My pet peeve—and a keeper recipe

 

Not my image
Clipped from web for algorithms or whatever
Close, but not the sme dish

Okay, it’s not my only pet peeve. I have a fairly long list, many of them about grammatical errors that grate on my nerves like fingernails on a blackboard. But on my culinary pet peeves list, dry meat is maybe first. I do not like, won’t eat dry chicken, pork, or even beef. Partly, meat is dry because it is overcooked or improperly cooked, but to me a chicken breast, for example, is almost always dry. I”ve been known to eat the skin and ignore the meat on a good fried chicken breast. So I want some kind of sauce or gravy with it, and I don’t mean a dab of sauce dribbled decoratively over the finished product.

If I have a pet peeve, Jordan has pet foods, and high on her list is cream cheese—on almost anything. As a child, she’d eat cream sandwiches—nothing else on them, just the cheese and the bread. We both love cream cheese on toast, sometime alone, sometimes with smoked salmon or bacon. It’s great in sandwiches with cucumber, it’s good scrambled with eggs, and of course, it’s the base for many delicious dips. But in this recipe, it saves a chicken entrée.

Recently Jordan was out of town for the weekend, and I wanted to fix a welcome-home dinner that she would particularly like. My choice: chicken breasts with a cream cheese sauce. I found the recipe on my favorite foodie website, “Kitchn,” and adapted it.

Chicken breasts in cream cheese sauce – serves four

1 small sweet onion

4 cloves garlic

8 oz. cream cheese

4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts

Salt and pepper

2 Tbsp. olive oil

½ cup dry white wine

1-1/2 cups chicken broth

2 tsp. Dijon mustard

Pinch red pepper flakes (optional)

Slice the onion—I have taken to slicing instead of dicing because Jacob does not like onion, either the taste or the texture, and slicing makes it easier for him to pick out (I know, I’m encouraging a picky eater!). Mince the garlic. Cut the cream cheese into six or eight chunks (the smaller the chunks, the easier it will be to blend into the sauce). Pound the chicken breasts and flatten to a uniform thickness, pat dry, cut each into two or three pieces, and season with salt and pepper. Cutting the breasts up gives you more leeway in fitting them all into one pan at once—when you cook on a hot plate, pan size is limited.

Heat the oil until it shimmers and bown the chicken pieces until golden on both sides. Remove from skillet and keep warm on a plate tented with aluminum foil. Chicken will not be thoroughly cooked through at this point.

Deglaze skillet with white wine, stirring to scrape up brown bits from pan bottom. Let wine simmer until about a half inch is left in pan. Add onions and garlic, stirring frequently until onions soften and take on a golden hue from the browned bits in the wine.

Add chicken broth, cream cheese, Dijon mustard, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Simmer, stirring, until cream cheese is melted and incorporated into the sauce.

Return the chicken to the skillet, bring to a simmer, cover and cook until chicken is cooked through—test after ten minutes by cutting into middle of a piece. Do not let the dish boil.

Serve over egg noodles or rice, and sprinkle with red pepper flakes if desired.

So good that Jordan asked for it to be put in what she calls our regular rotation, and Jacob really liked it—always a coup.

Lamb, fancy and everyday

 

 

Lamb ragu before cheese is sprinkled on it

Have you priced lamb at the market lately? A bone-in leg of lamb can cost anywhere from forty dollars to eighty—and eBay shows one for $140. A Frenched rack of lamb is over a hundred dollars. Lamb shoulder chops are a good buy, but I have not yet figured out how to cook them so they are not tough.

Many Texans think you raise sheep for their wool and wouldn’t think of eating lamb. Others just plain don’t like the taste, with its hint of gaminess (I have a son like that). On the other hand, I grew up with a father who was most British in his taste about many things, including food. Dad loved a good leg of lamb, and I remember how special a cold lamb sandwich with mayonnaise was the next day. I have cooked leg of lamb and enjoyed it, but the price is beyond me these days. Nonetheless I’m including my favorite leg of lamb recipe—and a much easier way to buy and cook the meat.

Once when I served a leg of lamb at a dinner party, one guest said, “I’ll give you $8,000 for the recipe.” So now I call it my $8,000 Leg of Lamb. Here’s what I did:

Ingredients

About 5 white-skinned potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced

3 onions, thinly sliced

3 tomatoes, thinly sliced

Salt and pepper

Dried thyme

Chopped garlic

¾ c. white wine

⅓ c. vegetable oil

6-7-lb. leg of lamb, excess fat trimmed but bone in

Directions

What makes this good is that the lamb juices drip into the vegetables, making them taste incredible. Grease a 9x13 pan and layer the bottom with sliced potatoes. Add onions and then tomatoes. Sprinkle each layer with salt, pepper, dried thyme, and a little chopped garlic. Pour white wine and vegetable oil over the vegetables. Cover pan with a cake or oven rack.

Season lamb to taste with salt and pepper and set it on the cake rack. Roast at 400° until meat thermometer registers 145° (about 75 minutes—the lamb will be medium rare; roast longer for better done, but don’t overdo it!). Turn the lamb every 20 minutes or so and baste with liquids from the vegetables. Remove from oven and let it collect itself before carving.

 

Want a cheaper, easier lamb fix. I served this lamb ragu a couple of nights ago and got family raves—Jacob even liked it, and he doesn’t like ground meat much. A ragu is simply a meat-based pasta sauce.

Lamb ragu ingredients

2 Tbsp. olive oil

1 medium yellow onion, chopped fine

3 garlic cloves, minced

Salt and pepper to taste

2 anchovy filets (you can omit them, but they add a wonderful depth to the sauce, and you won’t taste fishiness)

3 Tbsp. tomato paste

1 tsp dried thyme

1 28-oz can diced tomatoes in tomato sauce (San Marzano is a good label)

12 oz. pasta, your choice from spaghetti to egg noodles; I probably would not use rigatoni or other tubular pasta (see note: you might choose polenta instead of pasta)

Grated Parmesan or Pecorino cheese

Directions

Sauté onion and garlic in oil in heavy Dutch oven. Season with salt and pepper. Add anchovies and cook until the fish dissolves (1 minute). Add tomato paste and thyme and stir to blend thoroughly.

Season the lamb with salt and pepper and add to pot, breaking up chunks as much as possible. Cook until lamb is brown through, and chunks are broken up.

Finally add the diced tomatoes. Stir thoroughly to get up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan, Taste for seasoning, and bring to a simmer. Cook until sauce thickens, about half an hour. Remember that lamb is usually greasier than beef. Before serving you may want to carefully spoon off some grease.

Serve over pasta and spoon grated cheese generously over each serving. 

Note: The picture above is an old one, not taken the night we had ragu this week, and it looks to me like that may be soft polenta under the ragu instead of pasta. Not a bad idea at all.

Enjoy!

          

 

Tired of ground beef?

 

Sometimes you just get tired of ground beef casseroles. My family certainly does. Jacob said last night that it’s not that he doesn’t like hamburgers—what teen won’t eat a hamburger? —but he doesn’t like ground beef in a lot of other dishes, like meatloaf which he despises (and I happen to love). So I give you the humble cube steak.

Granted, it’s not as cheap as ground beef, but it’s not nearly as expensive as steak—and it is usually cut from sirloin. When I looked today, ground beef was $6.99, sirloin steak $14.99. Cub steaks are $8.99 a lb. They are not appealing to the eye—all pounded and uneven but get past that. Some recipes say when you buy cube steak, you should pound it for tenderness. My feeling is the butcher has already done that, and if you keep pounding you’ll end up with lace.

Tenderized sirloin is, of course, the meat most generally used for one of Texas’ classic dishes—chicken fried steak. I’ve never tried to fix it, figuring that a select few restaurants do a better job than I could ever do at home (and some do a truly awful job, so it pays to be picky). As a transplanted northerner, I refused to eat what I considered a fat-producing, overcooked item—until I went to work on weekends managing the cash register at a friend’s steakhouse where chicken fried was one of the staple orders. I learned to love it—but not to cook it.

I used to fix cube steaks for my kids when they were young. I cut the meat into strips, about an inch wide, seasoned it with salt and pepper, tossed it in flour, and seared it at a fairly high heat. At serving, I squeezed lemon juice all over the strips. Amazingly good, and Jordan today still remembers it.

But I am also a gravy person, and I fixed cube steaks with gravy last night. My problem was, a it often is in my kitchen without a proper stove, how to cook four steaks at once. I don’t have a pan big enough to hold more than two—oh, how I long for that griddle I used to have! I remembered that dish from years ago and cut the steaks into strips. That’s a lot easier to do if they are frozen and you catch them when they are only partly defrosted. Cutting them also balances out portions, because as they come from the meat counter, cube steaks are varying sizes—one I had last night was really small.

Cube steaks with gravy (serves four)

4 cube steaks

4 Tbsp. butter, divided

1 yellow onion, diced (a smallish onion, not one of those huge things the grocery foists off on us)

¼ cup flour

Salt and pepper

2 cups beef broth (I use Better than Bouilon)

1 tsp. Worcestershire

Sauté the onion in 2 Tbsp. butter until translucent. Remove the onions (actually I omitted them in deference ot Jacob, and the meat still tasted great)

Toss the steak pieces with salt and pepper (one recipe I found called for paprika, but I don’t care for the taste)

Brown the cubes on a fairy high heat, until cooked on both sides. Remove to a plate with the onions.

Melt remaining 2 Tbsp. butter (more if needed) in skillet and stir in flour to make a roux. Gradually stir in beef broth and Worcestershire. When the gravy is thickened and smooth, return meat and onions to the mixture.

Serve warm. Again, trying to please Jacob, I served the meat over buttered egg noodles. He liked it. So did the rest of us. Great the next day if there is any left over.

 

 

 

The Dagwood sandwich

My finished sandwich
It tasked a lot better than it looked
I

You have to be of a certain age to remember the comic strip, Blondie, and one of its main characters, Dagwood Bumstead. Dagwood and family made their debut in the 1930s and though the comic strip is long gone, Dagwood and his wife, Blondie, have made a variety of cameo appearances, well into the twenty-first century.

It seems Dagwood was the son and heir of a wealthy family but was disowned when he married Blondie, a flapper whose maiden name was Bookadoop. When their first child, Alexander, was born he was called Baby Dumpling. Daughter Cookie followed, named by popular choice of Blondie fans. You get the flavor of it now, don’t you, just in case you, like even me, weren’t around in the thirties and forties. Actually I do have vague memories of the strip.

Dagwood is a family man, devoted to his wife and children, but beyond that he loves a good sandwich. His idea of a sandwich is a concoction of many layers comprised of several meats (cold cuts), cheeses, and condiments. It’s all held in place (a big problem with these tall sandwiches, as you can see from the picture above) by a toothpick holding an olive.

My family loves sandwiches. We make our own version of those served at Great Outdoors, and poor boys also appear on our table. So when I ran across a recipe for a Dagwood, I thought it was a natural. I am truly sorry that I cannot remember where I saw this, so I can’t give credit appropriately. I suspect it was the Not the New York Times Cooking Community page.

Jordan was out of town, but I served it to Christian and Jacob the other night, and it was a hit. However, it was a challenge to make, and I learned along the way. Next time I’ll make a few changes. Here’s what I did:

Dagwood sandwich

Start with a round loaf of bread, sliced horizontally. That in itself is a challenge, but I found a round loaf of sourdough at Central Market, and the man in the bakery was more than willing to slice it. However, I should have specified I wanted to end up with five slices. As it was, I had too many and couldn’t fit the rounded top onto the sandwich. That may have been a blessing, because sometimes the crust on these breads is hard to cut through. Using the whole loaf would have made a more attractive sandwich, however, and my mom always told me food is half eaten with the eye.

Building the sandwich

First layer: sliced beef with a creamy horseradish sauce

Second layer: bacon, provolone, and Dijon mustard

Third layer: honey ham, sliced red onions, pickle slices, and mayo

Fourth layer: cheddar and provolone with honey mustard sauce

Put the top or cap on and coat the sandwich with garlic butter.

Bake at 400^o for 15 minutes.

Here’s another change I’d make: I’d wrap the sandwich in foil to bake. I think that would help it hold its shape.

I built the sandwich on a plate and then was faced with the challenge of transferring to a rimmed baking sheet. (Christian actually did it for me.) Next time—and I definitely will do it again—I’ll build it on a large piece of heavy-duty foil.

Cut in wedges. An 8” round loaf will serve six people.