Iowa grapes

Baby Bok Choy

Bowl o'Red

Texas chili is not an arcane art. I'm always amazed to hear of the elaborate secretive hijinx of competitive chili teams. Yes, it is a team sport in Texas. If you ever see it, Chile Pepper Magazine is an entertaining read even if you only read the ads. Good photography, too.

Your average Texan isn't looking for the ultimate cook-off chili. What a Texan wants is a bowl o' red. It's meaty, it's smooth, and it is completely, utterly, free of beans. It doesn't take 10 hours to make or a special cut of meat. If you use hamburger, the clattering, wan ghosts of chuck wagons past will not circle your bed in the night.

Texas Chili:
1 1/2 lbs. Hamburger
1 fat clove Garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ground Cumin
1 teaspoon Chili powder
1 teaspoon Chipotle powder
1/2 teaspoon Oregano
1 teaspoon Bacon grease ( no substitutes!)
1/3 can tomato paste
water & salt
cornmeal or masa to thicken

1. In a big skillet, brown the hamburger and leave it lumpy. Drain the grease if you want to.
2. In a pot, gently fry the garlic in the bacon grease till it's soft. Add about a cup of water to stop it frying if you need to. Then stir in the tomato paste till it's smooth.
3. Add all the meat and all the spices (not the thickener). Add water to cover, and stir well.
4. Simmer gently for about 20 min. and add the salt. How much salt? More if it will go over rice, Cajun style, and less if it will go over corn chips. If you use canned tomato sauce or diced tomatoes, you'll need a lot less than if you use paste, with is unsalted (and cheaper).

At this point, it's perfectly okay to eat. But it will taste better if you turn off the heat and let it rest a few hours.

About 10 min. before serving, mix up your thickener to avoid lumps and stir it in to simmer about 10 minutes. I use ordinary yellow cornmeal; if you have masa it tastes fine. I've seen a recipe suggest using a big spoonful of Jiffy brand cornbread mix, which makes sense if you're making it, but it's very sweet by Texas standards.

Serve it plain or over corn chips. If you're just dying for that Friday night football stadium taste, squirt processed cheese over it all. (I never touch the stuff.)

And no beans. Anathema sit!
*******
Austinites of a certain age will remember Hill's, a steakhouse owned by the Goodnight ranching family, serving their beef. What amazing chili they had! (And sourdough dinner rolls I never equalled at the height of my bread-god powers.) The Goodnight ranch tried a cross breeding experiment decades ago between cows and buffalo (American bison). The experiment failed, but if you substitute ground buffalo for some of the beef, the chili will taste absolutely fabulous. Hill's was a casualty of the recession of '86-'87, but reopened in 2001; I haven't been there.

Thai Chicken Coconut Soup: Ka Tom Gai

There are loads of recipes out there for this soup: it's cheap, it's easy, and a beginner cook can get restaurant results on the first try. And it doesn't have to be spicy hot if you don't want it to be--it tastes perfectly fine without any chile at all. It's a myth that all Thai food is hot.

After shoveling way too much sidewalk and driveway in -1F, I had this and then a second bowl.

A Soft Crust Surprise

Okay, this bread began as breakfast gone awry. But it turned out really well, and it achieved something difficult: a soft crust without adding any fat, egg, or other sneaky trick. It's not the right recipe if you're a complete beginner, but you don't need to be a gluten goddess, either.

There is one sneaky trick, with the salt, but I'll explain at the end.

The Gruel:
3/4 c. rolled oats (the 5 min. cook kind)
3 c. water

Boil the oats in the water till it's thickened, the oats are hardly distinct, and the volume somewhat reduced. When you think of Charles Dickens, you're there. Take it off the heat to cool to a yeast-friendly temperature.

The Poolish:
1/2 t. dry yeast (I like Red Star)
1 c. flour

Pour the warm gruel into your bread bowl. Scrape any papery film on the sides of the pot in, too; that's soluble fibre and will dissolve again easily. Add about half a teaspoon of dry yeast (NOT quick rise yeast, which is evil) and about a cup of flour. Mix together well, cover, and let it ferment all day and overnight.

In the morning, you will have an unlovely bowl of stinky, bubbly, swamp juice.

The Dough:
Flour
Salt

Add flour till it starts to come together well. Then add salt to the desired taste, and finish it to a soft, but not sticky, dough. (The sneaky salt trick is below.)

Yes, I ought to have quantities, but I hardly ever use them myself. The salt was about half a tablespoon, which is a bit more than I'd use for a French dough. A bland addition, like oatmeal, and sourness from a long poolish both need a bit more salt.

Oil your bread bowl, drop the dough in and then flip it to coat with oil. Cover and let double in bulk. In my winter kitchen (temp. mid-50s) that took about 3 hrs.--it's like having a fancy bread retarder for free several months of the year! The top picture is the doubled dough in an ordinary bread bowl.

Gently turn it out of the bowl and press out all the air bubbles. Divide it in half & shape each half into a boule; set on the baking pan. I use cornmeal on mine, but whatever you ordinarily use. Cover it, because it will dry easily.

Ideally, they would then double and be docked. But I didn't do that. After an hour, I docked them and put them in the 400F oven 'cause another couple of hours' rise was not in my schedule. I baked them for 40 minutes, which is about the minimum for that size. That's an electric oven, no steam.

The Surprise
The crust was soft when it came out of the oven. The crust was still soft after it cooled. The crust was still soft the next day! No oil, no egg, just a soft crust with pure grain taste.

The crumb was even throughout: no big bubbles saying,"Look at me! I'm so artisan!"

My kids think this is the perfect bread. It doesn't have any little oatmeal lumps in the crumb or crust, which happens if you make it with normal cooked oatmeal. It has a soft, dense crumb with the short second rise. The kids hate those big holes the jam falls through. And the crust is good for the weird little aliens who don't want a nice European crunchy crust. It's pretty much perfect with honey.

The Salt Trick
How to get the salt right when you're working without a recipe: know the taste of the dough. When I used to bake all the time, the bread I made most was a French poolish and we had tweaked the recipe till it was consistently just what we wanted. First step was to pour the measured salt into my palm, so I'd get an idea what a certain amount looked like in my hand. That way, I learned to get the right amount of salt for that recipe by eye. And I tasted the raw dough. That way I knew what the right amount of salt tasted like. Day after day, I measured by eye in my hand and tasted the dough.

Making bread at home, I'm usually working with approximately the same amount of dough, so I know roughly how much salt I need to begin with. But working without a recipe, like here, I always begin with a little less than I'll think I need. When it's well mixed but not yet kneaded, I pop a raisin-sized piece in my mouth. If it tastes right, I knead just a minute or two (kneading is vastly overrated if your flour's good quality). If the salt is lacking, I add a bit of salt as I start to knead and then check again.

Only you know what the right taste is for you. I prefer less salt than many recipes call for, but I'll try to describe it. When I put the bit of dough in my mouth, I should taste a little bit of salt immediately. After a few seconds, I should taste more salt as it dissolves. If I don't taste it till it's had time to dissolve, it's not enough. If it's so salty I notice it over the flour or it's sharp, that's too much salt and it needs more flour.

Once you've mastered the salt trick, you can experiment easily. If a dough has a sweetener, you might need a tiny bit more salt. If the dough has something more bland than wheat flour, like oatmeal or potato, it will need more salt. Fresh herbs and sun dried tomatoes need only a tiny bit extra. It'll give you a lot of confidence to play.

Thai Eggplant

So what's so special about Thai eggplant? It's very mild, the skin is tender, and the seeds are soft. Cut off the tops, quarter them, and you're ready to go. They are about the size of golf balls. And they look really cool.

Doughnut Muffins

Recipe from Jenna here, thanks to Ree at The Pioneer Woman. The kids love'em!

Asian grocery: white fungus & incense

Asian grocery: bamboo shoots

Asian grocery: peppers & eggs

Asian grocery: lemongrass

man bread

When I lived in California, there was a great big fair for three adjacent counties. Lots of agricultural competition! And the baking competitions were fierce.

I grew up urban and took some persuading to enter the Tri-County Fair. Aren't county fairs strictly for shitkickers? There was no resisting the Farmer's wife's relentless good cheer on this point, especially when I was already disappointing her by not reproducing. But the first time I read the rules, I was shocked to find the category "Baked By a Man" ! It could be crackers to tiramisu, so long as the baker had the Y chromosome. Hilarious. One of the Deep Springs students smoked'em with his tiramisu my 3rd year.

Anyway, the bread in the photos was made by my husband, start to finish. It's an olive oil bread from poolish; the dark flecks are flax seed meal. The round loaf was baked the same day it was mixed. The rectangular loaf was refrigerated for the second rise and baked, cold, in the morning. Note the tiny blisters freckling the crust on the rectangular loaf--that was done without steam.

More Chicken Under a Brick

Lemon Artichoke Heart Soup

Olive Oil Bread

Chicken Under a Brick

Chocolate Coconut pots de creme

I really wanted the chicken to be the focus of the meal, and the menu reflected that.

The soup is Greek avgolemnos with imported artichoke hearts. Early January isn't the time for fresh produce and the artichoke went well in the lemony soup. I put thyme in mine, to echo the chicken's marinade. If you put the artichoke in early and let it sit, the flavor infuses the soup without any labor by the cook.

Olive oil bread because the table looks naked without it. And my kids gobbled it down while I cooked the chicken and our guest regaled us with tales of his very successful hunting trip, complete with large caliber rifles, large caliber handguns, trucks, and barbecue. Oh, and he's a priest. One of the things I love about Iowa is that almost all the clergy are avid hunters.

The chicken was the star, and turned out really well, as I wrote yesterday. Tomato sauce would have been overbearing with it, so...

I served this with bowtie pasta in a mild picata sauce. Picata (piquant) sauce is a versatile clear pasta sauce made with lemon juice, chicken stock, and white wine. Sauteed garlic, capers, green olives, or other little flavor bombs can be added. The cook has a lot of freedom to set the tone, and I used garlic, nonpareil (very small) capers and omitted the wine. I think small pieces of green olives would be better. White wine would have clashed with the bacon, and leaving it out was fine. It's the right taste, but doesn't make for an interesting photograph. If it's new to you, grated cheese is not ever appropriate with picata sauce.

The Belgian dark chocolate coconut pudding was a huge success. It's obviously not Italian, but it's so good no one cares. My son plaintively suggested we buy larger cans of coconut.

I know diddley about wine and seldom drink it. But for what it's worth, we decided all this tangy food needed a table wine on the sweet side and not too heavy. We drank an '09 Alice White (Australian) red lexia. I've never even heard of red lexia before. But it was good, went well with the food, and wasn't expensive. Since I like Greek food and can't get Rhoditis here, we'll certainly get it again; not too many wines play well with lemon and bacon both.

And yes, I confess to a tiny bit of food styling.

Chicken Under a Brick

I'm always a little worried when trying a new recipe I haven't been served: "how do I know if I got it right?" Since I was fortunate to eat Tom's cooking for 3 years, I felt confident making his Chicken Under a Brick from the cookbook for a guest who regularly goes to Italy. But if you're unfamiliar with the dish, have no worries when you follow his instruction. Just do what he says, and you'll nail it.

The Recipe...
is fine. Really, just do what he says. I was very happy he includes a variation for skinless, boneless chicken thighs, because that was all we could get in the all-natural chicken.

I fiddled with the recipe in two ways. I marinaded it for about 5 hours, far longer than suggested, and it wasn't overwhelmingly garlicky. In my house, time flexibility is a plus! And I didn't wrap it in bacon strips, but fried it in bacon grease & fond. It didn't crackle as it would have with bacon, but it still had a flavorful, crusty exterior.

It's pretty subtle. The meat is moist but not greasy. The bacon flavor from the hot grease doesn't penetrate, but the marinade does, so it still tastes like chicken, rather than bland hunk o' white stuff holding up bacon. I'll post the rest of the menu next.


The Method...
is classic, and I well remember Tom's collection of bricks in an out of the way corner of the Boarding House. My kitchen, alas, has no out of the way corners, being the size of a lentil. And I wanted to make a lot because leftovers make splendid spinach salad.

So, I improvised with the biggest, heaviest thing in my kitchen, a cast iron griddle that's as wide as my nonstick griddle but twice as long, so there's plenty of space for me to grab it. Serendipitous, no? It worked like a charm.




BUT, please notice I have a flat stove top, so there's no place for the grease to puddle. Since the bottom griddle didn't catch splatters, and they could just drip off the larger top griddle, a thin layer of hot grease surrounded the operation. I carefully mopped this up a couple of times and it wasn't a big deal. But if your stove isn't flat, doing what I did would be very dangerous. Use a brick or something smaller than the bottom pan. Tradition's smart on this one. If you're brickless but have nesting cast iron frying pans I think that would work well, too.

If you have a flat top stove, it's great. Be sure to use oven mitts to handle the iron griddle. It doesn't warm much itself, but the splattering grease and steam underneath could burn you. I did this twice with no trouble at all. The taste is worth it.

coming soon

Company's coming for dinner, so I hope to have some big posts in the next couple of days. The big story: cooking Italian Chicken Under a Brick from Tom Hudgens' new cookbook. See the link on the right!

atsa ragu to you

A true ragu is a big hunk of meat seared and then simmered slowly in tomato sauce (usually on a rack, so it doesn't scorch on the bottom). When the meat reaches the stage of being tender but not yet falling apart, it's fished out, sliced, and served with pasta. The meat-infused sauce is then poured by each diner from a gravy boat. It takes a long time, and you have to hover over the pot a bit to make sure the meat doesn't cook past the point it can be sliced.

For special occasions, a ragu might be made with mixed meats. If you peek in the freezer of a Sicilian cook, there's often a bag of leftovers, that one extra pork chop or a marrow bone, hoarded away for just this purpose. I've never seen sea food mixed with meats or poultry in Italian cooking, but just about everything else can go into a ragu.

For my husband, it's not a special occasion ragu without some lamb. The bad news is that lamb is expensive. The good news is that the flavor really travels--other meats pick up the flavor readily. But there's a trick to this, and it works well if your life doesn't allow you to hover over the pot all day.

The trick is to control the fat. The traveling lamb flavor is in the fat, so you don't want to give it much competition. You'll need a frying pan, a simmering pot, and a crock pot.

The hunks of meat will go in the crock pot. If you actually read the instructions (does anyone but me?) they say to carefully trim all the fat off meat going into your slow cooker. It's important! The steam at the top of the slow cooker can become very hot and give oil floating on top a very unpleasant taste. When you trim the hunk of lamb, cut the fat and bone out but save them both. Discard the fat trimmed from other meats. I find it works well to have a layer of sliced raw onions on the bottom, then the meat, then sprinkle with dried herbs, and then lightly fried garlic on top. Lid on, and let it cook.

Meanwhile, mix up a plain tomato sauce in the simmering pot. I like to use tomato paste and add liquid to the desired consistency, because it's cheaper and gives me complete control over the saltiness. Because most meat and poultry has been brined before you buy it, and canned tomatoes are very salty (even the organic ones) a ragu is easily too salty. Too much salt will ruin your palate, make your Romano cheese seems bland (if you use it), and it's not good for you.

Then make plain meatballs and fry them in a non-stick frying pan. Any ground meat will do; the meatballs in the picture are ground beef mixed with an onion grated on a cheese grater and a little oregano. The whole point is for the meat to taste like meat, so don't fuss with eggs, bread crumbs, etc. Discard the grease from the pan. For once, you're not after the fond, which won't be very good because of the grated onions anyway, because they scorch very easily.

Put the meatballs, lamb bone and fat, and one bay leaf into the tomato sauce. Simmer gently a while, then let it rest. That's the picture of the sauce, with the bay leaf and a lamb bone poking out for the photo. The meatballs (no matter what kind) will pick up a lot of the lamb flavor.

When the meat in the slow cooker is almost as tender as you'd like it to be, scoop it out and add the meat (but not the pot liquid) to the tomato sauce. Simmer a while longer, and make your pasta. If all goes well, you'll have tender meat that still has distinctly different tastes, but meatballs and sauce that taste like lamb. Discard the bay leaf and lamb bone, slice the meat, and you're ready to arrange it on a platter.

If you've eaten with an Italian family at a special occasion, you understand completely why there's no photo of the final platter.

Notes:
In the slow cooker photo I didn't sear the meat first, as with smaller pieces it doesn't make much difference. Life is short.

Doesn't it need more spice? No. This is better with a light touch on the spices: oregano and basil are shown. Some folks would put rosemary in since the lamb dominates, but I don't like rosemary with beef at all, and if you use sausage it can clash badly.

Why not just put it all in a slow cooker? You can't control the fat, and hence the flavor that way. And tomato sauce is usually ruined in a slow cooker. Again, the steam between the liquid and the lid gets very hot and it will scorch the tomato sugars at the top, giving your sauce a bitter taste. Also the bones of any baby animal such as lamb are too soft for a slow cooker anyway: it's possible for a soft bone to begin dissolving in a crock pot and that's a catastrophe.

Sunspots

That's an Indian style of frying vegetables, common in southwestern India. The spice is brown mustard seed, readily available and inexpensive at an Indian grocer or online. Black mustard seed is also used but is harder to find and more expensive. Both are mild and nutty, entirely unlike cooking with European yellow mustard.

Brown mustard seeds get popped in a bit of hot oil. They sizzle a minute and then make a tick as they hop about 6 inches. You'll want a lid on the frying pan!

As soon as they stop popping, take off the lid and add a few shakes of turmeric powder, which will smoke a little. It's a strong smell, so you might want the exhaust fan on. Or not.

Then add any mild vegetable. Cauliflower or potatoes are popular in India, but we often make this with shredded cabbage. With the veggies add a little lemon juice and some water and cover to steam. Salt just before serving.

This is my favorite thing to do with leftover cooked potatoes and they cook in about 4 minutes. But it's also great with cabbage, nutty and subtle, cooked till it still has a little crispiness. The yellow cabbage is great with rice, and we sometimes pair it with a spicy hot tomato-sauced curry. In Indian meals, it's often the cool foil to incendiary dishes. I've seldom seen it in restaurants, perhaps because the turmeric will stain everything it touches.

The popped brown mustard is fragile enough it doesn't crunch, but won't turn to powder with stirring either. It's kinda magic.

Bambini Jesu (panini)

Bambini Jesu: how to

Babies made of bread are an Italian custom at Christmas: Bambino. They're usually pretty big and tapered, a fairly complicated shape to make (especially if you only do it once a year). The eyes would be raisins on a traditional one. The goal isn't to make the face look realistic, but to make fancy swaddling bands.

I hardly bake bread at all now, so it's a big deal to the kids. They really wanted to do it themselves this year. So we made little ones with a basic mock braid.

The only sneaky trick here is the dough, which is a chilled challah. This is challah made with oil rather than butter, so it's pretty stiff without being brittle. Note in the pictures that there's no stray flour on the counter: you want it with just enough flour that it doesn't stick to the counter. I set it in the fridge at the end of the first rise. A couple of hours later it was chilled throughout and ready to shape.

Once it's in flat pieces it warms quickly as you handle it and gets too sticky and stretchy for little kids, so don't dawdle. I made the cuts with a bench knife and showed them how to do the mock braid. The only tricky part is to lay the dough strips gently, without stretching them, and that gets really difficult if the dough warms up. Again, they're on an unfloured surface.

Then they rise on the pan and go into the oven at normal challah temperature. The kids were in bed when the bambini came out of the oven, but they had them for breakfast Christmas morning. These two were each a quarter of a recipe of challah; the other half got braided and baked after the bambini for meatball sandwiches. Challah makes great French toast, too.

Inexplicable

Today I finished reading Wilder's novel, The Long Winter. The thing that got me the most? When they start running short of supplies, Ma Ingalls starts a sourdough, which lives underneath the stove. But as soon as the train comes in the spring, she immediately goes back to baking with yeast cakes.

?????????

There are good reasons to use commercial yeast today rather than sourdough for lots of folks. But none of those reasons apply to her. I noticed in Little House on the Prairie that she actually preferred freshly-butchered longhorn beef to duck and venison (!). There is just no accounting for taste. I charitably remind myself that the poor woman seems to have never even seen garlic.

Quite unaware of what I was reading, my husband made biscuits for dinner.