Smooth as velvet

 

Obviously several years ago, but here are the boys in the kitchen.
Christian is often in the kitchen, cooking for us. Yum!

Christian fixed Mongolian beef for our dinner the other night, using flank steak. It was everything I don’t associate with flank steak—tender, flavorful, delicious. His secret? He “velvets” the meat. So I asked him to explain.

Ever notice that when you eat stir fry in a Chinese restaurant the meat has a special tender quality that you never can achieve at home? It’s due to velveting, a Chinese cooking method used primarily for stir fries but useful in all kinds of dishes.

Christian, a great cook who loves to experiment, was researching Asian cooking and came across the velveting technique. You don’t often, he said, see the words “velvet” and “beef” in the same sentence. The name may come from a velvet-like texture on the outside of meat that has been treated. Or some descriptions say the meat becomes “soft as velvet.” At the same time, velveting locks in moisture.

Christian tried it and found it was genius for cheaper cuts of meat like flank steak or sirloin that you intend to cut into strips for anything from stroganoff to tacos al carbon. Velveting tenderizes round steak for chicken-fried and is magic for some chicken dishes. Recently, I made coq au vin, with white wine and chicken instead of the traditional red and beef, and the sauce was delicious but the chicken too chewy—Christian said next time he’ll pound it flat and velvet it for me.

Velveting is fairly easy but it does add time to the cooking process. You slice the meat against the grain first, to expose all those tough fibers. It does not work as well with one large piece of meat.

Next, make a slurry of 1 Tbsp. cornstarch, 1 Tbsp. rice vinegar, 1 tsp. salt, and one egg white. Whip the mixture as though you’re making scrambled eggs. Then pour it over the meat, stirring to be sure all strips are evenly coated, as you would with a marinade. Let the meat sit in the mixture for thirty minutes, and then dip it in boiling water or boiling oil for 45 seconds. (Christian always uses water because working with boiling oil is difficult and dangerous—and it would take a lot of oil.) Drain the meat on a plate coated with paper towels.

There is another method, slightly easier. Simply coat the meat with baking soda and after the thirty minutes rinse. If you let it sit at all longer than the half hour, the taste of the meat will be affected by the baking soda. Christian prefers the slurry method (though he wishes for a better word).

Christian Burton’s Mongolian Beef

1 lb. flank steak, thinly sliced, cut into bite-size pieces, and velveted

¼ cup cornstarch

½ tsp kosher salt

½ tsp finely ground black pepper

2 Tbsp. sesame oil

1/3 cup light soy sauce

1/3 cup water

2 tsp. freshly grated ginger

3-4 garlic cloves, minced or micro planed

½ cup dark brown sugar

½ cup vegetable oil

¼ tsp. red pepper flakes, optional

2-3 green onioned, chopped, for garnish

Sesame seeds, for garnish

Heat sesame oil, soy sauce, water, ginger, garlic, and red pepper flakes in small saucepan and simmer until mixture reduces by one-fourth. Remove from stove and set aside.

Separately toss beef pieces in cornstarch, salt, and pepper.

Heat vegetable oil in large skillet over medium heat. Working in batches, if necessary, cook beef in a single layer. Each piece should have a crispy crust on both sides. Drain excess oil from the meat on a plate lined with paper towels.

After the beef is cooked, wipe out skillet with a paper towel to remove leftover grease. Add the beef and the soy mixture to the skillet and again let it cook over medium heat until liquid is reduced to a thick glaze. Do not cook until all liquid is evaporated—you want that delicious sauce.

Serve at once over white rice and garnish with sesame seeds and green onions. Chopsticks not required.

 

Easy chicken casseroles

 

No, don’t yawn just because I mentioned casseroles. Those venerable reminders of the 1950s dinner table are among my favorite foods. But I am increasingly in the minority. Last night I fixed the entrée for a potluck with three friends. When I said I’d do a chicken casserole, one, watching her carbs, replied, “I don’t mind a casserole as long as there is a salad too.” It was sort of a left-handed compliment, but her thinking was that casseroles are usually heavy with pasta. She was pleasantly surprised last night.

So I thought I’d share two of my favorite chicken casseroles, sans pasta. A caution about chicken: somehow, I have lost the ability to poach or steam chicken so that it is tender. (After I made coq au vin with chewy chicken, Christian said he’d pound and velvet it for me next time.) For these casseroles and a lot of other dishes, I rely on rotisserie chickens. The catch with those ready-to-use birds is that they are often really high in sodium. Locally, I think Central Market chickens have the lowest amount. Since everything from soy sauce to canned soups is available in low-sodium form, you’d think they’d get around to roasting low-sodium chickens. Another hint: it’s much easier to bone a rotisserie chicken when you first get it home and it’s still hot. The meat slides off the bone. If you stick it in the fridge to bone later, it’s a whole different, difficult, and messy chore. (Jordan debones for me as soon as she gets home with groceries.) I usually have one or two deboned chickens in my freezer, ready to use. One chicken  yields about 2 cups of meat. A few stores offer breasts only, which I prefer. More meat for your buck.

Baked chicken salad casserole

2 cups chopped chicken

3 hard-boiled eggs, grated or sliced (I chopped them)

1-1/2 cups minced celery (do string your celery first)

2 cans cream of mushroom soup

4 tsp. finely minced onion (I used green onions)

½ cup mayonnaise

Juice of one lemon

1 tsp. salt

½ tsp. pepper

Crushed potato chips

Once you get everything chopped, this is a breeze to make. Layer the chicken, celery and eggs in a lightly greased casserole dish (I used 4 x 6 or thereabouts—I think 9 x 13 is too big). Mix remaining ingredients and pour over meat mixture. Top with crushed potato chips and bake at 350^o for 20-30 minutes. Watch that the potato chips don’t burn.

Curried chicken salad casserole

For this you need to plan ahead, and you need a fridge-to-oven dish. If you have some valuable old Corningware, it’s perfect. This is a cold dish—salad really—with a hot topping.

3 c. cooked chicken

2 cups sliced or diced celery

2 tsp. curry powder

1 tsp. lemon juice

¾ cups mayonnaise

½ cup sour cream

2 cups crushed potato chips

1 cup sharp cheddar cheese, grated.

           Mix everything together except the cheese and chips. Refrigerate overnight. Just before serving, top the casserole with potato chips and cheese mixed. Run it under the broiler just long enough to melt the cheese. Again, watch carefully—the topping scorches easily.

It strikes me that there is one basic sauce for chicken that you can vary slightly and make several dishes. It involves cream of mushroom soup (I’m not at all shy about admitting I love to cook with canned soups), mayonnaise, and sour cream. The other night I made white coq au vin and realized it was much the same as these two recipes but with wine. And lemon juice is often the distinguishing touch.

The best dinner ever…

 

Picture from The New York Times online cooking column

A few days ago, I bragged on the cooking skills of one of my grands; today I want to brag on my own cooking. The other night I fixed one of the best dinners I’ve done in a long time. In fact, Jordan pronounced it “the best dinner ever,” and Jacob liked it well enough to request the recipe for a file he’s keeping of things he really likes. It was baked cod with a buttery cracker topping.

My local family loves salmon—and those shrimp I’m allergic to—but they weren’t much on fish in general. I sauteed Dover sole one night, but it is as fragile as it is delicate in flavor and fell apart so that we ended up with fish hash—tasty but no eye appeal. The last time I tried cod I overcooked it, so we swore off it for a while. But the other night I got it just right—done enough for Jordan who has a horror of raw, yet still moist and flavorful. And it looked terrific. I am so sorry I forgot to take a picture, but I have “borrowed” the one that came with the recipe.

Cooking hint: when cooking fish filets with crumb topping, spread a thin layer of mayonnaise on the fish before adding the topping. It both hold the crumbs in place and keeps the fish moist. This is my addition and not in the recipe. Texas residents may remember the Black-Eyed Pea chain of restaurants and particularly their whitefish with crumb topping. I learned the mayo tip from them, I think.

Cooking hint two: for buttery crackers, you can’t beat Ritz original.

The crumb topping for this recipe was seasoned with plenty of butter, lemon zest and juice, salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, and chives (I used green onion tops). You can find the recipe here: Baked Cod With Buttery Cracker Topping Recipe - NYT Cooking (nytimes.com) I hope the paywall doesn’t keep you out.

The topping was so good on its own that I used it the next night to make salmon patties from my last can of good salmon, canned fresh where it was caught on the Oregon coast. (I hope to be able to order more in the spring when the salmon run again.) Salmon patties are a favorite from my childhood, and I often make them just for me. Mom called them croquettes, insisted on nothing but saltines for binding ingredients together, and then rolled the little round logs in more crushed saltines. I found the croquette shape to hard to deal with, patties much easier, and forgot the idea of a crumb coating. I also switched to Ritz crackers—they crush easily into fine crumbs. Ordinarily I season with salt and pepper, maybe a bit of dry mustard and a dash of Worcestershire, but with those already seasoned crumbs I just added egg to the salmon and then enough crumbs to make a mixture that would hold together. Usually it’s one egg for a 7 oz. can of salmon; last night, because my eggs were small, I used two.

With both the cod and the salmon cakes, I served a lemon/butter sauce: You can find it here: Lemon Butter Sauce Recipe (Versatile & Easy) | Kitchn (thekitchn.com) If I’ve said it before, it’s worth repeating: kitchn.com is a terrific source of recipes—and cleaning tips, though the latter don’t interest me nearly as much.

Next on my fish list: either salmon piccata or salmon with spinach and artichoke hearts. Wish I felt like splurging on lobster.

Betty Crocker cooks Chicken Stroganoff

 

A Betty Crocker catalog from the 1970s

Yesterday about noon I asked Jordan what was for supper, and she said, “I’m working on it.” Off the top of my head, I volunteered to make Chicken Stroganoff which I thought was in one of the cookbooks I’ve published. Turns out it wasn’t. How hard could it be? We just had Hamburger Stroganoff, I had a deboned rotisserie chicken in the freezer, and it seemed to me the principle would be the same—just chicken and chicken broth instead of beef. To be sure, I went online where I found complicated recipes with long lines of ingredients. But I found one that was fairly quick and easy. And guess whose name was on it? Betty Crocker.

Betty is a hundred this year. General Mills, who owns the fictional character, intends to keep her around for another hundred years. The iconic baker first appeared in response to letters from home bakers who wanted cooking advice. When the Washburn Crosby Company (later reorganized as General Mills) ran a contest promoting Gold Medal Flour, they were overwhelmed with letters asking for help, so Betty was born. Her first name was chosen because it sounded friendly; the last name was in tribute to a retired board member named Crocker. In no time Betty was on radio with “Betty Crocker’s Cooking School of the Air.” Her cookbooks appeared, often the first cookbook a young girl was given when she left the nest. The first product to bear her name was a pea soup mix. In the Depression, Betty dispensed advice on stretching what food a housewife had. She was among the best-known women in America, second only to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Today, she has her own web site, an entry in Wikipedia, and an online catalog. You can buy a Bett Crock mug, counter-top pizza maker, or any of countless cookbooks—even one titled Betty Crocker’s Lost Recipes which features vintage recipes. An online search turns up recipes from chili and Sloppy Joe to pineapple upside-down cake—remember when that was classic?  You can buy mixes for cakes, cookies, biscuits, muffins, and even casseroles. And what does this fictional character look like? There have been eight portraits over the years, but today she looks remarkably like she did a hundred years ago—your average American housewife, with straight brown hair framing her face and a slight, pleasant smile. Someone you’d ask for the best meatloaf recipe.

Here's her chicken Stroganoff, slightly adapted:

Chicken Stroganoff

¼ cup flour

1 tsp. paprika

½ tsp. each salt and pepper

4 Tbsp. butter (divided)

½ c. chopped onion

½ lb. baby button mushrooms, sliced

About two cups diced, cooked chicken

1-1/4 c. chicken broth

1 Tbsp. Worcestershire 

½ c. white wine   

1 cup sour cream

              Mix together flour, paprika, salt and pepper and set aside. Melt 2 Tbsp. butter in 12-inch skillet (or thereabouts) and sauté onion and mushroom until onions are translucent and mushrooms have released their liquid. Add remaining butter to skillet, add chicken, and let it brown slightly. Sprinkle flour mixture over skillet contents and stir to coat thoroughly. Gradually stir in broth, stirring constantly as mixture thickens. Stir in white wine. Simmer until serving time.

              When ready to serve, stir in one cup sour cream. Do not let mixture boil! Serve over egg noodles. We had shredded Brussel sprout with lemon as an accompaniment.                                                            

The joy of brown butter sauce

 

Ravioli with brown butter sauce
Salad of sliced pear, radish, and blue cheese
chardonnay
a menu fit for a fine restaurant

In my recent no-holds-barred cleanout of my refrigerator and freezer, I discovered a twelve-pack of frozen wild mushroom/truffle ravioli. No idea when or why I got them, though I think I expected them to be smaller, appetizer size, and they must have been on sale. I have blogged about this before, so if I’m repeating myself, please forgive me.

My dilemma was what do you put on mushroom/truffle pasta. Eating it without any sauce did not appeal. Both marinara and Alfredo would smother the ravioli, I thought. I took the problem to the Facebook page of “Not the New York Times Cooking Community” (it used to the “The New York Times Cooking Community” until the newspaper disowned us). A wide variety of voices contribute ideas, recipes, pictures, equipment recommendations, renovation suggestions. Some of the contributors are way above my grade level, especially in baking, and I suspect some professional chefs lurk. Occasionally someone will get testy, but generally it’s a good-natured group.

And they are willing to answer questions, so I posed my dilemma and was deluged with answers. I bet I got a hundred responses, everything from marinara lightened with cream to pasta water and butter. Cream sauce, either as is or reduced, was mentioned several times. Someone suggested butter and sherry vinegar, someone else, Hollandaise, which I love but think might also have overwhelmed, and someone said pesto. But the one sauce that showed up most often was brown butter with sage.

I knew about brown butter of course, have eaten dishes incorporating it in restaurants, but never worked with it at home. Truth: I was a bit intimidated. But I found a recipe that was specific for ravioli and adapted it, both in amount and ingredients. The recipe called for chopped walnuts, which I thought added the wrong texture (I don’t like to find nuts in my salads either). It also called for a tiny bit of fresh spinach, which I think would have been wonderful for taste and visual appeal, but I didn’t have any and wasn’t going to the store for a quarter pound of spinach. Fresh sage was specified—my neighbor offered hers, but I have rubbed sage in the fridge and thought it would be fine. So I set about my experiment.

Because in the cottage I can’t cook two things at once, I made the sauce first. It takes a long time to brown butter without burning it, slow and easy and lots of stirring. I wasn’t sure what shade brown I was looking for, but I kept stirring until the butter smelled nutty and looked fairly brown. Some time in the stirring I added minced garlic, but I think another time pressed would work better—if I didn’t want tiny pieces of nuts, I didn’t want to chomp down on a mince of garlic either. You want the garlic to turn golden without burning.

I pulled the sauce from the hot plate and made plated salads of sliced pear, fresh radish, and blue cheese, dressed with a light olive oil and lemon vinaigrette and garnished with watercress. And then it was time to cook the ravioli—a new procedure for me. The trick they say is to let them pop to the surface of the water, but they popped so quickly I knew they weren’t done. I guessed at the timing and ended up with them a bit too much on the al dente side.

Showtime: ravioli in soup plates, with the sauce over them. And oops, much later I realized I had forgotten the sage. I still have six ravioli in the freezer, so next time. It was a good learning lesson and a good dinner besides. Here’s what I recommend:

Ravioli with brown butter and sage

Three or four medium size ravioli per person (some will be ambitious and make their own, but in spite of having made pasta years ago, I’m going to buy frozen)

1 clove garlic, pressed

4 or 5 Tbsp. butter (no substitutes)

½ tsp. dried sage or a handful of fresh leaves

¼ lb. fresh spinach (frozen will not work)

Salt and pepper

Parmesan or pecorino

 

For the ravioli: bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Cook ravioli until tender. If you’re lucky, the package will give you a guide to time. Drain, reserving ¼ cup pasta water.

Put butter in a large skillet and melt over medium-low heat, stirring all the time. The butter will sizzle and them foam—add the pressed garlic at this point and keep stirring until it is a deep, golden-brown. At least five minutes, though it seemed a lot longer. Remove from heat and stir in sage. Add spinach and reserved pasta water and stir. Put cooked ravioli in the skillet. Toss to coat and briefly reheat at a low setting. To serve, sprinkle with grated Parmesan or Pecorino and optional cracked pepper.

A bonus: I had leftover brown butter, so last night I used it to brown ground sirloin for Hamburger Stroganoff. Added a bit of new flavor! I think I’ll find lots of uses for brown butter now and may store some in the freezer.

What’s for dinner?

 

Lamb ragu
(Not my picture)

   “Scottish Memories: Recipes, Photos, Shared Memories” is a Facebook page that I feel I sort of snuck on to through the back door. I am fierce about my Scottish heritage, but I almost never cook anything that could be called Scottish, and while I have eaten haggis with neeps and tatties, I probably wouldn’t order it again. The moderator of the site, who I think lives in Central Europe and must do this for nostalgic reasons, asks each day, “What’s for dinner tonight?”

Sometimes it’s something clearly Scottish, but lots of other cuisines show up—fish and chips, mince, scones, chicken with naan wraps, pasta dishes, stews and soups. I like to see what people are cooking—pictures and text—and sometimes when I think whatever I’m cooking is appropriate, I chime in. Today, I’d probably answer that I’d like to fix a stew (not that I really will since I’m eating alone tonight). But stew sounds ordinary to me, no matter how good it is. Much classier to fix a ragu (see where I was headed with this all along?). So on my mind today for some reason is a good lamb ragu—hearty and warming on this bitter cold day.

In Italian cooking ragu is a sauce made with ground meat, onions, tomato puree, and red wine. What’s the difference between a ragu and a ragout? Language. The latter is French and doesn’t necessarily contain meat. You can do a fish ragout or vegetable. Ragu comes from ragout.

Back to Scotland for a moment: the Scots have always eaten more lamb than we Texans, or so I believed until I went to Scotland and never saw lamb on a menu. In Texas, I think we see more lamb offered today than we did twenty years ago, and I for one often cook it. So here’s my favorite quick and easy lamb ragu recipe (if you really do not like lamb, you could undoubtedly do this with ground beef).

Lamb ragu

2 Tbsp. olive oil

1 medium onion, copped

4 garlic cloves, minced

Salt and pepper to taste

2 anchovy filets

¼ c. tomato paste

1 lb. ground lamb or beef

28 oz. can crushed tomatoes

1 cup red wine

Pasta, cooked

Grated Parmesan or Pecorino cheese

Sauté the onion and garlic in olive oil until translucent. Be careful not to scorch the garlic. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Add the anchovies (Do not omit—your ragu will not taste fishy; in fact, you’ll not know they are there, but they add to the richness of the dish). Cook until anchovies fall apart.

Add tomato paste and stir so it doesn’t stick or scorch! Add the ground meat, using a wooden spoon to break it up, and cook until it browns—it will sizzle. Finally add the crushed tomatoes and a cup of red wine. Season again with salt and pepper and stir to mix and scrape up any browned bits.

Reduce heat and simmer until sauce thickens—30-45 minutes.

Serve in pasta bowls over pasta, sprinkled with grated cheese.

Up your chicken soup game

 

Chicken soup in a pot
(not my picture)

Much of the country has already seen fierce winter storms. Even in Texas, we’ve had frigid cold temperatures. But it’s only mid-January, and it’s a pretty sure bet winter isn’t done with us. In Fort Worth, we wait for “stock show weather” which usually brings ice, sleet, and snow in late January. It’s time to step up your chicken soup game.

Better than Best Chicken Soup

2 Tbsp. olive oil

½ yellow onion, sliced or diced

2 carrots, diced

2 stalks celery, sliced

Salt and pepper

1 packet dry ranch dressing seasoning

4 cups chicken broth, low sodium preferred

1 can cream of chicken soup

3 cups cooked chicken

8 oz. spaghetti, uncooked

8 slices bacon, cooked and crumbled

1 cup sharp cheddar cheese, grated

1 cup half and half

Heat olive oil in large soup pot and sauté onion, carrots and celery until softened Season with salt and pepper to taste. Add dry ranch mix and stir to coat vegetables evenly. Cook one minute.

Add chicken broth and cream of chicken soup. Stir together, and then add spaghetti, bacon, and chicken. Cook over medium heat for fifteen minutes or until spaghetti is al dente and veggies tender.

Add cheddar and half-and-half and cook another five minutes. Serve.

Perfect antidote to winter’s worst blast.