy? Lemme know in a comment and we can conduct business by email.