Celebrations, May 15 2015 – Grandmother

May15

Welcome to the Celebrating the Small Things blog hop, started by VikLit and now run by Lexa Cain, our fearless new leader and her two wonderful co-hosts L.G. Keltner @ Writing Off The Edge and Katie @ TheCyborgMom.

What am I celebrating? Well, once upon a time, longer ago than I care to recall, I had a grandmother (my mother’s mother) who was a wonderful cook. She made apple pie, strawberry rhubarb pie, crisp-skinned roast chicken… All things good seemed to come from her kitchen.

And the kitchen itself was a wonderful place, full of delicious smells, with a table in the corner and lots of comfortable kitchen chairs to settle into and watch Grandma cook.

She made doughnuts (Dunkin Donuts would be jealous), cookies… She came from an old homesteading family, out in North Dakota, and she somehow ended up in Vermont. She wasn’t just a cook (‘just’ is not derogatory; she did a lot of things) she dealt with antiques, was busy with the town she lived in, and she was a wonderful grandmother. She died long ago, and I miss her still.

The cover

Well, while visiting my mother, who is older now than my grandmother was when she died, I came across, forgotten in a drawer, a beat up old book:

I opened it, scanned it… Why had I never seen it before? It wasn’t as though I was never in the kitchen. …Although my mother was a charming pack-rat when it came to recipes, with clippings going back to the fifties and sixties.

I opened the book and began to look at the
recipes. I saw some old favorites…

…Boston Cream Pie!

Boston Cream Pie (actually a cake with custard filling and a chocolate-iced top:

Molasses what?

Molasses everything (they used a lot of it in Victorian times on the Great Plains)

So many things that Grandma made, that I had thought long gone. Yes, my mother had transcribed some of the older recipes from her grand parents: (“Take butter the size of a walnut, mix well with flour and roll out until satisfactory. Add essence of lemon and let sit…”)

What else was there? Well, lots of old favorites, including date-filled cookies that, I hoped, were the cookies I remembered as a child. They looked right…

“Mom?” I said, “May I borrow this?”

She frowned and looked up. “What is it?”

“Grandma’s cookbook.”

She had forgotten she had it. Grandma’s departure had been hard, with her leaving my grandfather who was in his late nineties. Things were done hurried. “Well, yes,” she said. “But be careful with it.”

Oh, I will be. I’ve been reading the recipes and toying with the notion of putting them in a cookbook, just for the family, with facsimile pages, with some of the recipes transcribed for those who wanted to make them. Maybe. There was a lot to dig through.

On the third- and second to the last pages I found this one last thing:

An index, by golly. Thank you, Grandma.

What are you celebrating?

Celebrating Sesame Seeds

Feb22

Today I’m celebrating something very small. Sesame seeds. I love the things. I’m always happy to encounter them, whether in ‘benne candy’ (those oblong rectangles of solidified honey full of sesame seeds that I always try to suck on and end up crunching), sesame chicken or hamburger rolls. I think it’s part of the human condition to chase sesame seeds across our plates, lick our fingers, catch the seeds, and bring them to our mouths.

This is a scene from a story I’m working on. It takes place in Egypt, God save the mark, and the two people are sitting in a plain, dockside tavern and discussing something very serious over a lunch of bread and, perhaps, some fish:

“There is that.” Intef reached for the jar of beer. “I can send troops over tomorrow, but it will be in a rush.”
Seti frowned and sat back, absently chasing sesame seeds with a fingertip. “That might be a good thing,” he said after he licked the seeds off. “As soon as it can be arranged at any rate. Space is limited there – best to set up an encampment.”

“That may take some time,’ Intef said.
“That’s what I am afraid of.” He looked for more seeds and then shrugged. “And that is why I am uneasy.” He hooked the gold pendant from beneath his tunic, slipped it over his head, took the ring from the cord and handed it to Intef. “If I need the forces at once I will send to you. This ring is the token I will use. It does not matter who carries it: the request will be coming straight from me.”

They could easily be sitting in McDonald’s chasing sesame seeds across their plates.

There is not a lot that sesame can’t improve in any form. (Toasted) sesame oil adds a lot of flavor, sprinkle a handful in a dish and it adds looks and taste:

I’m going to have a toasted sesame bagel for breakfast, and I’m going to chase all the seeds.

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Cooking Off the Cuff – Chicken Al’Italia

Feb20

Escape to Tuscany in Winter? Yes!

We all need comfort food, especially in the dull days of February (August, if you live in the antipodes). It comes in various forms. For me, rice pudding with raisins fits the bill very nicely. Hot tea with milk. Homemade cookies. Roast chicken…

My sister, a very creative cook, came up with the perfect dish for winter. I was visiting her and she came out with a bowl holding a medium-sized helping of Angel hair pasta. She had ladled over that a rich red sauce containing chunks of chicken with capers and bocconcini, the chicken having been browned, and all of it (but the pasta) baked in a medium oven.

Of course I had to have the recipe, and she gave it to me. Sort of. She had just thrown things together as seemed right. It was. She’s good at such things.

I decided I wanted some of that tonight, so I assembled the ingredients, got the cookware out, turned on the oven, and got to work. And then I thought ‘Why not share?’ So I am. Here is the recipe for the newly named Pollo Al’Italia:

Naturally, you need your ingredients. Since it’s ‘Pollo’, you need chicken. I suppose you could use chicken pieces with skin, but I use chicken breast, cut into chunks. That’s the hard part. The rest is easy.

You assemble what you need:

Olive oil, the stronger the better. Wondra flour (or any flour that’s a little grainy). You need Italian herbs (basil, oregano and, sometimes rosemary). Ground Parmesan or Romano cheese, capers (I prefer the larger ones. Large or small they brighten things), good canned tomatoes, Fresh mozzarella, red wine. Garlic. In other words, the usual suspects. Don’t forget salt and pepper.

You’ll need a deep pan for sauteing, one that will go gracefully into the oven. A smaller bowl for the seasoned flour, a pot for pasta water, a sharp knife with a respectable blade to deal with the chicken. Pot holders.

Turn the oven on to 375. Cut any ickies out of the chicken (those sinews that always like to show up in my chicken), trim the chicken, and throw any pieces you don’t plan to use into a pot of water. Put it on to simmer. Put enough olive oil in your saute pan to cover the bottom and turn the heat to medium.

Mix a cup of flour (do get Wondra; it’s best for this purpose) with 1/4 cup finely grated cheese. Add sat, pepper, Italian herbs and garlic and mix well. You can add some red pepper flakes. To release the flavor, rub it between your palms. Now toss the chunked chicken into the seasoned flour, coating it well. Shake off the excess. Put the bowl of seasoned flour somewhere that your biggest cooking fans (the dog and the cats) wont be likely to encounter it.

Put the chicken in the pan (enjoy the sound of sizzling) and brown it on all sides. I tend to be a little fussy about turning things, Browning is good, and the more you brown your meat, within reason, the better it will taste. Don’t forget to turn the chicken so it browns evenly. This seals in the juices, makes a nice crust, and allows you to turn to the various salivating humans and say, “It’ll be done when I’m good and ready!

Now is the time to get out the tomatoes – this is not the time to buy the cheapest in the store. Open the can and pour the juice into the pan. Then, using a stick blender, slightly blend the tomatoes and then pour in the wine – about half a cup. I prefer to use a cabernet or a zinfandel. They are a little more full-bodied than a Merlot. I like Merlots. They are charming, easygoing wines, and it’s hard to find one that is bad, but for this application they lack oomph.
Now pour the wine/tomato mixture over the chicken and dot the whole with boccocini. If you can’t find that, fresh mozzarella diced into larger chunks does just fine. It looks pretty good right now, but waiting never goes amiss. Into the oven it goes – 375 degrees for half an hour. This gives you a chance to clean the cooking area, cut up the ooky chicken and simmer it for the pets. You can snatch a glass of wine – any of that Zin or Cabernet left. Then you rememer the pasta and hurry off to put water on for it. The pasta cooks for five minutes (you ARE using angel hair right?
Dish up the pasta – not too much, and don’t forget to set some aside to eat with butter (not the fake stuff) garlic and cheese). That taken care of, you take the chicken out of the oven, smell the warm scents of cheese and tomato and wine all together with garlic, oregano, basil… The balls of bocconcini have sunk into the sauce, but they are there. The chicken is tender, not dry, all the flavors are blended. All you need to do is wait until the next day, giving it a chance to sit, to mingle, to mellow as tomato-based dishes always do. Tell the family, the dog, the cats (there’s nothing here they can’t eat unless you put some onion in) that they need to wait a day for everything to mellow.

Who am I kidding? Dish it up, dig in and enjoy it. And thank my sister, who invented the recipe!