Another week of bare grocery shelves—and a pantry recipe

 

Cheesy chicken casserole--
Tastes even better than it looks.

This week has been like the beginning of the pandemic lockdown all over again—bare grocery shelves. Jordan reported several items she couldn’t get, over and above toilet paper—like all the bread shelves were empty, and of all things, she couldn’t find the frozen hash browns we wanted for a casserole.

I have to eat a little bit of crow here. When pandemic started, Jordan loaded us up with staples—the cabinets in my kitchen, which are limited in space anyway, are filled with cans of cream of mushroom soup, tomatoes, beans—one whole shelf of beans! We have enough rice for Coxie’s Army, and every time I use up the egg noodles and think I’ve freed up a little space, she buys more egg noodles. Crackers anyone? We have your pleasure—Wheat Thins, Ritz, saltines, rice crackers. And the good canned tuna and salmon from an Oregon cannery—we could eat fish daily for a month and not run out. I do admit the latter is my fault, and I’m mostly the one that eats it.

On Sundays, we try to do a special “Sunday dinner,” but last weekend, like most folks, we were about out of anything fresh, and Jordan was reluctant to go to the grocery. She announced we would have something out of the cupboard and the freezer. So I plowed through the appalling collection of recipes I intend to try some day and found a casserole of chicken, refried beans, and cheese. Here’s what we did:

Cheesy Chicken Casserole

1 32 oz. can refried beans (we used refried black, believing, rightly or wrongly, that they are a bit more healthy)

1 can Rotel, flavor of your choice – recipe called for original, but I like lime with cilantro (and to think all my years as a Midwesterner I never heard of Rotel!)

½ onion, diced

12 oz. Velveeta, cubed

4 c. shredded, cooked chicken

1 cup corn, cooked and drained

½ c. cilantro, chopped

½ c. cheddar cheese, grated

Optional garnishes: chopped green onion tops, pico de gallo, maybe even corn chips

Directions:

Use a 9x13 baking pan and grease lightly. Spread refried beans in the bottom.

In skillet, sauté onions in a tiny bit of olive oil; add Rotel and Velveeta, heat slowly, and stir to mix. When cheese is completely melted, add the chicken, corn, and cilantro. Stir well.

Pour the chicken mixture over the refried beans. Top with plenty of grated cheddar.

Bake at 350^o until cheese is melted and mixture is a bit bubbly—about 20-30 minutes. Let it sit for a couple of minutes to set up and then serve.

Our verdict? Absolutely delicious! One of the best Mexican-style casseroles ever—and also one of the easiest. I could eat this once a week. It definitely goes into the regular rotation of dishes in our household.

I bet there are hash browns on grocery shelves today, but Jordan’s wise planning paid off with this recipe, and, other than gentle teasing, I won’t mention overstocking again. If you stocked your cupboard, what things—besides toilet paper—did you think were essential?

The ubiquitous salmon croquette

 

Salmon croquettes

I am amused that on Facebook you occasionally see a picture of a platter of salmon croquettes, with the caption, “Does anyone still eat these?” I am here to shout, “Yes!” A childhood memory and still a favorite food today. Just made a small batch—one for supper and two for leftovers—they make the best sandwiches with mayo.

But I set off on an internet search for croquettes and found they are defined as small cylinders of food, with filling and a binder, breaded and fried. According to that exalted source, Wikipedia, croquettes are found in almost every cuisine throughout the world but each has its own twist. The filling may be salmon or other fish (tuna or mackerel), ham, chicken, potato (Martha Stewart has a recipe for those online), and the binder may be mashed potatoes, thick brown of bechamel sauce, wheat flour or wheat bread. Croquettes may be small nuggets or as long as your finger.

Forget all that. Here’s what my mom taught me: never use any filling except crushed saltines. They bind better than anything else. Mom did shape them like tiny logs, which I have found difficult to work with—you have to brown three or four sides. I shape them into a pattie like a hamburger. Mom also not only used the saltines to bind the mixture, but she rolled the shaped croquettes in more saltine crumbs. I find that difficult too—crumbs fly off in every direction. And croquettes coated in crumbs tend to burn more quickly. So I leave out that step.

A side note: Honey Boy salmon (pink) from the grocery is fine, but I order salmon by the case from a cannery in Oregon. It is a family business; they fish, not with nets, so no dolphins get entangled. In fact, dolphins often swim alongside next to their boat. And they cook the salmon only once, after it is canned (most canned fish is twice cooked). The results if a product with wonderful flavor. (They also sell tuna, smoked tuna, and smoked salmon.) I’m sure there are several such small fishing vessel companies in the Northwest.

Here’s what I do:

7 oz. can salmon

1 egg, beaten

1 green onion, chopped fine

Salt and pepper to daste

A pinch of dry mustard

A dash of Worcestershire

Fine cracker crumbs, enough to enable you to shape the croquette (you don’t want too mushy, but if you get it too dry, it won’t hold together).

Mix together and sauté gently (I prefer butter) until browned on both sides. After all, the fish is already cooked, and you are only heating it and getting that good crust. (I am getting so hungry writing about this!)

Serve with lemon wedges. (I like lots of lemon on them.)

Leftovers (who has leftovers?) freeze well.

I have made croquettes with tuna, ham, and chicken, in addition to salmon, but I prefer the salmon. A neighbor tells me her kids consider tuna croquettes traditional on Ash Wednesday and beg for them. She adds a bit of chopped tomato and sometimes cilantro. And that’s another good thing about croquettes—you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want. The only way to ruin them is to miss the consistency.

Don’t laugh, but a favorite meal for me, all these years later, is a salmon croquette (or sometimes two), sauteed spinach, and a can of diced tomatoes (Mom canned her own, but I’m not that much of a purist) mixed with butter and crushed saltines (just not crushed as finely as for the croquettes).

Never tried making croquettes? You really should. Haven’t made them in years? It’s time to put them back on your rotating menu.

 

A good country cook

 

When my children were little, we spent many a happy weekend—and sometimes a week at a time—at a guest ranch near Ben Wheeler, Texas owned by good friends. Charles Ogilvie taught radiology at the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine, and his wife, Reva, ran the B&B and did all the cooking. They had several guest cabins on the property, although the children were dismayed to learn that other people stayed in “our” cabin and that it wasn’t really ours. There was a stocked small lake, with paddleboats, where my boys loved to fish so much that they would get up at dawn. We hiked Charles’ nature trails, watched the beavers transform a pond, petted the horse, sometimes burros, and once a doomed Longhorn steer, went to town on Saturday nights for catfish, and watched corny movies in the conference center they had built. The kids thought it was the best place in the world.

While the children fished and dabbled their toes in the water at the small beach area, Reva and I cooked. She was a great, down-home cook, a Missouri farm girl transplanted to Texas. We had huge feasts on the screened-in front porch of their house, looking over the lake at twilight. It’s about as close to heaven as I’ve come.

Charles leased his pastures, since he couldn’t care for livestock during the week, but he often kept one feeder calf in a pen not far from the house. One particular calf, however, was so adept at escaping that he was named Houdini. The kids loved him and always stopped to pet him on the way from the main house to our cabin (a good half-mile walk that included making your way across two cattle guards). One night we had beef for dinner—I don’t remember what cut or how it was cooked—and Charles asked, “How do you like the meat, kids?” They all chorused that it was great. With a grin, Charles said, “You’re eating Houdini.” Nobody ate much after that.

Here are some of Reva’s recipes that still use often. A note I feel compelled to add: I do not like bell peppers, especially green, and they don’t like me. I never use them—except to make Reva’s good beans, and then I slice the half pepper in pieces big enough that I can pick them out. Somehow the beans wouldn’t be the same without that pepper.

 

Aunt Reva’s good beans

1 3-lb.-4-oz. can Ranch Style beans

1 28-oz. can diced tomatoes (or two 14-oz. cans)

1 onion, chopped

½ green pepper, seeded and diced

Drain beans, but do not rinse. Put into crockpot along with other ingredients and simmer all day if you have to. (You can probably get by with less, but it’s nice to let them thicken up.)

 

Aunt Reva’s chili relleños

2 4-oz. cans whole green chilies

½ lb. sharp cheddar (or as much as you want to use)

5 eggs

¼ c. milk

Grease and butter a pie pan. Spread chilies in a single layer on the pan. Cover with grated cheese. Mix eggs and milk and pour over cheese and chilies. Bake at 325° for 30 minutes or until eggs have set. Great, easy breakfast.

 

Aunt Reva’s asparagus

2 c. asparagus (The recipe called for canned, but I use one bunch of fresh, trimmed and lightly cooked.)

1 c. sour cream

¼ c. mayonnaise

2 Tbsp. lemon juice

Buttered breadcrumbs

This actually doesn’t come with directions, but Reva used to lay the asparagus, fan-shaped, in a pie plate. For easier serving, I put it in single layer in a small rectangular baking dish. Mix sour cream, mayonnaise, and lemon juice and pour over asparagus. Top with breadcrumbs and bake until topping is brown, and dish is heated through.

Reva and Charles are long gone, and the kids and I treasure these memories. We also treasure the recipes. Nothing like learning from a good country cook.

With this column, I hope to get back to posting my “Gourmet on a Hot Plate” blog every Thursday. Happy cooking, folks.

 

 

 

A lazy cook—and Swedish meatballs

 

Reluctantly I admit that I am in many ways a lazy cook. There are simply kitchen chores I don’t want to deal with—chopping onions comes to mind, and I am eternally grateful to the grandson who doesn’t like onions because now I can omit them a lot of the time. Peeling garlic is another bothersome chore—those silvery skins are hard to get off and they stick everywhere. Yes, I know about garlic presses that work without peeling—except they don’t work as well, and I prefer to microplane garlic into a lot of recipes. And don’t get me started on snobs who eschew cooking with canned soups—I do it all the time, and the results are usually great.

So one of the things I rarely do is make meatballs because it is a real pain to brown those tiny things on all sides in a skillet. Too time consuming, too boring. But I’d been wanting Swedish meatballs, and I found the perfect recipe: you essentially dump everything into a big bowl and mix it as though you were making a meatloaf. Then you shape the meatballs—okay, that’s drudgery but not too bad—and bake them. No skillet required.

Swedish meatballs, as I alluded to last night, are milder, made of pork and beef and seasoned with the warm spices such as nutmeg and allspice. They are traditionally served with lingonberry jelly but that somehow didn’t appeal to me, so I made a simple white sauce—and then decided I like the meatballs better without the sauce.

But here’s what I mixed and did.

Swedish meatballs

1 lb. ground chuck

1 lb. ground pork

3 c. Panko

1-1/2 c. whole milk

2 large eggs, beaten

2 garlic cloves, microplaned into the meat mixture

1 Tbsp. salt

½ tsp. black pepper (I prefer fine ground)

¼ tsp. ground allspice

¼ tsp. ground nutmeg

Dump all the above ingredients into a mixing bowl, wash your hands, and dig in, mixing until everything is thoroughly integrated. You don’t want to overwork the mixture, but at the same time you don’t want pockets of breadcrumbs.

Use a Tbsp. measure to scoop out meat and create meatballs. Roll each meatball in your palms until it is firm—okay, this part is a bit of a pain. The recipe is supposed to make 48 meatballs. I didn’t count but I had at least that many, and I learned two lessons about cooking in my toaster oven. When the directions say to set your oven to 475^o the oven will only go to 450^o. So when it said to bake for 10-12 minutes, I left them for 15, which may be why they had a crust.

And the wonderful rimmed baking sheet that fits my oven does not hold 24 meatballs. I made three trays full, baking one and letting it cool; then filling the second, baking it and letting it cool, etc. I have to add a word about the baking sheet—it came from Williams Sonoma and was given me by a friend, and it is indestructible. After three trays of meatballs, it was greasy and crusted and awful. I soaked it for a couple of hours, and it came clean right away. Easy peasy.

So there I was with more meatballs than we’d ever eat in a meal. I made a white sauce, following the directions, but it kept thickening up and never was as thin as I’d like. My take? Meatballs were better without the sauce. In case you want to do it, here are the proportions for the white sauce:

3 Tbsp. butter

1/3 c. flour

1 cup milk

           Not near enough milk, probably too much flour. I wasn’t happy with it. Even adding white wine didn’t help.

But the meatballs themselves were great—crusty (which I don’t think Swedish meatballs are meant to be) with good flavor. I just happened to eat about six as I cooked—that was lunch. Tonight, we had them for supper with asparagus.

And that sweet fourteen-year-old came out to the cottage just now and asked, “Can I have that last cookie?” It was a large chocolate chip cookie that came with a to-go order last night. What grandmother could refuse. I told him to enjoy, and he grinned and said, “I will.”