Cooking from the pantry

A friend wrote that she was not liking her own cooking in isolation, so she and her husband were resorting to take-out. It made me sad for her, because I am having fun with the challenge of what I can and do fix. Granted, much of the time I’m cooking for just me. We are only getting groceries either delivered or curbside pick-up, and there is a great time lapse between ordering and receiving, so it’s hard to plan. I may run out of ideas, but for now my mind is full of possibilities.

Some essentials: I find it is really important to have sharp cheddar cheese in the fridge and tuna in the pantry. And you always have a meal if  you have eggs:

Here are a few of the things I’ve done:

Baked a huge baked potato and mashed it with chopped green onion, crumbled bacon, grated sharp cheddar, and lots of butter. Re-stuffed the shells, and baked one for dinner one night, one for lunch a day or so later. I laid thinly sliced cheddar over the top of the lunch potato before baking it. Should have taken the picture before I tried to transfer it to a plate.

Made soup out of things I found in the freezer—beans in tomato sauce, orzo pasta, corn, peas, slices of Polish sausages. Made a base of chicken broth and a can of diced tomatoes. When serving (to myself) I topped it with grated Parmesan.

Made tuna salad, after we scored a whole, very fresh loaf of good Jewish rye bread. Next up, I think I’ll do tuna salad, top it with cheese, and bake—a tuna melt. I still intend to make tuna pasties, but that’s a bit of a chore and I find myself getting lazy these days.

Last night, I baked eggs—a new discovery for me, and I loved it. Here’s a sort-of recipe:

½ slice sourdough bread

½ can chopped spinach (fresh would be better, but we don’t have it, so I’m making do)

Grated sharp cheddar

2 eggs

2 tsp. milk

Grease an individual casserole dish thoroughly. Line bottom with torn bread. Layer spinach on next and top with generous amount of cheese. Crack two eggs on top, being careful not to break. Salt and pepper to taste, and cover eggs with the milk so they don’t dry out.

Bake at 350 until eggs are set to your personal taste. I like them runny, so you can stir ingredients together.

Wish I’d thought to take a picture. You can vary the layers as you want—a different vegetable, another type of cheese. .Just use the technique.

A thread on the New York Times Cooking Community Facebook page (that’s a mouthful) had varying opinions on creamed tuna—apparently you either love it or hate it. For me, it’s comfort food, and it’s on my to-make list. Here is another sort-of recipe:

1 or 2 green onions, chopped

1 medium stalk celery, diced

1 Tbsp. butter more or less

1 Tbsp. flour more or less

About 1 cup milk

1 can water-packed albacore tuna, flaked

About a half cup or less petit green peas, defrosted

A splash of white wine

Salt and pepper

For serving: toast, rice, pasta, your choice

            Sauté onion and celery until just soft; sprinkle with flour and stir in thoroughly to make a roux. Slowly add milk, stirring as you do, until you get a sauce of the consistency you want. Add tuna and peas and cook over medium-low until warmed through.

I’m going to put mine on a piece of that good rye bread, toasted.

You can use this same technique for chicken or, even—dare I say it?—chipped beef, though for the latter you might want to omit the peas and wine and season with a dash of Worcestershire. Or maybe red wine? Garlic?

Tonight, smothered chicken thighs because I had them in the freezer from a curbside pickup mistake—thought I was ordering four thighs and got four packs of four thighs each. I'll feed the family. This weekend, when we finally get new groceries, we’re going to make a holiday dinner—turkey and dressing and green beans. Darn! Wish I had French’s onion rings, but crushed potato chips will do.

I think that’s part of cooking in quarantine—making do.

           

Cooking in the time of quarantine

Hard to know what to say or where to begin. We are besieged with the contradictory news of bare grocery shelves and the need to have supplies in case the delivery chain breaks down. Should we use our stored staples or cook with fresh ingredients while we can get them? I know I for one am a bit reluctant to use the few cans of tuna I have because I might need them more lately.

I read on MSNBC this morning that toilet paper will soon be overstocked; pallets will sit in grocery aisles because everyone has stocked up and no one is buying. But, the article cautioned, some foods may be in short supply. Still, there will be plenty to eat; we just may have to adapt our menus.

Possibly, this change in lifestyle and the availability of goods will lead us to a more plant-based diet. One food that will be a staple, in my mind, is beans, beans of all kinds.

On the internet, I read lots of posts about people who are finding comfort in cooking. It’s something we can do while isolated, whether we cook for a family or for ourselves alone. One night this week I made a family staple—King Ranch Chicken. Tuna pasties, always a favorite of mine, are in my planning. But this is also the time to experiment, try new recipes. I have recipes for white bean stew with tomatoes, and I’m looking forward to trying that dish. Last Sunday night. I fixed cheese grits with black beans, avocado, and radishes—straight out of the pages of the New York Times, with thanks to Sam Sifton.

One reason I picked this recipe was that son-in-law Christian loves grits and radishes. He may be the only person I’ve ever met who is so crazy about them. But at dinner, I caught him picking the radishes off his entrée and putting them on his salad. I couldn’t help but ask, and he confessed he liked them best cold, not on a hot dish. So there goes that recipe I cut out for pork chops with roasted radishes. And, frankly, the radishes didn’t do as much for me as they apparently  do for him. So color them optional.

Cheese Grits with black beans

What you need to serve four for a main dish:

Chicken broth – about 3 cups

Whole Milk – 2 cups.

Grits – 1 cup.

Black beans – l large can

Cayenne pepper to taste

Butter – 2 Tbsp.

Avocado – 2, sliced

Radishes – 3, sliced

Any other diced vegetable you want - tomatoes, bell pepper, scallions, celery, etc.

            Make grits by stirring together 2-3/4 cups chicken broth, 2 cups whole milk, and 1 cup grits. Cook over low heat—I used my soup kettle, because grits bubble wildly, even on low, and I didn’t want hot grits on my hands or the wall. Stir this occasionally and after about 25 minutes, you should have a creamy, smooth pot of grits. Take it off the heat and stir in a cup of grated sharp cheddar (the original recipe calls for a half cup, but I like them extra cheesy) and the butter. Stir until thoroughly blended in.

For the black beans: drain and rinse, put in saucepan with remaining ¼ cup chicken broth and the cayenne. Cook to heat and let the sauce thicken a bit. Mash a few beans to make it more of a sauce.

Put the grits in four soup plates, top with beans, and garnish with avocado, those optional radishes, and any other vegetable you choose.

PS: Leftover grits are great for breakfast!

A gourmand experience

Our front row seats right by the kitchen

Know what a gourmand is, as opposed to a gourmet? I once worked with a woman who thought gourmand equated with glutton but not always so: the dictionary tells us a gourmand is a person who enjoys eating, a connoisseur. So, for tonight, for this blog, we’ll ignore the side implications about someone who eats too much and is greedy, because I had a gourmand experience last weekend.

My two daughters, two grandsons, and I met an old friend for dinner at Savor, the laboratory restaurant of the Culinary Institute of America in San Antonio. From start to finish, the meal was outstanding. The restaurant itself was not as imposing as I expected—no white linen tablecloths but bare wooden tables and a sort of sleek modern look and a more casual atmosphere. The kitchen was open so we could look in and watch the budding chefs at work; one of the most fascinating aspects to me was watching them close down the kitchen at the end of the evening. We had front-row seats, right by the kitchen.

Corn soup

risotto

With six of us, we ordered a variety of things. I began with a Caesar salad, followed by corn soup. Several at our table had the risotto, and my oldest daughter had mussels. You could choose either three items or four (the price varied accordingly—the pricing was not expensive, except that between us we consumed a lot of wine which drove the total up considerably).

Mussels

I did not have an entrée, but the two most popular at our table were the tenderloin and the yellowtail. Jacob tried roast pork with pork belly, despite my warning that pork belly is a fancy name for fat. His mother was dismayed at the piece of fat on his plate, and the roast meat was too dry. Otherwise, everyone said their entrees were wonderful.

roast pork

beef tenderloin

The frites we ordered for the table were perfectly seasoned and delectable. It would have been a sin to put ketchup on them, and none of us asked—not even the two thirteen-year-old boys among us.

Frites

For dessert we had tarts, which I somehow didn’t get a picture of.

Throughout, the presentation of every dish was as outstanding as the taste. It truly was a wonderful evening.

An epic fail and a standby

One of my neighbors recently lucked into several bunches of leeks and generously shared the wealth. Problem: I’ve never cooked with leeks—a funny admission from someone who likes to cook as much as I do. I dithered about what to fix—Prudence, the giver, was making a leek quiche, but quiche wouldn’t go over well here. I narrowed it down to leeks au gratin or potato/leek soup. Decided to serve it on Sunday night when we were having hash (the other part of today’s story), so I thought the soup would be too much potato.

I made the gratin the way I do for Brussel sprouts and artichokes, with a sauce of mayonnaise, aa bit of lemon, some sour cream and celery salt. What I didn’t take into account is that the artichokes and sprouts are pre-cooked, and the leeks needed to maybe be poached in broth or something. They were too crisp, their flavor too harsh—when I had assured my family they had a delicate flavor. I have fished out and enjoyed the artichoke hearts and am saving the sauce, but today may be the day to pitch the whole thing.

When I was feeding my kids, I always made hash out of leftover turkey, potatoes and gravy. So I don’t know why I’ve never thought of making hash any other time than post-holiday—or with any other meat. (With the exception of canned corn beef hash which I have been known to enjoy slathered with ketchup.)

Last week I presented Jordan with several recipes I thought might be good for Sunday supper, and she chose chicken hash. Like a newbie cook, I followed the recipe slavishly—until I realized I’ve been making hash for years and knew how to do it. Here’s what I did: 

Chicken hash

1 large baking potato

1 whole chicken breast (you could use breast of a rotisserie chicken)

2 Tbsp. butter, more if needed.

½ cup coarsely diced onion

1 small stalk celery, with leaves, sliced

1 large garlic clove, minced

Pinch of thyme

Salt and pepper to taste

½ cup chicken broth (I used the Better than Bouillon concentrate)

¼ c. heavy cream

            Boil the potato. Set aside to cool; peel and dice coarsely—pieces about ½ inch square

Poach the chicken with salt, pepper, a bay leaf, some celery leaves, whatever you have. Set aside to cool and then dice like the potato.

Sauté onion, garlic, celery until onion is soft and translucent. Add potato and sauté until browned and a bit crisp. Add the chicken. Stir in thyme, salt, and pepper and then broth and cream. Cook over medium heat until liquid is absorbed, giving it an occasional stir. If it gets too dry—mine did—add a bit more broth. The hash should take on a lovely golden-brown color.

Serves two generously, four with smaller helpings.

Who knew that old-fashioned hash could be so good? I didn’t even need ketchup.

More on Sunday suppers

         

Smashed potatoes

   If you’ve followed my blogs at all, you know Sunday supper has been a big deal for me and my family for many years. It’s a time for the family to come together, share our week past and our hopes for the coming week. All over food, which I truly believe binds people together almost as much as prayer.

I’m also a fan of the almost daily email column from Sam Sifton, food editor at the New York Times. So I was delighted to find that Sifton has a new cookbook, out this week: See You on Sunday. Sifton believes, as I do, that people want a sense of belonging, and where better to find it than at the table. When people show up, he advises, feed them.

His book is a guide to preparing meals for a group larger than the average American family of four. (I used to feed about 15 on a Sunday night when my kids were in high school.) Pushing it on the TODAY show, Sifton fried chicken. The recipes seem chosen for the average cook, a refreshing change from a man whose recipes often call for dukkah, za’atar, harissa and houlamie. Certainly the table of contents is reassuringly familiar, with chapters on pasta and pizza, big meats, big pots, birds, and salads.

In the chapter on seafood, for instance, there are directions for roast fish, grilled fish, fish chowder, fish cakes, and so on. Your basics. A chapter on rice and beans offers discussions of white, brown, and wild rice, followed by a recipe for pilaf and then goes for the gold with paella. And red beans and rice, of course.

One of my weaknesses is that I copy or print recipes that sound wonderful but are so complicated that I know I’ll never fix them, cooking as I do on a hot plate and or in toaster oven. One such I recently found was for cabbage rolls stuffed not with beef and rice but with a chicken mixture and in a velvety cream sauce instead of the traditional red. I’m quite sure Sifton’s book doesn’t offer me those temptations.

But here’s what I did last Sunday night:

Salmon filet

1 lb. salmon

Olive oil

Minced parsley

Chopped garlic

Grated Parmesan

            Slather the filet with oil. Top with parsley, garlic, and cheese. Wrap in non-stick foil and bake at 400^o for 15 minutes. My family thought it underdone, and we put it back for another five minutes, but I like my salmon closer to underdone than overdone. With this I served smashed potatoes. The fish was delicious and the potatoes good but not as crisp as I’d like.



Smashed potatoes

12 small potatoes (new red potatoes work but I used Yukon gold, about the size of a golf ball)

1 Tbsp. olive oil

Salt and pepper

3 Tbsp. butter, melted

I have seen far more complicated directions, with herbs and a complex sauce, but I went for simplicity and am glad I did. Boil potatoes until you can put a fork through them, but they are still firm, not mushy. Grease a glass baking dish with the olive oil. Put the potatoes in the dish and use a potato masher to smash each one individually. Paint the potatoes with olive oil, using a pastry brush. Salt and pepper to taste and pour butter over them. Bake 40 minutes at 350^o.

I think too much butter prevented them from crisping up. My daughter put leftovers in a toaster oven, and they got crisp. You might try a higher temperature or a quick broil at the end of cooking time.

And here’s what I did with a tiny bit of leftover salmon: added one chopped green onion, about four slices cucumber, peeled and diced, juice of half a lemon, and enough mayonnaise to bind. Don’t make soup by adding too much mayo.

Happy Sunday dinner. Now I have to figure out what we’ll have this coming Sunday. Wish I already had Sifton’s book.

A recipe with a back story

One of my kids’ favorite dishes growing up was something I called green noodles. It’s quick and easy, vegetarian if that matters to you, and relatively inexpensive. It is not low-fat, at least not the way I do it. But there’s a story.

Way back when my brother was a bachelor Navy pilot in Corpus Christi, he courted a woman who had two children and little money. She used to tell that one night he was coming for supper and she had no money for groceries. So she cooked with what she had—spaghetti, pasta, and lemon. She made the simplest version ever of a lemon sauce—and he liked it. After they were married, I ate this dish many times at their table. (She is also the one who used to sauté sauerkraut in butter, slowly sprinkling it with sugar and turning, until it caramelizes—neither my brother nor I have ever mastered that since).

When I had children of my own, I gradually began to change the dish. The first big change was to use spinach fettucine in place of spaghetti. Then I thought chopped green onions might add a bit to it. Sliced mushrooms came next, and I loved the way they absorbed the lemon flavor. Quartered artichoke hearts came next, and like the mushrooms, absorbed the lemon flavor in a delicious way. Finally, I thought if you add Parmesan to traditional spaghetti sauce, maybe it would be good on green noodles. It was (though nowadays I prefer pecorino).

For many years that was how I served green noodles. But in recent years, I’ve had bumper crops of basil, more than I could use in daily cooking. So I made pesto and froze it in old-fashioned plastic ice cube trays so that I could pop one out whenever I needed it. A cube of pesto added the finishing touch to green noodles.

Pesto

            Pine nuts are traditional in pesto, but being a good Texan, I prefer pecans.

Combine in food processor:

3 c. packed fresh basil leaves

4 cloves garlic, peeled

¾ c. grated Parmesan

½ c. olive oil

¼ c. chopped pecans

½ c. chopped parsley

Process until smooth. Will only keep in the refrigerator three or four day but freezes well.

Green Noodles

1 16-0z. pkg. spinach egg noodles

1 stick butter (you may want to use less, but I like plenty of sauce)

8 oz. mushrooms, sliced (I always buy whole and slice them myself)

4 scallions, chopped

1 can quartered artichoke hearts, drained

1 ice-cube size piece of pesto, thawed, or about 1 Tbsp.

Juice of one lemon

Cook and drain noodles. Melt butter in the skillet. Sauté the mushrooms and scallions in the butter. Add lemon juice to taste—I like lots. Toss in the pesto and stir to blend. Add noodles and toss to coat. Top with grated cheese.

My daughter-in-law Melanie used to do a slightly different version for her daughters when they were young. At a young age, both girls seemed to prefer savory to sweet, so Melanie cooked angel hair pasta and buttered it liberally; then she added lemon juice and capers. I watched in amazement one day as she dumped capers in out of the jar, not bothering to drain them (as I always do, with some difficulty). “Oh, yeah,” she said, “the juice adds a really good taste.” I tried it, and she was right.

Buon appetito!

I can't resist adding a funny thing with an Italian twist that I saw on Facebook. Police raided the home of an Italian family, looking for marijuana I suppose, and came up with 50 lbs. of dried basil. Gosh, I hope they don't come search my freezer!

The easiest pasta—or is it?

One of the earliest versions of mac and cheese was a thirteenth-century dish known as “de lasanis”—pasta with cheese. Today, Italians call it cacio e pepe—literally cheese and pepper. It has four ingredients—cheese, butter, pepper and pasta. Not even any garlic. You make it in your skillet, so it’s a quick preparation that doesn’t leave you with the kitchen full of dirty dishes some pasta dishes require. Anthony Bourdain once said cacio e pepe “could be the greatest thing in the history of the world.”

So what’s difficult about this? Getting that sauce right so that it’s velvety and smooth and coats every strand of pasta. Get it wrong, and you have pasta floating in cheese clumps in a thin and greasy sauce. It’s happened to me more times than I care to count. It’s a question of getting the pasta water and butter to blend together smoothly.

I’ve read that some chefs say the trick is in the flick of the wrist, learning to toss the pasta in the skillet at just the right angle. Others claim it’s the ingredients—you must use fresh cracked pepper. It’s not just a flavor accent in this dish. It is the flavor. And not any cheese will do—fresh, finely ground pecorino (a sharper Italian cheese than Parmesan). Grated cheese won’t work as well, because the pieces won’t melt and adhere to the pasta as well. Use your microoplane to achieve a texture on the cheese that will blend well.

Every chef makes cacio e pepe differently, and there are plenty of directions on the internet. But here’s a version I’ve had some luck with.

Ingredients

1 lb. fresh linguine or spaghetti

½ c. butter

1 oz. finely ground Pecorino cheese

Freshly ground black pepper to taste

Notes on the ingredients: use a European-style butter. It has been churned longer, sometimes allowed to ferment just a bit, and—this is important—has a higher fat content. I prefer Kerry Gold.

As for linguine, unless  you have the seasoned palate of a trained chef, dried will probably be just fine. If you make your own pasta, more power to you—the dish will be better. But in spite of experiments with one of my sons, I have never mastered making fresh pasta. It’s a lot of work.

I sometimes use spinach linguine for a nice variation in flavor, but I’m sure Italian chefs would recoil in horror.

Directions:

Cook pasta. Some chefs says to cook no more than two servings at a time, so the pasta and sauce have enough space to blend in the skillet. If you follow this, cut this recipe in half.

Melt half the butter in a large, heavy skillet. Use tongs to transfer the pasta to the skillet. Stir to coat.

Add 1 cup pasta water. Add remaining butter. Shake and stir until water reduces and forms a creamy sauce. Remove from heat.

Stir in cheese and pepper.

An added flourish if you’re feeling rich: top it with 2 oz. sliced truffles.

The nice thing about this is that, except for the truffles, you probably have everything on hand. And it sure beats elbow macaroni with powdered or processed cheese for the sauce.

Next week: Green noodles. Somewhat like cacio e pepe but with more ingredients. The vegetarian dish  has a history in my family and has long been a favorite.