Chinese Eat-In

Mondays are my grocery shopping day. For the record, Monday is not a terribly good day to grocery shop because the shelves are often nearly bare following the busy shopping weekend. Nevertheless, when I retired, I designated Mondays as my shopping day, and, despite frequent frustration at not finding certain items, so it continues to be. But I’m not stubborn….

I used to like grocery shopping. That’s because I really like to cook, and it’s fun strolling around leisurely (now that I’m retired) looking at the various ingredients I can use in my recipes. Any more, however, I find shopping to be extremely depressing. Prices haven’t just crept up; in some cases, they have sprung to nearly unaffordable heights seemingly overnight. I picked up a pound of bacon today and nearly fainted at the cost. I’m not exaggerating. When I gasped, a woman who was also considering the bacon looked at me and said, “No sh**!” True story. Grocery prices are making nuns swear. (That part’s not true; she wasn’t a nun.)

Anyhoo, I am always looking at ways to save money. I recently watched a cooking show on television that is specifically focused on feeding your family inexpensively. This particular show featured Chinese recipes so delicious, the perky cook promised, that you will no longer feel any need to order Chinese delivery. Now, I appreciate her attempt to help me save money, because there is no way around it – when you order Chinese, you spend at least $20 to $30 plus tip. But, homemade Chinese food, unless you are Ming Tsai (the illustrious host of PBS’ Simply Ming) just does not compare to Chinese take out. Plus, you don’t have those cute little white boxes or the fortune cookies that taste like they have been in the restaurant’s pantry since the Ming Dynasty.

But remembering the price of that bacon, I went to my old recipe box in which I knew I had some Chinese recipes that I had clipped out of newspapers years ago and never made (because homemade Chinese food does not compare to Chinese take out). The first recipe I found was for hot and sour soup, which I love. As I perused the recipe, I noticed that the first ingredient was tree mushrooms. Ah ha. That’s why I never attempted homemade hot and sour soup.

Having said all of the above, I believe we can make really good food with the taste of China if we put our minds to it. We just need to recognize that we are not going to be making food for which a Chinese mother-in-law would yearn. But let’s face it. If your mother-in-law is Chinese, you will be eating as often as possible at her house anyway.

I recently found a wonderful and easy recipe for Chinese chicken wings at one of my favorite websites, Allrecipes.com. These wings are delicious, healthy (since they are baked rather than fried), and are really good if you serve them with some stir-fried vegetables. I like steamed broccoli sprinkled with soy sauce and toasted sesame seeds. Or if you want to make it really easy on yourself, just buy a bag of frozen stir-fried vegetables.

The recipe is for five pounds, so cut it down to meet your needs. Also, it calls for marinating the wings for eight hours or overnight. While you can make them without marinating them, they really are better if they sit in the marinade for a day.

Xiǎngshòu nǐ de shíwù (which means "enjoy your food").

Yo Yo

Last night I had a quadruple whammy.

Problem #1: Because of a health issue, I am currently (and temporarily) on a low- to no-fiber diet – not as easy as you would think;

Problem #2: A couple of nights ago, I came down with a cold, which for some reason has knocked me on my bee-hind;

Problem #3: We had plans to have dinner with my stepmother, but because of my cold, we had to cancel; as a result, I had nothing planned for dinner, and little to work with; and

Problem #4: It was Friday, and as a Catholic, I am not eating meat on Fridays during Lent.

But since I think I could be breathing my last breath and still be hungry, and because my husband does not cook (and I mean never – something I knew prior to marrying him so I can’t complain) and was looking at me with woeful eyes, I had to put on my thinking cap.

(As an aside, I’ll bet none of you under the age of 40 knows where that term thinking cap came from, and many of you over the age of 40 can’t remember – perhaps because you aren’t wearing your thinking caps. But I digress.)

There are a few things that I recommend you always have on hand in your pantry. Among those are fresh garlic, extra virgin olive oil, some kind of Parmesan cheese, and pasta. And I had all of those ingredients in my pantry. The result? I was able to put together a healthy dinner –Pasta Aglio e Olio – in literally the time it took to cook my pasta (which, since I used gemelli, was eight minutes).

Here’s how you do it.

Bring a big pot of heavily salted water to a boil. It is better if you bring the water to a boil and then add your salt as the water will come to a boil quicker without salt; however, when I do that, I almost always forget to add the salt. Sigh.

Once your water is at a rolling boil and is salted, add however much pasta you need. Typically, spaghetti is used for this traditional Italian dish. Last night I chose to use gemelli. Gemelli is one of my favorite pastas, and I find it hard to get. Gemelli means “twin” in Italian, and gemelli pasta is two short strands of pasta twisted together. I found it recently at a wonderful Italian deli and market in Scottsdale. Since I used it last night, I must wait until I’m back in Arizona to replenish. Sigh again. And again, I digress.

Once your pasta is in the water boiling away, put about ½ c. of extra virgin olive oil in a skillet and begin warming the oil. Mince anywhere from four to six cloves of fresh garlic – depending on how much you like garlic, but remembering that aglio e olio translated from Italian to English means garlic and olive oil. Garlic is key to this dish, and if you don’t like garlic, you shouldn’t be making this particular recipe.

Place the minced garlic into the oil in your skillet, and slowly brown the garlic. (I have learned the hard way that garlic turns from golden to burned very quickly, so I emphasize slowly. Keep your temperature down. Burned garlic is bitter.) Also add a pinch of red pepper flakes. Red pepper flakes are traditional in spaghetti aglio e olio, and I always have them on hand. However, if you don’t, forge ahead without.

Once the garlic is golden brown, add a ladle of water from the pot in which you are cooking your pasta. Let this water cook a bit in your skillet until the amount diminishes a bit, but doesn’t disappear. When your pasta is slightly undercooked, use a slotted spoon or tongs and put the pasta into the skillet with the garlic and pepper flakes. Mix thoroughly. Let it finish cooking for a minute or so, and then turn off your heat. Add Parmesan cheese and minced Italian parsley (if you have it, which I didn’t last night).

Serve with bread, a salad, etc.

A couple of notes: If you only have regular olive oil rather than extra virgin olive oil, use it, because I’d rather have you use that instead of not making the dish. However, you can buy extra virgin olive oil at a fairly reasonable price (you can also buy it at a price that would require you to take out a second mortgage), and you should really have it on your shelf if you want to be a serious cook. Do not use any other kind of oil in this particular recipe.

And regarding your cheese, parmigiano reggiano is, in my opinion, the most delicious cheese in the world (well, I could probably be talked out of that opinion since I love so many cheeses), but it is painfully expensive. Buy it when you can afford it. When you can’t, use regular Parmesan cheese. Don’t use, however, the kind that’s in a little container that looks like a sink cleaner. Buy it in the cheese department.

My favorite neighborhood pizzaria makes spaghetti aglio e olio, but has shortened the name to Spaghetti Yo Yo. Clever.

By the way, thinking cap comes from Tom Terrific, a cartoon character from what was my absolute favorite program as a child – Captain Kangaroo. It’s unnerving how many times I use names of characters from that program in my everyday life. For example, I kept referring to my husband, who recently painted our fence, as Mr. Bainter the Painter, and I’m not sure there was a single soul who knew what I was talking about. Of course, that’s nothing new.

Finger-lickin'

Who doesn’t like fried chicken? Seriously, I personally think fried chicken of any kind is delicious. And if I ask my husband what he would like for his birthday/anniversary/father’s day dinner, he will always (and I really mean without exception) request fried chicken.

But I must also tell you that fried chicken is a pain to make. Frying chicken makes a mess. So, unless you fall for the assertion that you can put crushed corn flakes on chicken breasts and bake it in the oven and it tastes like fried chicken, you are going to have to clean up a mess.

But, oh, it’s worth it. Every single time.

But I have a suggestion for frying chicken that won’t require you to haul out your deep fat fryer (Yeah, right. That’s what all newlyweds request on their wedding registry. Well, maybe if you’re related to Paula Deen. Or me.) It’s fairly quick, relatively unmessy, and makes really delicious, tender, and moist fried chicken.

The key is thinking ahead. Something I’m not terribly good at, I might add. I actually have to write myself a note to remind myself to do what I’m about to tell you. In the morning, before you go to work or before you get too bogged down with the details of your day, put your chicken pieces into a bowl. (And since I generally cook for just my husband and me, I buy pieces rather than the whole chicken. If you can find chicken pieces on sale, buy them, use what you need and freeze the remaining pieces until such time as you have forgotten about the mess.)

Mix together about a cup (more if you are using more than four or five pieces of chicken) of buttermilk with as much hot sauce as you would like to give it a zing – maybe a tablespoon or so – (I use Frank’s Louisiana Hot Sauce) and add a teaspoon or so of salt. Pour this mixture over your chicken and use your hands to slosh the pieces around in the buttermilk. The buttermilk breaks down the muscles of the chicken, which will help you produce tender and juicy fried chicken that evening. If you are home, occasionally stir the chicken pieces. If not, don’t drive home every two hours to do it because it’s not a big deal.

In the evening, pour about three-quarters of an inch of vegetable oil in a frying pan (I’m crazy about my cast iron skillet, but it’s not a deal breaker). Heat up the oil while you remove your chicken from the buttermilk. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

With a paper towel, wipe off excess buttermilk so that you don’t splash oil when you place the chicken into the skillet. Mix together about a cup of flour with some bread crumbs (seasoned or unseasoned, whatever you have on hand). Add some garlic powder (a teaspoon or so) to the flour, along with some pepper. Dredge your chicken pieces in the flour, making sure to shake off excess flour as well.

Carefully place the chicken pieces in the hot oil, and fry until the pieces are brown and crispy on the outside. The chicken won’t be cooked all the way through. It may take anywhere between five and 10 minutes per side. If you are doing a lot of pieces of chicken, fry in batches. If you fry too many pieces at a time, you will steam the chicken rather than getting a good crust.

Once the chicken is nice and brown on both sides, put the pieces onto a rack that you have placed on a large cookie sheet. (I would recommend you cover the cookie sheet with aluminum foil or parchment paper to help mitigate clean-up.)

Finish cooking your browned chicken in the oven for about 20 minutes or so. Dark meat takes longer than white meat. A meat thermometer should read 170, but if you don’t own a meat thermometer, cut into a piece and make sure the juices run clear. And go out tomorrow and buy an instant read thermometer.

Unfortunately, you really can’t reuse the grease, so that will be your biggest mess. I pour the excess grease into a coffee cup, wipe out the remaining grease with a paper towel, and wash my pan. Once the grease is cool tomorrow, I will place it in a plastic bag that I seal really well and throw it in the garbage.

Making your fried chicken this way really is easier than you think, and I can assure you of crispy, delicious chicken that you will make again. Maybe not for awhile, however. And to make yourself feel less guilty, tomorrow serve grilled tilapia and steamed broccoli.

Don't Make it So Difficult!

Every cook, whether he or she is a professional chef or cooks for a spouse and kids, was at one time inexperienced. At some point, each of us had a lot to learn about cooking. As a result, most of us have a cooking horror story to tell. It’s inevitable.

Mine? Making some sort of forgettable dish for my brother and his wife, with the rice having the look (and taste) of wallpaper paste. My brother, who has a long memory and a heartless sense of humor, reminds me of it on a regular basis. Oh, and the first pie I made during which I got so frustrated while rolling out the pie dough that I said a bad four-letter word that sounds somewhat like fudge, and threw it on the floor.

Simply Cooking Simply thinks we make it too hard on ourselves. And as I look at different cooking web sites and blogs or watch cooking shows on television, it becomes clear to me why. I can almost hear young cooks saying....

“This recipe calls for gruyere cheese, and have you seen how much that costs?”

“I’m suppose to use unsalted butter in this recipe, and all I have is salted butter!”

“A tablespoon of freshly grated lemon zest? What do I do with the rest of the lemon?”

“What the hell are blood oranges?”

See what I mean? The chefs on television make it seem as though you simply MUST use these ingredients or your cooking world will be shattered. And if I’m just beginning to cook for a family and am on a limited budget, I don’t want to go out and buy expensive ingredients that will grow old in my refrigerator or pantry shelf and need to be discarded.

Simply Cooking Simply recommends that you look at recipes as simply an outline, a recommendation. For example, don’t let yourself believe for a moment that you must use gruyere cheese in your French onion soup. Substitute Swiss cheese that you get on sale at the market, and maybe add a little parmesan cheese for a sharp bite.

Here is a recipe for French Onion Soup from Melissa d’Arabian that is simple and really inexpensive to make. If you don’t have fresh thyme (or have reason to buy any besides this recipe), either use dried thyme, or leave it out altogether. The key to making this recipe work is to have your burner on a low temperature and carmelize (which just means cook them until they are a carmel color) for a very long time. She recommends an hour-and-a-half. Low and slow.

As an aside, remember when you substitute dried herbs for fresh, use a LOT less. As herbs are dried, their flavor is concentrated. Using the same amount would be overpowering.

Serve your soup with a fresh vinaigrette salad, and you have a fancy French dinner for not much money.

By the way, I’ll try to answer some of those other questions in future blogs.

Do What Mom Did

My husband and I used to have a continuing battle over how to correctly put the bottom fitted sheet on a bed. Through my sheer tenacity, he has finally given in.

It always started out okay. Put one corner of the sheet on one corner of the bed. However, he would then attempt to put the other corner of the same side of the sheet onto the corresponding corner.

“No, that’s not right,” I would (once again, with feigned patience) explain. “You MUST put the corner that is directly diagonal to the original corner onto the mattress next.”

Invariably, he would ask why. The answer: Because. That’s the way my mom did it.

I never really bothered to ask Mom why she did it that way. I always presumed that it was because the sheet would somehow fit tighter onto the mattress if done that way. Perhaps sheets weren’t made as well back then. It doesn’t matter why. I just know it was the right way to do it because my mom did it that way.

I started thinking about some of the things I do as an adult simply because my mom did it. For example, I am unable to throw away any kind of bottle of anything with a thick texture – shampoo, dishwashing soap, olive oil, hand lotion – without balancing that for-all-intents-and-purposes empty bottle onto the new bottle so as to catch every single drop of the one I’m about to toss. Yes, that has resulted in breakage. It is not unusual to hear a crash come from the kitchen when the corn syrup bottle that is balancing on top of the other succumbs to gravity and falls onto the counter or floor. Still, I continue to do the precarious balancing act every single time.

I asked my sisters if there were things they do simply because Mom did it that way. Yes, laughs one sister. Mom always properly set the table, so no matter where she and her husband eat (even if it’s off of the coffee table in front of the television), she sets the plate, carefully folds the napkin to the left, and properly places the flatware, fork to the left, knife to the right.

Of course, says the other sister. She cannot (not will not – CANNOT) throw away a little bouillon cube jar. They can, really MUST, be used for such things as leftover salad dressing, buttons, or garlic butter.

Mom’s influence goes to all of our cooking habits as well. Mom used garlic salt every time she browned ground beef. So do we. Mom took the lid off of the potatoes she was boiling to ultimately mash and let the water evaporate, which she said concentrated the flavor into the potatoes. So do we. (Well, I must admit I just learned this habit of Mom’s recently from my sister, but it is undoubtedly the way I will boil potatoes from this point forward.)

I have a friend who used to cut off a corner of her ham every time she cooked one for Easter dinner. One day, she told me, her mom was at her house for dinner. Her mother watched as she dutifully cut off the corner of the ham and tossed it aside to use in soup. “Why did you do that?” her mother asked. Surprised, my friend said, “I did it because you always did that when you made ham.” Her mother laughed, and responded, “I did that because my pan was too small to hold a whole big ham!”

I would love to hear what sorts of things others do for no other reason than that is what their mom or dad did.

Simple

Sometimes I practice what I preach, and cook simply.

It’s been kind of a tiring month, and has involved a fair amount of cooking for large numbers of people, all here in honor of my father. Usually I love to cook for crowds – the more, the merrier. This month, it has felt kind of overwhelming. I’m not quite up to par I guess.

In addition, last weekend I, along with a friend, hosted an annual gathering of women to celebrate the Christmas holiday. These are generally the kinds of situations in which I thrive. I love to make simple and delicious soups and salads, and bake homemade goodies for friends and family.

However, sometimes cooking simply means making it easy on yourself.

For example, I have talked before about how I can make these wonderful chocolate cupcakes that I fill with delicious cream filling, reminiscent of Hostess cupcakes. I have successfully made these cupcakes a dozen times. This time, however, something went terribly wrong. I’m not entirely sure what. Perhaps I forgot the baking powder. Maybe I used too much (or too little) flour. Instead of light and delicious cupcakes, I had greasy chocolate doorstops.

I briefly (about a millisecond) considered a do-over. Then I came to my senses and went to my pantry and brought forth a store-bought chocolate cake mix and a can of store-bought chocolate frosting. In a mere 20 minutes or so, I had not-quite-as-good-as-homemade chocolate cupcakes, which I filled with the homemade cream filling I had already made for the original cupcakes.

And here’s the thing – nobody noticed. Everyone was caught up in joyful conversation and holiday gladness, and not one person took a bite of the cupcakes only to spit it out with disgust. While I knew they weren’t as good as homemade, no one else cared.

The moral of the story is that cooking and eating for and with friends should not exhaust you or bring you to tears. There’s nothing wrong with taking the easy way out when that seems to be the most sensible thing to do. Just think of yourself as Sandra Lee, the star of Semi-Homemade Cooking, instead of the Barefoot Contessa. After all, both women are probably equally loved – and equally rich!

Love Letter

November was a difficult month for me. My father died.

He was placed under hospice care at the beginning of the month, and died with exceptional dignity on November 9. That he died with such grace was predictable.

I have spoken about my father often in this blog. He was a baker, just as his father was a baker. While as far as I know, he never said this out loud, I’m not sure being a baker was his first choice. I think if he could have been anything he wanted when he grew up, he would have been a professional musician. Making a living by blowing a horn.

He was, in fact, a musician when he met my mom. He was playing in my mom’s brother’s dance band when he spotted the pretty petite girl who was his band leader’s sister. He set his sights on her, and never looked back.

He knew that after they got married and began a family, a musician’s life was not practical. So he went back to my grandfather’s bakery to work, and eventually bought the bakery from him. He and my mom ran a very successful business, and he was probably the best baker in the entire Midwest.

He fully understood the feel of a dough or the way a cake batter should look. If the look or feel wasn’t right, he knew why and how to fix it. My dad would roll out yeast donut dough, and could cut the donuts and flip them onto his finger (tossing the hole aside) all in one flawless motion – faster than you can say Krispy Kreme.

He was proud of his skill, proud of his business, proud of his family. He taught my brother to be a baker, and taught all of us the importance of hard work and doing our best. After all, we couldn’t produce incomplete homework any more than he could put a shapeless loaf of bread into his showcase. Work hard for the best product.

He taught us all how to live and what is important in life. There was no use in his eyes in looking at what might have been but only in looking ahead and at the gifts he was given. And what was important to him was his family, beautiful music, and good food – and if you could have all three together, that was even better.

He died peacefully, sitting in his easy chair in his own living room. Fittingly, his three daughters had just taken a bit of time away from him to have a sandwich, and once we sat down next to him again, he took his last breath. It would have been important to him that we would have eaten something before he left us. In fact, I’m pretty sure my mom and my grandmother were in heaven telling him, “Now Honey, there’s no need for you to go anywhere until they have had a little something to eat.”

While my brother is a professional baker, I only dabble. I’m fairly successful, but fully admit that nothing about baking is intuitive to me. I follow a recipe and my baked goods generally turn out to be pretty tasty. But when my bread won’t rise or my cakes fall in the middle, I can’t tell you if there is too much humidity or the flour is old or the water used to proof the yeast was too hot or too cold. But in my dad’s memory, I will continue to bake. And also in his memory, I will try to always have a positive outlook, just as he did.

And finally, I pledge to learn to make a decent loaf of bread. But it won’t be as good as his.