Cheese Souffle

Tonight, Nick and I had fresh asparagus and a cheese souffle for dinner. This is my very first, ever, cheese souffle. I used my grandmother Eleanor's glass baking dish. Not ideal for a souffle, as the sides slope outward, so my souffle did not rise significantly, but it did rise. Besides, I did not have a souffle dish small enough for my two person version. Ok, I will say that this recipe was supposed to serve four, but it served two. At our house, we eat a lot.

I turned to Julia Child for the recipe. I used the one in The Way to Cook. Here's the basic method.

Separate the eggs. I used five eggs. Make a thick bechamel sauce, with 2 1/2 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, and 1 cup milk. Add a bit of salt, pepper, paprika, and nutmeg. Whip the egg whites to stiff peak. After the bechamel cools, add the egg yolks. Then, fold the egg whites into the bechamel mixture, along with the cheese. The recipe said to use 1 cup of shredded cheese, but I used about 3/4 cup. Put into your buttered, prepared dish, then, put a collar on the dish, so the souffle has something to rise against, once it elevates itself in your oven. The oven is preheated to 375 F. Bake for around 35 minutes. My souffle was a bit weepy in the center, but that was not a bad thing, I don't think. Reminiscent of an omelet baveuse.

I served the souffle with a Pinot Grigio, a salad, some whole wheat bread (I used the basic whole wheat bread recipe from this book), and asparagus from California. I bought the asparagus today at the Reading Terminal Market, in Center City Philadelphia. Wow. $1.49 for a beautiful huge bunch! How great is that price? I read earlier this week, I think in The Wall Street Journal, (which I read every morning while commuting on SEPTA) that Asparagus is coming in huge quantities, thus the price, which is a full dollar lower than I am used to paying. So right now, I'm congratulating myself, thinking we ate pretty well at Chez Barbara. AND there's more! It took only about an hour to make this dinner, and it was all 'from scratch'. (I left work 1/2 hour early tonight, which gave us a head start on the deal.)

Getting to the Root

Root vegetables are comforting. I think I'm genetically coded at the most basic level to say "yes" and "good" when it comes to foods that store well and taste good. All I know for sure is that I like root vegetables. Potatoes. Carrots. Parsnips. Turnips. Onions. And so on.

Spring has come to the northeastern US, and there are still no green vegetables above the ground. Even the alliums are silent. But what we do still have are the root vegetables, noble sorts, who have kept well over the past hard and cold months of snow, ice, and rain.

Every Thursday evening, I stop to visit at a farmer's stall. He is from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and every Thursday, he's at Penn Center/Suburban Station, in downtown Philadelphia. He sells in-season produce and beef. He also sells free-range eggs (from happy chickens, my mom, Anne, would say). I buy from him. He's Daryl, from Rineer Family Farms. I like to support those who put heart and soul into the food they produce for sale.

This past Thursday, I bought beets, carrots, parsnips, and eggs. This post is about beets and carrots.

Carrot salad is a comforting food. Some like sweet, mayo laden carrot salad. I like mine more piquant. So here's a carrot salad I will serve tonight. I made up this recipe, and I'm not an expert. So feel free to experiment yourself!

Barbara's Carrot Salad

1 pound carrots, shredded.
1 lemon, squeezed.
1 small apple, chopped, with peel on.
1 stalk celery
salt
pepper
2 tablespoons neutral vegetable oil (I used peanut)
2 tablespoons sugar (more or less)

Shred the carrots. Put in bowl. Cut up the celery and put in bowl. Cut up the apple. Squeeze the lemon. Swish the apple up in the lemon juice, and add the sugar. Put the apple mixture in with the carrots. Add the oil, salt, and pepper. Cover, and refrigerate. (The apple will not get brown if you do the lemon juice treatment...the alternative is to use a Cortland apple, which do not oxidize brown).

Beet Salad

I had a beet salad at a catered work lunch, and I liked it so much, I was inspired to make my own.

Here's how. I adapted a recipe from the Craig Claiborne NY Times Cookbook, which I have had for years. My version was published in 1990. I use this cookbook a lot.



Boil around 2 pounds of beets whole. This will take around 4o minutes. Then, after they've cooled, peel and chop them. Peel 1/2 a red onion. Cut it into slices. Put the onion into the bowl. Add vinegar to taste, salt and pepper, and a little vegetable oil. Also, add some spices, such as clove or allspice. Chill and serve when chilled down.

Root vegetable salads seem perfect for this time of year. Not hot and hearty and long stewed, but...light and rooty.

Croutons

Got a stale piece of bread? You've got croutons for two!

Here's how. Cube bread. Heat skillet.

Put bread cubes in skillet. Turn heat to high. Spray liberally (or not so much, depending on your mood) with Pam (non-stick cooking oil spray).

Turn heat to 'medium'. Add herbs of your choice. Tonight, for me, it was garlic powder and "herbs de provence", which is a blend of lavender, thyme, and other 'typique' herbs of southern France.

Saute, stirring frequently, keeping heat to medium (depending on your stove and its heat), until all sides of each piece of bread are browned or golden.

Et, c'est fini! That is it! You have croutons from that stale piece of bread you were thinking of tossing. Serve and smile.

Morels

My sister, Leslie, brought me some dried Morels, from her last trip to France.
Tonight, Pork Chops were on the menu, Chez Cat Fur Studio. Actually, I was not supposed to be in town at all tonight. I was supposed to fly out to San Diego at 7:30 this morning. A surfing vacation for moi coming up, s'il vous plait!

But a big snowstorm has kept me homebound. In fact, my re-book, for tomorrow at 7:30, has also been cancelled, and now I'm to fly out at 2 PM, and through Phoenix (groan), adding 2 hours to my trip, so I will miss a get-together I've been anticipating for a while (double groan). But it looks like my 1 PM Monday surf lesson is still on. Un-groan. Double-yay!

SO. Cooking.

I'd been conserving the Morels for use at an auspicious time,which, I decided would be tonight. So, in typical conserving mode, I used only about six of the Morels, leaving plenty for a later use. After all, I OPENED the container. That was all I could do for today. Using some was enough...

The directions on the Morel container say to hydrate the morels in hot water for 20 minutes, and subsequently to put them in boiling water. These directions are en Francais, so I THINK that is what they said. So I did what I thought I should do, and I ended up with edible morels. I sliced them, and put them into my saute pan, in which I'd been frying some onions with bacon fat and salt and pepper. The onions were on low heat for almost one hour. I put in the morels, then added the morel soaking water, in which I'd dissolved about 2 tablespoons of flour. This made a nice bed onto which I perched each finished pork chop. On top of the chop, I put some "Frenchs" fried onions. From a can. The type we, who were children in the 1960s are used to seeing on on top of thanksgiving campbells green beans in mushroom soup. Not gourmet fried onions, but who cares. Pretty good is good enough for me, amidst 18 inches of snow.

The serving plate here shows just the main entree and the baked potato, before I placed the broccoli onto the plate. I served this with homemade bread and red wine.

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.