I want fries with that.

I have been hearing the praises of the "Care and Share" shop for quite some time. My parents love the place, and other friends visit often, too. I've been wanting to go there for quite some time. Today, my parents showed us where it is, and it lives up to its billing. What a fantastic place! I bought a Calphalon nonstick skillet, 13 inches, for $20. Brand new! I also got a plastic bag of rick rack, a hat, some pajama pants, two slips, and a small, 1 1/2 quart deep fryer.

French Fries for dinner! I have a humongous bag of beautiful potatoes from Costco, and two of them, fried up, would make a dinner for two, with a salad, I thought.

The last time I made french fries at home, I was 21 years old and in college. A bunch of us had come home late on a Saturday night (I guess it was really Sunday morning, to be technical), and I remember that I used my electric skillet, on a whim, to make fries. There were at least 10 of us in that kitchen, and I think we ate 10 pounds of potatoes. We kept frying and eating and frying and eating. I think we just cut the potatoes, and put them in hot oil. Did not think too much about it at the time. But then again, I don't think we were a discerning bunch.

So, tonight I consulted Mark Bittman's book on how to cook things, to find out how I should make french fries. Mark and Julia Child (and probably everyone who knows anything about cooking) say that you should peel the potato, then cut the fries, and soak them in cold water. During this time, the oil is heating up in the fryer. Both Mark and Julia say to drain the water from the potato, then fry the potatoes in 325 degree oil (or so), for about 10 minutes. They will be limp at that point, and still not brown. Take them out, drain the fries, let them rest, then put them in at a higher temp - 375 degrees, for a few more minutes, until they're brown.

So, I cut the potatoes, and made the sticks shorter, so they'd fit easily into my little fry basket. I soaked the potatoes in ice water, to get the starch off the surface. I put peanut oil into my fryer. I chose peanut oil because I know it tolerates high temperatures without breaking down, and I plan to re-use the oil after I'm done with it. I will filter it when it's cool, then store it.

One of my jobs during school was in a restaurant where they served a lot of fries. Every night, the fryer got drained, and the oil was filtered, then every week (I think Sunday night) the oil was thrown out and replaced. So that's how I know the 'basics' about deep-frying and oil, even though I have not deep fryed at home since I was 21.

After draining the water off, I lowered the fries into the hot oil using my basket. I ended up just frying the fries in one step, for about 13 minutes at 350 degrees. They turned out yummy, so I'm not complaining...but they were a bit soggy after a few minutes out of the oil. So next time I think I'll try it the Mark and Julia way and do them at a lower temp for a while, then let them rest, then finish them up in high heat.

For kicks, I cut a few potato chips and fried them up too. Not bad! A little thick, but next time I'll cut them thinner to get that perfect crispiness.

Peesa Pizza

I made personal sized pizzas for dinner. Nick complains that anchovies put on only 1/2 of the pizza have an irritating tendency to 'migrate' their umami goodness to the entire pie - his half. So, I made two mini-pies. Mine with anchovies. His without.

I am a prolific bread baker, and am a sucker for bread recipe books. My most recent acquisition is "Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes Per Day". The basic premiseof this book is that one takes a wet yeast dough, consisting of flour, yeast, salt, and a relatively high percentage of water, mixes it all together, lets it rise, then stores in the refrigerator, where it gets even more flavorful over time. You make a large quantity of dough, all at once, taking out only the amount wanted, then baking it then and there, for a lickety-split loaf at din-din. These people are geniuses! Seriously. I am blown away by how easy this method is...for someone like me, during the week, to bake bread on a work day. You don't need to knead the bread, because somehow, some way, the gluten gets lined up and springy with only the help of the extra saturation of the water-heavy dough mix.

So, I used some of this stored dough, in my frig, to make two pizzas. I weighed the dough so that each pie used 250 grams of dough, and that way I knew that the pizzas would cook evenly, and that one of us would not get more than the other to eat. (Shades of when I was a little kid, and my mom made sure that my sister and I got our things given to us 'even steven'.)

I heated up my oven to 450 degrees F, with the Pizza Stone in there, then rolled out my little pizzas on my peel, which had been covered with cornmeal. On each pie went some red sauce, then mozzarella, then a bunch of chopped yellow and green sweet peppers. On one pie (mine), went 4 anchovy filets. Then I sprinkled home-grown dried basil on top. Closed the oven door, went to take a shower, came back...and - pizza for dinner.

This dough made a nicely chewy pizza dough, and was crisp on bottom, thanks to my use of the Pizza Stone. My Pizza Stone is nice and black, from years of use, and I leave it in the oven all the time.

So, to summarize, my dear and kind reader, Nick and I enjoyed a tasty, gourmet style (if I do say so myself) pizza dinner tonight. We had the pizza with a nice field greens salad, and our wine was some 2009 Beaujolais Nouveau that Nick got from one of his clients/vendors. Its fruitly sprightliness went well with the mood of our pizza dinner tonight. And Beaujolais Nouveau HAS to be drunk quickly, does it not? So that's why we opened it tonight and did not save it for another occasion.

Snowstorm Soup

It's snowing buckets, and what better to make than a big pot of soup!

Potato and Sausage Soup
Barbara's Own Recipe

Ingredients
2 Tablespoons Bacon Fat (or Olive Oil if you're feeling virtuous)
1 teaspoon salt
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
1 italian sausage, chopped
4 potatoes, peeled and chopped into 1 inch square pieces (approx)
1 1/2 quarts (approx) chicken broth
1 tablespoon thyme
1 teaspoon green pepper, ground
2 tablespoons flour (optional, for end)

Process
Saute the onion and garlic in the bacon fat, along with the salt, on medium heat. After about 5 minutes, add the sausage and thyme. Saute until sausage is done. When done, remove all from pot, and put aside.

Deglaze pan with chicken broth. Add all the chicken broth and the potatoes. Cook about 25 minutes on high heat, until potatoes are done. Add pepper.

Take about 3/4 the potato mixture (in batches) and put in blender. (Careful...it's hot!). Blend and put back into pot. Put about 1/2 the sausage and onion/garlic mixture in blender, too. Blend that and return to pot. If mixture still looks thin, take about 1/4 cup liquid, put into blender with 2 tablespoons flour and blend hard. Return all to soup pot, and heat to boil, but do not boil.

Call husband for din-din, ladle into dishes, and enjoy. Serves 4 hungry mungries or 6 normal people.

Pears ... and Pie

My parents gave me a 1/2 bushel of pears, because it's fruit harvest season, here on the east coast! You might remember that I also got a slew of apples. I've made apple crisp, apple pie, apple sauce, stewed apples, apple muffins...later, if I remember, I'll share the list.

But this is not about apples. It's about pears.

Last night, I made a pear and apple pie. For the first time in my life, I discovered the joy of making a pie crust using a food processor. The food processor that Nick and I have is a "Magimix", which we bought in 1986, while living in Germany. The Magimix is a ProtoCuisinart. Ours is a 220 volter, made for Europe, and it's fully equipped with a recipe book "en Francais, s'il vous plait"! And I still use this Magimix, over 20 years later.

I used it to make the crust.

2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 stick butter
2 tablespoons crisco

put all this in the food processor, with the metal blade, and pulse about 6 times.

Then, add about 1/2 cup water, iced. Pulse again, a few times, and there is a beautiful, hands-free pie crust dough! This recipe is adapted from Julia Child.

I put it in the refrigerator for 1/2 hour before rolling it out.

This pie...only took half the above recipe, as I put a crumb crust on top, decorated, of course with an apple cutout, drawn freehand. The remainder is in the refrigerator, for later use. Pie crust, if wrapped well, will keep for weeks at a time. I learned this from the Pillsbury people, who sell 'ready made' pie crust in the grocery store. I don't buy that very often...and after discovering the joys of food processor dough, I won't in the future, at all!

After baked, this dough was light, crispy, and perfect for a fruit pie.

So, for inquiring minds, here's what I did for the filling:

6 cups more or less of mixed pears and apples, cored, peeled, and sliced
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons flour
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 cup flour

Mix the above all together, and put in the rolled out pie crust.

Top with crumb topping:

1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup oats
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon
mix in 2 tablespoons butter until crumbly

Bake at 350 degrees F. until done. This is when the crust looks crisp, the pie is bubbling, and your nose...well...it just "knows"...that the baking is done.

The pie you see is ready for transport to a friend's house for dinner! We served it with homemade ice cream.

Bird Food

Really! Food for birds.

I had about 3/4 cup of bacon fat, collected over the past month or two. Nick and I don't eat bacon that much, and I mostly use it as a flavoring. But I save the grease, and sometimes use it in cooking. Bacon grease makes a fantastic medium in which to fry potatoes.

But I try not to eat animal fat too often, so inspired by the bacon fat in my refrigerator, and by the knowledge that winter is coming, I decided to use the fat to make some suet for birdfeeding. As I write this, the finished product is cooling, and not yet served to the birds. I have high hopes that this offering to the birds will be well received by them, thus you're hearing about it now. In the unlikely event the birds to not like my offering, I'll comment to this post later.

Nick is faithful in feeding the birds. Every morning in late autumn through early spring, right after making coffee, Nick goes outside to stock the feeders. He does this no matter what the weather. In the middle of a snowstorm, he clears off the feeders, and creates a clean space on the deck, putting birdseed down. This is typical of Nick - he loves the birds - and is one of the many things I love about my dear husband. We feed the birds every day in winter with a mixture of suet (especially for the insect eater types), sunflower seeds, and millet mixture. In summer, we taper off, feeding them just a small portion of seeds only - no suet. We understand from the people who are paid to know these things, ( and intuitively this makes sense) that birds need to learn how to forage for themselves, and the way to do that is to limit 'free' food in the seasons during which their natural food (insects, grubs, seeds, or whatever each species likes to eat) is most available. Lots of birds choose our yard in which to raise their families, so it is very important to us that the young ones learn that the feeder is not the only place to find food!

We're lucky in that we live on a 2 acre lot, and the houses are pretty far apart here. Our yard is neat, but not manicured. We don't fertilize our grass. We don't use pesticides. Our lawn looks pretty good. Happily, we do not live in one of those hypergroomed "mcMansion" type neighborhoods, in which everyone "has" to have a monoculture green grass lawn or risk social ostracization. Our neighborhood has a variety of people living in it - from 'first original owners' to young families. Our home was built in 1948.

Our lawn is a mixture of what grows there naturally and survives not getting watered, and getting its head chopped off by the lawnmower every few weeks. So really, we live on kind of a bird sanctuary, since much of our lot is filed with forest 'edge' type growth. Bushes, evergreens, and a mixture of small and tall deciduous trees, with some open patches of grass and low growing plants. We get around 35 inches of rain here annually, so the growth is lush. Birds love it here. We have counted over 65 species since we've lived here.

So let's get to the good stuff, shall we? A quick internet search yielded a recipe for peanut butter suet. I used this as my base, but departed quite radically. Here's what I did.


Melt: 1 pound of chunky peanut butter, along with
3/4 cup of bacon fat and
1/2 cup of crisco.


I figured the crisco, as a hydrogenated vegetable fat, along with the peanut butter, which are both solid at room temperature, would work to hold the mass together.

Next, I took the pot off the stove. Then I stirred in:
1 cup raisins
2 cups cornmeal
1 cup sunflower seeds
2 cups millet birdfood mix
1 cup wheat gluten, and
3 cups of rye flour.
Finally, I tossed in about 1/2 cup of bulghur wheat.

The raisins, the rye flour, the bulghur and the wheat gluten were all geriatric - been sitting in my cabinet who-knows-how long! I needed the gluten, I knew, because the rye and the corn have hardly any natural gluten, so something needed to hold the grains together.


After mixing the above, I added about 1 1/2 cup water. (Not sure exactly how much.) I added enough so that the texture was correct.

I kneaded this a few minutes, then molded it into a plastic square, which was the container in which some commercial suet had come.




I made several squares, and they're cooling and drying slightly on the table. Once they're dry, I'll package them up for this winter's bird feeding.


I think the birds are going to like this, because when I was mixing the ingredients, Nick came in the kitchen and told me how good this stuff smelled. It did smell good. Kind of like a natural foods fanatic's version of a peanut butter cookie!

Looks like I made this stuff just in time, because the first junco of the season arrived at our birdfeeder this morning.

Chicken Marengo, In A Fashion

23 years ago, Nick and I were living in Germany. That' s the Federal Republic of Germany, aka Western Germany, as it was known back in the 80s.

I hosted an important work dinner, and I served Chicken Marengo, using a recipe from Jeff Smith, The Frugal Gourmet. This was prior to the scandal that derailed his public TV cooking career.

At the dinner, were my boss, Major Livingston, his wife, Cheryl, my co-worker, Captain Dennis Barletta and his wife, and Elke Dressler, the Third Infantry Division Protocol Officer. Manohmanischewitz, was I a nervous wreck. I didn't know what to play for music, so I left on one of the classical Bavarian music stations (we were stationed in Wurzburg, Germany). It so happened, that the radio station was playing lots of Strauss that night. Elke, who was a worldy - or, should I say, world weary, said, with a critical edge to her voice"What, is this Strauss Rememberance Night?". At that time, I was not good with comeback repartee, so I just smiled and drank another glass of Barolo. And I was happy that everyone ate their chicken peacefully and seemingly, gratefully.

Tonight, I served another version of Chicken Marengo. This version is all mine, for sure. Using the pressure cooker!

Instructions:

• Dredge 1 1/2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts in flour, salt, and pepper. Brown in 2 tablespoons olive oil. Take out of the pot.
• Brown 1 onion, chopped,and 2 cloves garlic. Add 1 16 oz. can chopped tomatoes. Put the chicken on top.
• Add 1/2 cup dry white wine, and 1/2 cup chicken broth. Then add 5 springs parsley, some celery tops, and a bay leaf.
• Cook at 5 pounds pressure for 10 minutes.
• Take off the stove, and let sit for 10 minutes more.
• Chop some parsley.
• Put the chicken on a platter, discarding the bay leaf, the celery, and the parsley.
• Put the newly chopped parsley on top.

Serve with mashed patatoes and steamed brocolli.

And this time, if only in my mind...When Fraulein Dressler says, "Is it Strauss Remembrance Night??", with that critical edge to her voice, I'll reply "Yepper...and next you're gonna hear Wagner. Followed by the Skorpions".

With age does come wisdom. Yeah, yeah, I'm over it. Finally. Now.

Herb Layered Foccacia

I collect cookbooks. I read cookbooks in bed before going to sleep at night. There is something comforting and relaxing about reading cookbooks. A favorite genre is baking. Nick gave me this book, Rose Levy Berenbaum's "The Bread Bible". It is one of those cookbooks that tells you now just 'how', but 'why'. It reads almost like an illustrated textbook.

Yesterday, I had the chance to bake some bread. Why I haven't featured that particular activity yet here, I have no idea. Well, it's time to correct that oversight! I cook bread because I like to eat bread. Same as sewing. I like clothes, so I sew.

For me, and I guess for most cooks - there are two types of cooking and baking. There is 'craft' cooking, and there is "utilitarian" cooking. The craft type is when I immerse myself in the process, enjoying the journey as well as the finished result. The utilitarian type is what I do most of the time. It's "get it on the table" cooking. The satisfaction of whipping something decent (and, at my best...great...) out of what we have - and doing it in 20 minutes - that's satisfying! But that said, what I did here was what I would call craft cooking. I had to pay attention to the deliberate process.

I used Berenbaum's focaccia recipe, but I tweaked her method. Her method uses a hand mixing and kneading. But I used my KitchenAid mixer. The one I have is the "professional" model. I had the artisan model, with a smaller motor, but I burned that one out a year ago, when I was using it to knead some sturdy whole wheat bread. So I bought a big boy model.

This dough is very very wet, and when making foccacia, the hardest thing for me is to let it be wet. Because it should be wet. The proportion of flour to water in this bread is 2 cups flour to 1 cup water. That's 1/3 wetter than my normal 'knock it together' pizza dough! But I was disciplined and did not add too much flour.

After a series of rises and gentle punch downs, my dough was velvety soft, full of air, and tender. So I rolled it out, so that a third of the dough was thin, and the rest was thick. In the middle, between the dough layers, before sealing it for the final rise, I put fresh herbs. Our garden still has some herbs growing in it, despite the recent frost here where I live, on the east coast of the US. The only herb that is pretty much decimated is the green basil. My purple basil, for some reason, is hardier. So, after letting my bread rise, in went the herbs.

I had an appointment, so when I came back, two hours later, this is what I had. I punched dimples in the bread, drizzled it with olive oil and salt, then baked at 400 degrees....

Bread with a hearty red wine. A classic and 'can't go wrong' combo. In this case, it was a Spanish wine. Spanish wines are a favorite of mine, because they deliver some good complexity for a reasonable price, in many cases. This bread was s0000 good that we almost finished the loaf - just the two of us, at dinner last night. And after that, I had some as a snack.