What I Believe about Food

I’ve been thinking about what went wrong the dish I attempted last week. From a blogging standpoint, it wasn't a problem that the dish failed. In spite of what I said, I don’t need every dish to turn out perfectly in order to write about it. But what I've been contemplating is why the dish failed. Something was not true about the experience, from choosing the ingredient to cooking to writing, true in the sense of being “straight on,” the way a redwood trunk is true, or a carpenter’s ruler is true.

I’ve figured out the problem. The dish I was trying to make was not true to me. It wasn’t a reflection of a style of food I know and love. It’s not that I can’t or won’t ever cook Indian dishes. It’s not that I shouldn’t try new things. We all should, of course. That’s how we grow. But the problem with my presenting tandoori to you was that I was doing it in an effort to be exotic. I was trying to spellbind you with a foodie buzzword. And that wasn’t true.

I do hope to cook real tandoori-style food. But the next time I write about it, it will be because you and I can trust the ingredients and techniques the way I present them.

All this thinking of writing about food that is true to me has made me want to share with you my food point of view. It’s simple, really. I believe that good food tastes, feels, and looks good and brings people together, whether they are reading about it, preparing it side by side, or eating it around a table or standing together at the counter. Good food is central to many good conversations and familial experiences. Eating does not have to be a matter of simply fueling up. Connecting with people around food can be an emotionally enriching experience, a gift from God who is in the business of “filling our hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:17 KJV).

And so the first element of my food point of view is taste. Good food isn’t too salty, or not salty enough. Its own flavors come through, heightened by the presence of the right amount of salt. Good food has no “off” flavors caused by old ingredients. It is not cloying. It does not taste like the can it may have come out of. There are no harsh or caustic notes. Perhaps we have come to accept that some foods, such as coffee, grapefruit, or Italian olive oil, are supposed to be bitter. I don’t accept that assumption. The food I enjoy and serve to others should be neither bitter nor bland. No matter if sweet, savory, buttery, or strong, a dish’s flavors are in perfect harmony. A certain flavor may dominate, but its partner flavors complement and complete it. That is food that tastes good.

Beyond taste, I also consider texture. When you eat my food, you’ll encounter a variety of textures that meet your expectations of the dish. The roasted chicken will be tender and juicy and will have crisp skin. The crème brûlée will give you a full-mouth feeling from its inherent fat, but there will also be shards of caramelized sugar to crunch. In minestrone, the beans and vegetables will be firm yet yielding. The texture will be as you’d expect to find it. But you’ll also be surprised by things as simple as crispy bacon lardons in a bowl of potato leek soup.

Taste and texture addressed, I must also touch on presentation, about which many cooks and chefs have said, “You eat first with your eyes.” When you see the food, it will look good, and the sight of it will start your mouth watering, thus preparing you already for the experience of tasting. Presentation of food starts with color. If food is cooked properly, its color will be appealing. A little knowledge of the color wheel will help you put foods of contrasting and complementary colors together. How the food is arranged on the serving dish is a matter of the cook’s skill and knowledge of design, but these things can be learned through observation and practice. And some foods need no formal plating at all. It’s a wonderful thing to eat hot pasta, or hash, or scrambled eggs containing softened bits of cream cheese right out of the pan.

Above all, the food I want to cook and eat, and the food I want to share with you is food that comes out of my strengths, skills, and knowledge. That is not to say that I won’t or can’t learn new styles. But learning takes time and is not accomplished by picking up one bottle of something from the store. Learning to cook well comes from study, from practice, from making mistakes and taking risks and eventually preparing dishes that disappear in much less time than they took to put together. When I have done that, when you have done that, we know our cooking is true. And that’s a fine feeling indeed.

Now on to the recipe and the explanation for these glorious photos, which I hope did not distract you too much. I’ve been making this recipe for 10 years. It’s not my recipe, but was written by Sharon Landeen and published in Taste of Home magazine in 1999. The only thing I added was a handful of peanuts. My recipe card is splotched and crumpled, but, oh, it’s still good. Yes, it’s still very good.

Caramel Corn (adapted from Taste of Home)

6 quarts popped popcorn

½ cup dry roasted, salted peanuts

2 cups packed brown sugar

1 cup butter

½ cup corn syrup

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

½ teaspoon baking soda

Have ready two greased 13- x 9-inch baking dishes and heat your oven to 250˚ Divide the popcorn and the peanuts between two large bowls and set aside. In a sauce pan, combine the brown sugar, butter, corn syrup, and salt. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly. Boil for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. But watch the pan, because the bubbling mixture will expand; you don’t want it to boil over. After 5 minutes, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the salt and vanilla extract. It will bubble violently for a while, but as you stir, the bubbles will subside and the caramel sauce will take on a voluptuous and creamy texture. Working quickly, pour half the mixture over the popcorn and peanuts in each bowl. Stir thoroughly. Scoop the popcorn into the waiting baking dishes and bake, uncovered, for 45 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes. Cool the caramel corn and store it in an airtight container.

When Things Go Wrong in the Kitchen, There's Always Risotto

I wanted to write about a gorgeous new chicken dish today. But this blog, like my to-do list, whose random projects bear little relevance to one another, has staggered me with fits of starts and stops.

Last week when I was browsing World Market for a new ingredient to use and write about, I bypassed siracha and some lovely pink-, blue-, green-, and yellow-striped farfalle that reminded me of ribbon candy and bought a bottle of marinade. I know, right? I should have known better. But I was seduced by its name—tandoori.

I’ve wanted to try tandoori chicken for some time now, but not having a clay-lined pit, or tandoor, in my backyard, or a plane ticket to India, I copped out with something fake. In my defense, I didn’t know it was fake; on the other hand, when it comes to bottled marinade, there’s probably no defense.

I butterflied a roasting chicken, and slathered it with the red stuff from the bottle. It grilled beautifully, but the flavor wasn’t all that great. It didn’t taste bad; it didn’t taste like much of anything at all.

Of course, that’s because it had no yogurt to tenderize the meat and none of the usual tandoori spices—coriander, cumin, red pepper, Garam Masala, and tumeric.

But I couldn’t turn a blog post out of a failed dish. As I re-thought what to write about, I stood at the kitchen counter eating crispy French fried onions. And it struck me—who does that? We’ve probably all eaten those crispy onions in the ubiquitous Thanksgiving green bean casserole. But who else eats them straight out of the can? That’s pretty weird, I thought. I could probably write about weird things I eat. Weirdness is subjective, of course, but still, it’s a topic I could work with. When I brainstormed, however, other than sprinkling salt on apples, I couldn’t think of anything else weird. (I’m not counting calamari, as Kevin suggested I should, as weird. It’s simply delicious.)

It’s a good thing, though, that the risotto Kevin made while I babysat the chicken was not weird in the least. In fact, it was perfect, as was the chocolate tapioca for dessert.

Perfect Risotto (serves 4)

I distinctly remember the first article I ever read about risotto. The writer emphasized the time-consuming nature of the dish and the precise skill needed to ensure that each rice grain retained its individual structure while at the same time morphing with the other rice grains into a creamy showpiece. It scared me for years.

I assure you, however, that risotto is actually quite easy to make, and more forgiving than some would want you to believe. It doesn’t take any more time than it would to cook long-grain rice, and the only skill required is stirring.

One ingredient note: if you don’t use wine, and there are those who don’t, simply omit it. I do not recommend using cooking wine since it contains huge amounts of sodium and will ruin the taste of the dish.

3 cups chicken broth or stock

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 cup Arborio rice

2 shallots, diced

½-cup white wine

salt to taste

First you will want to start the chicken broth simmering on the back of the stove. Once it’s going, heat the butter and oil in another saucepan over medium heat until the butter stops foaming. Add the rice and shallots and cook, stirring occasionally, until the shallots are softened a bit, but neither they nor the rice is browned.

Pour the wine over the rice and cook, stirring, until almost all the liquid is absorbed. Next, ladle the chicken broth, ½-cup at a time, into the rice mixture. Cook and stir until the rice absorbs almost all of the liquid, and then pour in the next ladleful. And so on, until the rice is creamy, yet each grain is firm. You may not use all the liquid every time, so do taste the rice when there is about half a cup of broth left; if it’s tender, you can be done. Season with a little salt.

The whole cooking and stirring one bit of broth at a time is, I think, the part that was most scary to me when I first read that frightening article. But in reality, though you should not leave the kitchen, or even go more than two steps from the stove, while you’re cooking risotto, you don’t actually have to stir the entire time. If you leave the spoon for a few seconds, disaster will not ensue. Trust me.

Risotto is best served right at the moment it is done. If you find you are not ready to serve it, then you will need to hold off the last few ladlefuls of broth. Simply cover the pan and move it to a cold burner. It will quickly re-heat when you are ready to serve, at which time you can finish it and season it.

One of the beauties of risotto is its endless delicious variations. Sauté diced porcini mushrooms with the rice and shallots at the beginning. Or don’t use shallots at all; use onion. Or leek. Once we made a beautiful purple risotto by using red wine instead of white. At the end, stir in peas and bits of bacon. Parmesan cheese and a little chopped parsley would not be amiss, either.

One other word—after you make this dish, you will never again eat boxed rice that comes with the powdered flavor packets. Unless it’s one of those weird days in which accomplishing anything on your to-do list is giving you fits.

How the Tastes Do Change

I despised cooked carrots when I was a child. It didn’t matter how they were dressed, I hated the taste and the way they felt in my mouth. A carrot was supposed to be crisp, cold, and crunchy, with a sweet fresh, almost grassy, taste. It wasn’t supposed to be mushy or sugary with glaze. Putting a cooked carrot in my mouth was alien and gross. I ate them anyway, because that’s the way I was trained, but I remember one of the joys of going to college and being on my own—the ability to refuse to eat cooked carrots. That measure of control over my own life caused me endless exultation.

When Kevin was a child, there were a lot of things he hated. Lima beans, pinto beans, black beans, beans of any kind except green ones. He didn’t like fish or anything spicy. Baked and mashed potatoes were in, but au gratin was out.

There were a few other quirks about his palate, but I learned to cook for him and we have lived and eaten harmoniously together for more than 13 years.

Recently, however, we have noticed some changes. For one thing, I like cooked carrots. I discovered this fact about myself about a year after our second child, a son, was born when I made glazed carrots for a traditional Thanksgiving feast. I was not planning to eat any, but I did have to taste them before I served them. Surprise, surprise. I found them to be pleasantly crisp-tender and not overly sweet with their glaze of butter, brown sugar, lemon juice, and thyme.

That I could enjoy something I had hitherto despised was a revelation to me. I could chalk up the change to the influx of hormones my body had received while I carried my son. But that explanation would not work for Kevin, for whom no such thing had occurred, but who had been experiencing similar changes in tastes.

Fish, for example. Creatures of the sea have never endeared themselves to him. But I have been able to make various shrimp dishes which he enjoys. Once, after a fishing trip we took with my dad, I cooked some red snapper fillets which were well received. He still won’t eat fried oysters with me, but he does enjoy the fish sandwich at our favorite beach restaurant.

He even likes my favorite preparation of au gratin potatoes, which I took from The Gourmet Cookbook, which credited the technique to Jacques Pépin. What I do is put thinly sliced potatoes and onions in a sauce pan and barely cover them with half and half. I bring them just to a boil and then transfer them to a greased baking dish, layering the potatoes and onions with a mixture of Gruyère, Parmesan and Romano cheeses. I pour the half and half over all and bake at 400˚ until they’re tender, maybe 25 minutes or so, depending on their thickness. Excellent with meatloaf, naturally.

As for spicy things, let me tell you that in the last 3 months, we have had Buffalo wings no less than half a dozen times, always at his request, and that's the reason for all these photos. Over the years he has tolerated the various spices I have used in meat rubs and chili, but for him to ask for hot wings is remarkable. Six times!

I grill the wings (let the fire burn down to medium to avoid excessive char), or deep-fry them, and my sauce is the traditional mixture of equal parts butter and hot sauce (we like Frank’s) with a splash of cider vinegar, so there’s no need for a recipe. The only thing you really need is blue cheese dressing and celery and carrot sticks. These should be not, of course, be cooked.

I rejoice in the way our palates have expanded, but acknowledge that it’s probably too much to hope that one day he will enjoy limas.

You'll Love the Leftovers

This is not another blog entry about leftovers. I’m actually one of those people who, with few exceptions, have no great fondness for leftover food. I don’t like the taste. I eat leftovers when I’m feeling frugal or lazy, but I generally don’t enjoy the experience. I don’t think my daughter does, either.

But I digress.

Bear with me.

Yesterday was a great day. I clarified my work goals, rewrote some web content, and took out chicken to thaw. When my daughter blew into the house after school asking the inevitable, “What’s for dinner,” she was happy to see something fresh in the works. I call it “Fettuccine Alfredo with Pan-Seared Chicken and Garlic.” Or, when I’m not feeling talkative, “Garlic Chicken Alfredo.”

My husband still calls this dish Mediterranean Garlic Chicken, though it has come a long way from its original roots. I found the first version in a recipe booklet I picked up from the grocery store check-out line. It was called Browned Butter Chicken. The basic idea was to cook whole garlic cloves (about 20) and chicken cutlets in browned butter (half a cup!) and toss it all together with angel hair or spaghetti.

Yum.

The recipe evolved a few years later when we started cutting back our fat consumption. I replaced butter with olive oil, and significantly decreased the quantity. I added more seasoning, including black pepper, red pepper flakes, and thyme. For some reason it had a Mediterranean feel, hence its new name.

Then when I finally learned how to make a good alfredo sauce, thanks to Everyday Italian, inspiration struck. Wouldn’t it be delicious to add chicken and garlic to fettuccine alfredo? Of course it would be. I fussed with the technique a bit, and now it’s a favorite weeknight meal.

Fettuccine Alfredo with Pan-Seared Chicken and Garlic

2 tablespoons olive oil

4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, flattened to ½-inch thick and patted dry
salt and pepper
10-20 cloves of garlic, smashed gently, paper removed
4 tablespoons butter
¾- to 1 cup heavy cream or half-and-half
juice of ½ lemon
1 teaspoon dried thyme
a few grinds black pepper
a pinch of red pepper flakes, or more if you like a bit of bite
1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
8 ounces fettuccine, cooked al dente and drained
a few tablespoons of chopped fresh parsley

Turn your oven on to about 325˚. In a cast-iron pan or good stainless steel skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat until it shimmers. You want a delicious sear on the chicken, so make sure the pan is good and hot. Season the chicken with a little salt and pepper and brown in the oil, 2 to 3 minutes per side. Remove the chicken to a heat-proof shallow serving bowl and put it in the oven to finish cooking.

Turn the heat on the pan down to medium. You may need to remove the pan from the burner for a few minutes so that it will cool faster. When the pan is not blistering hot, put it back on the flame and throw in the garlic cloves. I know it sounds like a lot of garlic. It is, because that’s the way we like it here. Adjust the number of cloves to your taste. Keep them moving around in the oil; you want them browned and soft and sweet, but not burned. When they’re finished, lift them out and add them to the bowl of chicken in the oven.

Now wipe out the pan. Yes, I know you are wiping out the base for a delicious pan sauce, but for this recipe we’re aiming for creamy white alfredo. You can do the quick pan sauce another night.

For the alfredo, melt the butter over medium-low heat. Do not brown it. Pour in most of the cream, saving some to thin the sauce later if you need to, the lemon juice, and the seasonings, and cook just until it starts to bubble. Sprinkle in the cheese, stirring the while until it melts.

You don’t want it too thick, or too thin, for that matter, so add more cream if needed, or, equally as good, a few tablespoons of the water you cooked the pasta in. (You have been cooking the pasta meanwhile, haven’t you?) Taste it and adjust the salt, if necessary. If the sauce is too thin, you can add more cheese. And, to be honest, if it isn’t quite the right consistency it will still taste good, and you’ll know for next time how to adjust.

When the sauce looks good, cut the chicken into half-inch-thick slices, and add them and the garlic, with any juices collected in the bowl, and the pasta to the sauce. Toss and pour back into the bowl. Sprinkle with a little fresh chopped parsley.


The best thing about this dish is that it makes leftovers you actually want to eat. I like to eat them standing in front of the open refrigerator, my fingers poised greedily over the open container.

Bread-Crumb-Coated Grilled Pork Chops

I didn’t make that up; I really didn’t. I saw it in a magazine--I could have sworn it was Gourmet--but now I can’t find the recipe. I just spent an hour looking through my back issues, to no avail.

But I wish I had made up the technique of brushing olive oil on pork chops, seasoning them with salt and pepper, and then dredging them in fine bread crumbs and grilling them. I wish I had made it up because it makes juicy pork chops like you can’t imagine.

If we had pork chops at all when I was growing up, they were thin and boneless, cooked over low heat until they had taken on some brown color, which invariably took a very long time and left them very dry. A good friend, who is a good cook, sears pork cutlets over high heat and then braises them low and slow in gravy. The flavor of the gravy is good, salty and toothsome, but the tenderness of the meat is hit or miss. Sometimes it’s succulent; sometimes it resembles chewy animal hide.

Neither technique was making pork palatable to me. And pork should be palatable. Why can’t a pork chop, on the bone, with fat streaking through it, end up on the plate in a shimmering sea of its own delicious juices so that it needs no gravy?

To my mind, the problem was long cooking, a method that didn’t make sense to me. The best way to cook a pork chop is high and fast so that a savory crust is formed and the chop is cooked through, both sides done in about 5 minutes. This would be for a half-inch thick chop. Add a few minutes for a thicker one. The best heat source, of course, would be fire. Need I expound on the deliciousness of fire-roasted meat?

To hedge my bets against dry, flavorless meat if it turned out my timing was a little off, I tried a variety of methods to ensure flavor and moisture, including brining and dry rubs. While the brining introduced too much salt for my taste, the dry rub worked beautifully. My favorite combination turned out to be 1 tablespoon chipotle, 1 tablespoon cumin, 1 tablespoon brown sugar, 1 teaspoon coriander, and 1 teaspoon ground black pepper. I rubbed the meat, sprinkled it with salt, and let it sit out, loosely covered, while I got on with the business of firing the grill.

The result, as I had hoped, was flavorful meat that retained its juiciness. It was spicy, yes, but juicy.

We enjoyed this dish frequently for a couple of years until this spring when I ran across the bread crumb technique. It was just as simple to dredge the chops as to rub them, and the grilling time turned out to be the same. As for flavor, at my table savory won out over spicy, with the added bonus of bits of charred bread.

I may not have made it up, but I’m sharing it with you, so that has to count for something.


Grilled Pork Chops with Bread Crumbs
(adapted from Gourmet, I think)

4 bone-in center cut pork chops, ½-inch thick
3 to 4 tablespoons olive oil
salt and freshly ground black pepper
¾ cup unseasoned bread crumbs, panko, or crushed croutons

Lay the chops on a cooling rack set over a baking sheet. Liberally sprinkle with half the olive oil and use your fingers or a pastry brush to spread the oil around. Sprinkle on some salt and pepper. Flip the chops and repeat. Dredge both sides of each chop in the bread crumbs, shaking off any excess. Return the chops to the rack and keep, loosely covered, at room temperature for about 30 minutes while you prepare your fire to medium-high. Grill the chops, uncovered, for about 2 minutes. Flip them and cover the grill, leaving all vents wide open. But don’t go too far away. You’ll want to cook them only about 4 minutes longer, or until the juices gleaming through the top are clear. At that point, the chops will have the slightest bit of pink in the center, and they will be perfect. Let them rest 10 minutes before serving.

One of These (People) Is not Like the Other

When we baked peanut butter cookies the other day, my daughter swiped tastes of ingredients, leaving a finger trail in the flour dusting the countertop. Later, she held her pinky between the mouth of the vanilla bottle and the teaspoon. When she helps in the kitchen, she likes to mix but not measure, scoop but not sift.



My son cracked the egg on its pointy top, not its side, and overlooked the bits of shell in the bowl. He wrested the mixer from me, struggled to hold it upright on full power, and endured my hand steadying his.

But when the cookies were done, both took identical courses of action. As did I.




Let’s eat.

You Want How Much Butter on That?

What better way to start a food blog than with butter. Nutritionists may hate it, but many of us admit to a certain guilty glee when butter is mentioned. I was transfixed recently by a recipe, found in this book, that included two sticks of butter melted and poured into waffle batter perfect for Sunday mornings.



Though in our home Sunday morning usually means a mad scramble to get everyone fed, dressed, and out the door to church, sometimes it’s worth it to sleep in, slow down, go to the late service, and meantime mix up a batch of waffles. The lazy stirring of ingredients and the quick hot scent of baking batter savored during a stolen morning at home puts me in a serene mood.

Ten years ago, though, I would not have dropped “serene Sunday morning” and “waffles” in the same sentence. I despised waffles and the whole waffle-making process, especially the part where I had to beat the egg whites separately (who needs another bowl to clean) and the other part where I had to extract the waffles from the clutches of the sub-par appliance I owned. In addition to that, the fickle heating element either burned the waffles (and me as I extracted them), or left them doughy and limp.

I have very painful memories of trying to make waffles.

Eventually I threw out my clunker of a waffle iron and broke my usual guideline of no processed foods in the house by buying frozen waffles, which the family gobbled up. No fuss, no mess, no blistered fingers. In my household ledger, happy family plus happy food provider equals culinary success.

But as I recently contemplated committing myself to a food blog, I figured that to be fair I’d have to be open-minded about all kinds of foods. Whether the food was ugly, scant, slimy, or included separately-beaten egg whites, I had to have an open palate. Yes, that included trying dreaded waffles again.

Funny thing is I’ve had a beautiful brand-new waffle iron in my kitchen for several years. Its sleek chrome lid covers gorgeous non-stick, deeply-grooved plates. Memory is tough to erase, however, and I had never used it.

Until last Sunday.

Armed with a recipe that graciously allowed me to dump the eggs in whole, I mixed up a batter so easy I thought for a moment I was making muffins. When the steam subsided, the crisp yet light waffles lifted right out. The family tucked in, and I made a note to take frozen waffles off my shopping list template.

With a slice of salty pork roll alongside and a mound of blueberries and whipped cream on top, this pastry is a Sunday morning tribute to ease, tranquility, and culinary satisfaction.

Of course, if you want you can have yours with butter.