Yes, you can do other things with Hawaiian rolls

 

Hawaiian rolls are light, fluffy and slightly sweet

Some kitchen experiments work out great, and I hear a chorus of, “Put that one on permanent rotation”; others, well you just know even before you serve it that it’s not going to go over well; and then there are surprises: last night I made cheese and hamburger sliders, and as I was following the rather sketchy directions, I thought, “This is a one-time thing.” Jordan and Christian both raved about them and said to keep the recipe. So I will, but with some modification.

Remember when sliders of Hawaiian rolls, ham, Swiss cheese, and a poppy seed dressing were all the rage? Did you know they’re sometimes called funeral rolls, I guess because they were often contributed to the table at funerals. I made the recipe once, thought it was manna from heaven; made it again and wasn’t so enamored of the sliders. After that, I kind of left Hawaiian rolls alone, dismissing them as too sweet. But the web has lots of suggestions for their use, even as stuffing or dressing for that Thanksgiving turkey. There are also several recipes of making them at home, but if you prefer to buy, King’s is the best-known brand. Then I found this recipe on a random website, thought it sounded easy and good.

Here’s what I did, with suggestions for what I’d do differently next time:

Cheeseburger sliders

½ small onion, diced

2 Tbsp. butter

1 lb. ground beef, preferably lean

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. garlic salt

1 tsp. onion powder

½ tsp. ground pepper

1 tsp. Worcestershire

6-8 slices sharp cheddar cheese

1 cup grated sharp cheddar cheese

1 12-count package Hawaiian rolls

2 Tbsp. butter

1 Tbsp. sesame seeds

Sauté the onion in 2 Tbsp. butter until soft; add ground meat and seasonings; cook until all pink is gone from the meat.

Lightly butter a rimmed baking pan. Split the rolls horizontally and put the bottom half, still attached to each other, on the baking sheet. Cover with cheese slices.

Drain meat thoroughly and spread evenly over half rolls in the baking pan. Cover that with grated cheese. Put the tops on (as evenly as you can). Brush the rolls with melted butter and sprinkle sesame seeds. Bake at 350 for 20 minutes.

My notes: the recipe called for 1.5 lbs. of meat. It was too much, spilled out of the rolls, was difficult to handle and eat. For cheese slices: I will almost never recommend processed American cheese; you can get good cheddar pre-sliced or, as I did, slice your own. If you want pre-sliced, Sargento is a good brand. If you slice your own, disregard the quantity listed and just cover each roll. Other quantities I disregarded and used my own judgement were: butter, onion, and sesame seeds. Although the recipe called for seasoned salt, I used Kosher which I always prefer. I added the Worcestershire sauce to give the meat a bit more flavor. In retrospect, I wonder if a bit of concentrated beef broth might also have strengthened the flavor.

Another retrospective thought: having discovered how great sea salt is on everything both savory and sweet, I wonder if sea salt might be more interesting than sesame seeds on top of the rolls.

About baking the rolls: the buttered baking sheet created a nice crisp bottom crust on the sliders, but if you want a soft bottom, you might try a dry pan or a sheet of parchment.

This served three of us generously with about half left over. The resident teen was not home for supper, so he didn’t vote. He generally doesn’t like ground meat but likes hamburgers, so I was hoping he would put this in the hamburger category rather than casserole.

 

The famous Blackhawk Salad

 

When I was young, single, and working in Chicago, I was very much in love with a medical student a few years older. In retrospect, I think he tried to teach me a little sophistication. I clearly remember that the first time I was ever asked what I wanted to drink before dinner was at a restaurant dinner with his friends. I opted for a Tom Collins because I knew it was like lemonade (later found out gin gives me a headache). He was relieved I didn’t ask for a Coke. He took me to upscale restaurants and smokey bars that I would have never known about, and one of our favorite places was Chicago’s downtown Blackhawk Restaurant. I remember one night I wore a new blouse to the Blackhawk—I had spent an astounding $20 on it and felt very extravagant. This would have been in the late fifties.

The Blackhawk, opened in 1920 on North Wabash in the Loop, which meant the elevated roared overheard. Once inside, you never heard the trains. The Blackhawk was famous for its two specialties—the prime rib and the spinning salad bowl.for many years, they featured live music including big bands. Name entertainers appeared there, some like Mel Torme (he had gone to my high school) and Doris Day making their debut appearances, thers such as Kay Kyser, Chico Marx, Louis Prima, and Ish Kabibble were household names. You have to be really old to recognize these names. By the time Tom and I dined at the Blackhawk, the music was gone and the focus was on food. I don’t remember ever eating prime rib, but oh did we love that salad!

A waiter—always a dignified, elderly gentleman—wheeled a cart to the table. On it was a bed of ice and a large salad bowl that he spun on the ice. As he made the salad in front of you, he talked about what he was doing. Today I can still hear those men saying, “We toss it gently three times so as not to bruise the delicate greens.” I don’t remember about this, but I suspect the cream cheese/blue cheese mixture and the vinaigrette were pre-made in the kitchen. If you’ve ever ordered a Greek salad at Pappadeux, you’ll recognize the at-the-table technique.

Christian made this for us one night not too long ago and it was as good as I remembered. In the directions, you’ll note that this was pre-food processors, and the dressing was made in a blender. Today I think you can use either one. Don’t be intimidated by the long list of ingredients but do take heed of the warning that comes at the top of the recipe: Do not skip or substitute a single ingredient or change the proportions.

Blackhawk Salad

Ingredients

3 oz. cream cheese, softened

3 oz. blue cheese, crumbled

5 Tbsp. water

1 raw egg

1 Tbsp. plus 1-1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice

1 cup vegetable oil (In those days, we didn’t use olive oil as much as we do today, and I think olive oil might change the flavor of the dressing.)

2 Tbsp. mayonnaise

¼ c. red wine vinegar

1 Tbsp. sugar

2 Tbsp. chopped chives

1-1/2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce

¾ tsp. salt

¾ tsp. paprika

½ clove garlic

1-1/4 tsp. white pepper

¼ tsp. hot mustard

8 c. torn salad greens (romaine)

1 chopped, hard-boiled egg

Salt and pepper to taste

Mix cream cheese and blue cheese until smooth; add water, a Tbsp. at a time until the mixture is pourable. Set aside.

Combine raw egg, lemon juice, and ¼ c. oil in blender or processor—blend on medium for 15 seconds. Increase speed to high and blend in remaining oil in a steady stream. Stop to scrape down sides of container as necessary. Add mayonnaise, vinegar, sugar, chives, Worcestershire, salt, paprika, garlic, white pepper, and mustard and blend until smooth.

Toss greens in a large bowl with enough of dressing to coat. Sprinkle with chopped egg, salt and pepper, and toss gently. Do not bruise those tender greens!

Add 1 Tbsp. cheese mixture and toss again.

Find a Mel Torme concert online, listen to the “Velvet Fog,” and enjoy a Blackhawk Salad.

 

Top of the morning to you!

 

Sure, and what’s for supper tomorrow night? Why, yes, corned beef and cabbage in honor of St. Patrick celebrating most anything Irish you want to celebrate, starting with the country’s patron saint.

We all know how to cook corned beef and cabbage—put the corned beef in a crockpot, add pickling spices and vegetables—onion, potato, carrot—cover it with water and let it cook on low all day. About 45 minutes before serving, lay wedges on cabbage on top and let them cook gently. I was all set to do this last Sunday when my younger son was due for supper, but then I remembered that I had cooked a much-better-than-usual corned beef supper last year. I dug out the recipe I’d adapted from kitchn, the daily food newsletter that I think is a treasure of hints and recipes. Here’s what I did:

Ingredients:

One corned beef brisket, 3-4 lbs.

1 Tbsp. pickling spices

2 tsp. sugar

½ tsp. salt

1 8 oz. bottle dark beer

Water as needed

1 Tbsp. cider vinegar

4 large carrots, scraped and cut on the diagonal into chunks

1 lb. potatoes, peeled and cut into one inch chunks

1 small onion, cut into wedges

1 tsp. dried thyme

½ small head of cabbage

Some notes on the ingredients: You can corn your own beef, if you start days ahead. It’s supposed to be much better. Directions are online. A packet of pickling spices came with the meat, but I had some in bulk from Central Market; I suspect they were fresher. As for the beer, I had a bottle of stout and used that—made the best tasting potatoes! The recipe called for 6-8 cups of water, but I barely used 4 cups. The recipe also called for fresh thyme—I don’t know about you, but I rarely have that on hand (hope to have it when I can plant a spring garden, which won’t be this weekend); I used dried. The recipe also called for savoy or napa cabbage, which is much more expensive. A plain old head of cabbage worked fine.

A note on herbs and spices: if you live near a Central Market  or someplace else that sells bulk spices and haven’t discovered spice drawers—run, don’t walk. Bulk spices are much fresher; you can buy smaller amounts so they don’t get stale in your cupboard; and they are a fraction of the cost.

Directions:

Heat the slow cooker to the low setting.

Put the brisket in the slow cooker fat side up and cover with spices, sugar and salt. Add the beer and enough water to cover the brisket. Then add the vinegar.

Add the vegetables and the thyme in no particular order. Cover and cook on low 8-10 hours.

About 45 minutes before serving, lay the cabbage on top of the vegetables.

When ready to serve, remove brisket to a cutting board. Let it rest and “collect itself” for a few minutes, and then carve against the grain into thin slices. Use a slotted spoon to scoop the vegetables out.

Serve with mustard and/or horseradish sauce.

Leftover corned beef? Here’s Christian’s favorite cocktail spread (it always amazes me that he likes it so much, because in anything else he would never touch kraut):

Warm Reuben spread

Ingredients:

4 oz. cream cheese, softened

½ cup Thousand Island dressing (you can find directions online for making your own)

¼ lb. corned beef, chopped

¾ cup well-drained sauerkraut

8 oz. Swiss cheese, chopped

Directions:

Mix together cream cheese and Thousand Island dressing. Stir in remaining ingredients and spread in a 9-inch pie plate or shallow pan. Bake at 350^o for 20 minutes.

Serve with rye crackers or, if you can find them, small pumpernickel or rye cocktail breads. Triscuits would be good too, but this is not the dish for veggie dippers.

 

May the road rise to meet you

May the wind be always at your back

May the sun shine warm upon your face

May the rains fall soft on your fields, and

Until we meet again, may the Good Lord hold

You in the palm of his hand.—traditional Irish blessing

An alternative:

May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.

 

Chicken salad casserole redux, or making a recipe your own

 

Chicken casserole recipes are so numerous that recently on the web I found one called Chicken Casserole No. 1000. This one, however, is probably my favorite. I’ve made it several times and probably shared it in this column, so I’m not sure why it struck me this week that the proportions in the original were all wrong. I suspect I fiddled with it without recording my changes. But Tuesday, my former colleague Melinda was coming for lunch, and I wanted something light—dare I say It? Ladylike. Tea room food. This fit the bill perfectly. But when I got into making it, it threatened to turn out all wrong. So I made the recipe my own.

According to the U. S. copyright law, ingredients to a recipe cannot be copyrighted—how do you have exclusive use of “one cup flour”? —but directions can. So when I find a recipe I want to share, I’m always sure to rewrite the directions. Frequently, my version makes more sense (at least to me). But I also often make a recipe my own by changing ingredients and amounts. That’s what happened with this.

I have no idea where I got this recipe. It’s typewritten with no attribution, so if I’m criticizing someone I know, I apologize. The recipe calls for using a 9x13 casserole dish  and layering two cups diced chicken and three sliced hard-boiled eggs in the dish. You can use your imagination—that much chicken and egg spread out in that big dish is sparse, at best. Then I was to add a whopping amount of sauce—two cups minced celery (that is a whole heck of a lot of celery), two cans cream of mushroom soup, ¾ cup mayonnaise, and ½ Tbsp. lemon juice. Not only did that sound like enough sauce for three chickens, it underplayed the ingredient that gives this dish its distinctive flavor—the lemon juice. The final outrage: two teaspoons of salt, in a day when we’re told to watch our sodium intake.

Obviously, the sauce is out of proportion to the amount of main ingredients, and to my mind some of the sauce’s ingredients needed balancing. Here’s what I did:

2 cups chicken, chopped (from a rotisserie chicken, if you want convenience)

3 hard-boiled eggs, sliced

1 can cream of mushroom soup

½ cup mayonnaise

¼ cup sour cream

1 cup minced celery

1 Tbsp. lemon juice

2 green onions, sliced fine or minced

1 tsp. sal

½ tsp. pepper         

Crushed potato chips

Layer the chicken and sliced eggs in a square, two-quart casserole. Separately mix other ingredients (except chips) and pour over chicken and eggs. Top with crushed potato chips. Bake at 350^o for 20 minutes or until just heated through. Watch carefully that potato chips don’t burn.

A taste of Germany

German potato salad

Jordan spent a weekend in Fredericksburg recently, and I asked her to bring home some authentic German food. She brought brats and sauerkraut. I decided we needed a German dinner. Coincidentally Mary, who values her German heritage, had a birthday this week. So we had a German birthday meal. On the menu were herring salad as an appetizer, brats and onions cooked in beer, German potato salad, sauerkraut (heated), and carrot salad. Es schmeckt lecker! (In case your German is as bad as mine, that means “It is tasty!” Sorry, I can’t manage the past tense.)

Herring salad

1 12-oz. jar herring in wine sauce with onion

¼ cup mayonnaise

½ cup sour cream

1 Tbsp. lemon juice

3 green onions, sliced

½ tsp. sugar

½ green bell pepper, diced (optional: I did not use)

1 small red apple, diced (Optional: I used slices as garnish but did not stir in)

1 Tbsp. celery seed (optional: I did not use)

Mix it all together, chill, and serve with rye or pumpernickel bread, cut into small triangles. If you can find cocktail rye, it’s perfect.

Brats

1 onion, sliced

1 brat per person

Beer

Put onion slices and beer in skillet; pour in beer to cover; put the lid on the skillet and cook on medium until the brats are done (15-20 minutes); take the lid off and cook until the beer evaporates, brats are brown, and onions are golden.

German potato salad

The thing that makes this German is the sweet/sour dressing and the fact that it is served hot. I found the basic recipe in an old cookbook a lifetime ago and over the years have made it mine. It’s one of Christian’s favorite dishes.

3-4 slices bacon, fried and crumbled; reserve grease

3 stalks celery, chopped fine (I string them first)

4 green onions, sliced

1 heaping Tbsp. flour

½ c. each water and cider vinegar

1 Tbsp. prepared mustard

2 cans sliced white potatoes (The original recipe called for fresh cooked potatoes, of course, but this is one of the few places where I think canned does just fine and is actually better—they don’t crumble like fresh-cooked potatoes.)

After you fry the bacon, if there’s too much grease in the skillet, drain some, but you want at least a Tbsp. to cook this. Sauté celery and green onions in bacon grease. Add flour and stir. Add water and vinegar—more of each as needed until sauce is a good consistency. Add mustard. Add potatoes. Crumble bacon and stir in. Sprinkle with parsley just before serving to add color.

Sauerkraut

Heat until just warm and serve, or serve it cold. It’s a matter of personal taste. My mother came from a German family—Peterman—and loved German food, except sauerkraut which she claimed to have been forced to eat as a child. The results was I never tasted sauerkraut until I was grown and out of my childhood home. Now I love it. But never buy it in a can. Buy a brand in a glass jar. If you can get authentic German kraut, it’s better.

Carrot salad

This was the least successful dish. Grating carrots is harder than I thought (but fresh taste better than pre-grated from the store). I doubled the recipe, which proved to be way too much, and I got too much pepper in it. Leftover salad was increasingly peppery. If you can adjust for those things, it’s a nice touch on the plate.

10 oz. shredded carrots

2 Tbsp. white balsamic vinegar

¼ cup olive oil

Pinch of salt

Pepper to taste

Another note on salads: I found a recipe for Gemischter Salat which was really a salad buffet, and in addition to the carrot salad had recipes for beet salad, corn salad, cucumber salad, and baby green salad. Given more time and a bigger kitchen, I would have made one or more additional salads.

You really ought to top this meal off with a German chocolate cake. Gutes essen!

Dinner plate