My Dog Ate My Homework; I Ate the Gumbo

Holy crap. Here it is Lent already, and I'm just now getting around to Mardi Gras.
Not that I am religious. Ho, boy, no. In fact, I might just go and enjoy Pancake Day tomorrow, even though it was supposed to be two days ago. Yum, pancakes. I might substitute crepes. Wait, I have a recipe for Korean pancakes!
I confess that Pancake Day is alien to my culture. Never heard of it until a few years ago, when a Brit friend described her to-die-for flapjacks with lemon and sugar. Wow, that sounds better than meat, which is what you're supposed to overconsume on the eve of Lent and its 40 days of privations.
And you know what else? I don't know anything about Lent. I'm not a lapsed Catholic, I'm a neo-atheist based on sturdy Protestant stock. Well, my dad was a Mormon; is that even Protestant?
And I am also an American.
In America, Mardi Gras is synonymous with New Orleans.
With ingredients almost entirely on hand already, today I stirred up a pot of gumbo. (We only had to buy celery and a green pepper; I chose a mildly spicy poblano.)
My mentor, Paul Prudhomme, says to quick-stir the roux over high heat until it's dark red or even brown. I always chicken out and use a lower temperature. I also chicken out and quit when it's the color of peanut butter. This recipe is structurally similar to what I cooked; I used shrimp instead of chicken. Forget about all that proprietary commercial stuff in the ingredients. Wing it.
I am just about at the point where I can wing this dish without a recipe. Today I did a little remedial spicing when it turned out the proportion of thickened chicken stock was too high for the amount of (dried, always dried) spices and herbs I had put in.
A little andouille, a little shrimp, a scoop of rice. Bon temps!
And dog bless.

The 4-Year-Old Chef

I've been fascinated by the kitchen tales in the Sunday NYT magazine called "Cooking With Dexter." Dexter is a preternaturally accomplished 4-year-old cook. He has opinions. He is curious. He wants to heat, and stir, and chop. His dad supervises.
Are we being played for fools? Could a kid this young really devise his own vegetable pie, and bake it?
Maybe we are being played for fools. After all, what kind of parent names his son Dexter? Surely Dexter is a fiction, albeit an enjoyable read.
According to papa, Dexter wanted to fry kale. Dad said, no, that would be icky. But he did it anyway, because Dexter has him wrapped around his fictitious pinkie.
This led to a recipe for soup, for which the fried greens would be no more than a crunchy garnish. Take that, Dexter. Your dad's making up the soup, not you.
The soup sounded interesting, and we had to try it.
It's made with sauteed onions and garlic, to which are added half a chopped Spanish chorizo sausage, some peeled potatoes, and water. Simmer, simmer. Then puree with an immersion blender. I had never thought about blending — blending! — meat with potatoes for soup. It turns an intriguing orange color.
The other half of the chorizo (cubed and sizzled in the onion-frying pan) goes into the bottom of soup bowls. You pour the blended soup over it, and top with the frizzled kale.
We had some red chard growing in the yard, so that's what we used for the crispy garnish. The color was just right, we thought.
The soup was really good. It's creamy, without a single drop of dairy. We punched it up with a few sprinkles of salt and a couple of dashes of hot, smoky paprika.
It's really filling. Ohgod, I am so full.
Dexter, could you come over and clean up the kitchen?

Free Tree Candy

The orange tree is nearing perfection. The fruit is fine to eat now, but it keeps getting sweeter, the longer it hangs on to the branches.
Last year I contemplated orange marmalade and orange jellies. But you have to add sugar and maybe gelatin or pectin, and I don't want that. We mostly ate the oranges fresh.
Then someone Claudia, it was Claudia suggested dehydrating supremed segments. That sounded good.
I have a dehydrator. I know how to supreme citrus.
So, not many hours later, I ended up with, basically, natural orange gummi bears.
Delicious. The thinner segments are not quite leathery, and some of the thicker ones burst with juice when you bite through their sticky "skin." The flavor is concentrated, of course. Sweet, and a little bit bitter.
They're real, and they're spectacular.

Green Broccoli and Albino Broccoli

We got a break from the rain today. It's still quite cool out (but not snowy cool; this is the Left Coast), and entirely sunny.
So we sat outdoors with the doggie and ate lunch on plastic lawn chairs.
We looked around the soggy yard, stripped nearly bare of its vegetable plants, and started dreaming about what we'd plant in spring.
Tomatoes, of course, but the number two big crop this year will be eggplants. One little bush did not provide enough last summer. Cranky says it's the closest you can come to growing your own pasta.
Then there will be peppers, potatoes, cucumbers. We're actually sick of summer squash, but I might try a winter squash.
The onions are already in the ground, most of them volunteers from fallen seeds. Only the red onions reseeded themselves.
And that dumb patch of brassica. It was not a good crop this year. I had to hack a few brutally due to aphid infestation. And then the evil green caterpillars arrived.
So, no, not a good crop.
But it was sunny out. I had to go take a look.
There were cute little vegetables. Green broccoli, and albino broccoli. (Not. It's exploded cauliflower.)

Angel Food

This was dinner for Valentine's Day. It is a rolled-up rib cap from a standing rib roast (that we had for Christmas — freezers are wonderful).
I really liked carving off this sheath of meat and trimming the fat and silverskin. Rolling it, too. Cranky helped with the tying of twine (man, he is really stingy with twine, but it worked).
Best of all, it roasted in just 17 minutes. No lie. Oven at 400ºF, roast until internal temp is 130ºF. This was a rather petite roast, but that was really fast. Perfect for two lovers.
We accompanied our meat with horseradish-buttermilk mashed potatoes, and garlicky spinach. I'm back on spinach, after a few years on the hard stuff (kale, chard, mustard greens, etc.). I love how silky it is.
I'm still full.
By the way, Julia Child was apparently on record as saying this is an inferior cut of meat. She argued that if your butcher sold you a rib roast with the cap on, he was gypping you. That's because it's so tender and fatty, it cooks really fast. When you leave it on the roast, it's going to turn brown before the roast reaches rare. We don't want that! Carve it off! Roll it up and freeze it for later.
I'm so glad I discovered this option. We have a new holiday tradition.

Happy VD

This is a chocolate bar.
Cranky gave it to me this morning.
I wonder what he'd like me to give him.

Fidelicious!

Mid-winter. I should be braising lamb shanks. I should be stewing a pot of greens. I should be wallowing in warm, wet comfort food.
But Anita made Cuban sandwiches, and I suddenly needed one.
You know how these blog viruses just grab you by the throat? I was a goner.
Plus, I happened to be the lucky recipient of some of the insanely delicious roast pig that Anita procured for her husband's 40th birthday. All I needed was some bread and ham. I had homemade dill pickles in the fridge already, and there's always some Gruyere cheese on hand. Mustard. Butter.
My recipe differed from Anita's in just two ways. One, Anita used mayonnaise instead of butter. Two, she cooked her sandwiches in a skillet on the stove. I cooked mine in the oven. (Actually, three, Anita used pulled pork and we used sliced.)
Let me explain. You assemble the sandwich. Wrap it in aluminum foil. Heat the oven to 400º. Choose a cast-iron skillet large enough for the sandwiches, and that will allow a slightly smaller cast-iron vessel to fit over the top of them. We have an antique square skillet, and our Dutch oven fit perfectly atop it.
About 25 minutes in the oven, and the bread acquires a lovely toastiness. It does not get steamy! And the sandwiches flatten out, like they're supposed to. The pickles, which do not show up in the photo, were subsumed by the cheese. Ooh!
This is not a recipe blog, as you know. Read Anita's post; it's perfection in detail and imagery. And then try the foil-wrapped oven version if you prefer. Either way, you'll get a sandwich you want again tomorrow.
Darn, I'm out of pig.

Nuts to Me

In the wake of the salmonella-poisoning scare from contaminated peanut products in Georgia and Texas, consumers are simply avoiding all peanut products everywhere. Well, not all consumers, but peanut butter sales are down 24%.
And I read that restaurants can hardly sell desserts these days made with anything that sounds like it might wear a monocle and top hat.
There was a news story the other day quoting some young mother who clearly wasn't paying attention when the TV was on. Shopping in a grocery store, she wheeled arrogantly past the peanut butter aisle, telling the reporter, "The news shows say don't buy it, and I won't."
The news didn't say that. What it did say is that peanut butter is safe for now, as far as we know.
Do we really need another economic debacle based on misinformation?
I decided to take action.
I bought a jar of Skippy. (Crunchy, because I know you want to know.)
I'm supporting the industry! My five bucks worth, Mr. Skippy.
(Quick aside: The first Skippy peanut butter processing plant was in Alameda, CA, right down the street from where I used to live. What a kids' dream!)
What am I going to do with this roasty goo? Cover your eyes if you're squeamish, and I know there are some mayonnaise haters out there...
I spread it on Stoned Wheat Thins. Smear mayonnaise over that. Then a few thin slices of sweet baby pickles on top.
Just call the dirtbag police now. I'm guilty.
So good.

Kitchen, Repurposed

This girl, interrupted, was idling through a Pier 1 store today (for those of you blissfully ignorant, it's an "imports" store, with mostly brown furniture and stinky candles). Not as much fun as it used to be, when you could buy trashy earrings and jaunty sashes and carved giraffes.
I was hurrying back out the door (the whole store reeks of candle), where I had to pass through ground zero, with all those vanilla waxy towers, bottles of liquid incense (why?), smelly tea lights... when I noticed an incongruous shelf of little glass dishes.
So pretty. So tiny, almost exactly the same size as in this photo.
Wouldn't that make a nice salt cellar, I said to Cranky. He said, or a dish for olive pits.
In fact, they were candleholders for tea lights.
I bought four. Cost me two bucks. If they had been sold as salt cellars, I probably would have had to pay $12.
It reminded me of the time I bought a bag of gas-station dipstick wiping rags at Costco. Y'know, those pinkish squares of loosely woven cotton that your serviceman stuffs in his pocket after checking your oil. No engine oil for me. I bought those rags to use as napkins at a chili party. If any of them got seriously stained, I could just chuck them.
But after all these years, I still have most of the pink rags, and have never used them as anything other than napkins. Oh, yeah, and they were cheap, too.
What clever, inexpensive substitutes have you sneaked into your kitchen and repurposed as dining hardware? I'm particularly interested in table settings, but I'm happy to hear iterations on the bean can for bacon drippings, and like that. (Me, I like a label-off bean can on the table, holding sad flowers — heartbreaking. The doily underneath it is a lace glove, of course.)

When Garbage Is Prettier Than Food

There is something So Wrong with my computer today. I can't edit photos in iPhoto (probably because I got a message asking if I wanted to upgrade to iLife 09, and I said no... so they put a nasty pox on my current iPhoto; I think so; could be).
I got a successful edit of this picture on Photoshop Elements, but when I sent it to my desktop, it kept coming out the unedited version.
Which is what you're seeing. Not bad. Could be sparkier, because that's the way I felt about today's cooking.
It was sparky.
I made a soup from peeled broccoli stems (oh, damn, I've lost you already, haven't I?), vegetable broth, red onion, minced garlic and a sort of russet potato. Broccoli and potato in about equal proportions. Salt, always. My vegetable broths have lots of herbal notes, so no more was needed.
You just throw all this stuff in a pot — start with the chopped (peeled!) broccoli stems, because parts of them can be tough; you might need to trim. Simmer, and then allow to cool a bit. Pulverize it in the blender, return to pot, and taste. Needs some fish sauce? Sure, squizzle, squizzle. A hit of lime? Nice. Maybe a little smoothing with some buttermilk. A shake of dried red pepper (not as hot as cayenne; you be the judge).
It came out very glossy, a tender beige-green, not so pretty... The drizzle of olive oil on top was a good visual, and a great mouthual. Still, just a little beige puddle.
But I kept thinking that if I were served this as an amuse bouch at Chez Swankypants, I'd be impressed.
Probably because les amuses are "free," and we like free stuff.
No. It was that good.

please resist "currying favor" title... arrgh...

Last night we watched a taped episode of Iron Chef America, the one where the secret ingredient was curry. Curry blends, garam masala, individual spices that are used to blend curry powders, even curry leaves.
For the first half of the show, it was all coconut milk, all the time. On both sides of the cookoff. Lord, how typical.
Things got more interesting as the deadline loomed, with pork and squid and a big whole fish baked in a salt, crumb, eggwhite and curry paste.
Still, meh. Lovely food, but it all played so obviously into the expected Indian, Malaysian, Thai tastes.
Not that I wouldn't have liked to sample some of it.
Today, we're knocking around in the kitchen, dreaming up lunch. Actually, Cranky is knocking around in the kitchen.
I might have been online.
Cranky: "I've got those leftover beans, fresh spinach, carrots, a shallot, a couple of containers of good broth I could combine. How's that sound?"
Me: "Put a pinch of curry powder in it."
Wow, and wow. He actually had to put two pinches in, because the first dose was too low. Even so, with the second dose added, you would not know there was curry powder in the soup; just some subtle, ineluctable taste almost reminiscent of lactic something or other. Or that the cook has a brilliant way with seasoning.
Blurry photo. I blame, in no particular order, the winter light, Blogger (which can be counted on always to add 5% blurry), and old lady shaky hands. Or maybe crummy lens, but that would cost money. Can't shoot it again; all et up.

Happy Groundgoat Day

I dithered. I might make a re-do of the sublime 7-layer dip. Then I thought, no, let's have nachos. And make them the Chili's way, individually instead of one pile of glop (which always means the chips on the bottom get gypped, no dip).
Finally, I realized chili is ultra-classic Super Bowl food.
And I had a pound of ground goat in the freezer. (I know.)
So I conceived of a green chili, using roasted green tomatoes from the freezer, minced pickled serranos from the fridge (via my backyard), onion, pretty little beans, cumin, chopped local green olives.
It was too easy.
Cranky did all the prep work, wearing his onion goggles.
I just stood there, throwing things into the pot, tasting and adjusting.
I didn't even feel like I was cooking, but chili happened.
Great game, too.