My Reputation Precedes Me

This past weekend, I went out to the midwest to visit some of my extended family (grandparents, aunts, uncles, and some of my cousins). I hadn't seen them in a long while, and my mom has been feeling really homesick, so as a birthday gift to her we flew out crazy early Saturday and returned crazy early today.

Somehow, "we'll help with dinner, Grandpa, since everyone who can is descending on your house the Saturday we arrive" turned into "Ms. Hermit and her intrepid mother with fix dinner for the gang- and Ms. Hermit will make one of her famous pies!" On three hours sleep. And it was two pies, since I had to feed eleven people. (I could go on a rant about why it is that the women do all the cooking, and the blatant sexism I encountered in the midwest, but that's going to have to be it's own entry)

And when did my pies get famous, anyway? The last one in this family to have really amazing baked goods was my great-grandmother Atha (yes, that's her real name), who won all kinds of county fair ribbons back in the day. I was maybe ten or twelve when she passed on, and I remember her pies and cookies. How can I live up to that?

But somehow, my pies, and especially my pie crusts, have become reknowned in my family. I'll admit, pie crust takes a certain amount of finesse, but it's deceptively easy. Here, I'll write it out. This makes two crusts, by the way.

You need:
2 cups flour
10 tablespoons cold shortening or butter (or a mix of both)
a pinch of salt (like 1/4 t or less)
between 2 and 5 tablespoons ice cold water

Put the flour in a big mixing bowl. Bigger than you think you need. Add half the shortening, and either use a pastry tool to incorporate to the stage of looking like cornmeal, or two knives (the two knives method: hold a butter knife in each hand. Start with your fists together, then pull them apart. Continue to run them through the flour and shortening so that the sides of the blades touch or almost touch as they pass each other for what will feel like a very long time. Consider it your upper arm workout for the day.)

Add the other half of the shortening, and incorporate "until it looks like little peas." Or that's what the recipe I use says. I can usually get most of it down to the size of dried lentils. What you're doing is trying to get the smallest unmelted little globs of fat possible coated in flour.

Now add the water, one tablespoon at a time, to bind it together. It should still look grainy. But when you pick up some of it and squeeze it together in your fist, it should mostly hold its shape.

Wrap it in a ball in wax paper if you will use it right away and stick it in the fridge or freezer (freezer for what I call "mix and dump" pies like pumpkin and pecan, fridge for things like apple where you have some chopping and peeling to do for the filling). Wrap your wax paper ball in lots of plastic wrap if you're going to freeze it for later (if it gets frostbite, it's gone bad).

Honestly, you can put just about anything in a pie, and fillings are surprisingly flexible. The ones where I went "oh no, I fucked up" are inevitably everyone's favorite (who knew people would like an apple pie that was over-flavored to the point of tasting like a spice cake? Or a cherry where I added so much cornstarch that it didn't run at all?)

Warning! This pie dough will not easily stand up to things like making a lattice. You can do it, but be prepared for lots of breaking and patching. but lattices are really too much work anyway. you want pretty, I recommend just cutting some diamonds out of the top crust in an artistic sort of way or something.

next entry: rolling pie dough and a couple of filling ideas. With photos, I promise!

P.S. the funniest part? I got my pie dough recipe out of a cookbook that I promise you every single member of my family already owns.

Blog-keeping Note

I've been flitting about the internet, reading other food blogs. It is typical of me to jump into doing something before actually doing the research into the thing first. I have a talent for getting myself in over my head. So I've made some decisions regarding this blog:

1. I need to start taking photos as I cook. This means I need to get batteries for my digital camera.

2. I will continue to ramble on in the process of sharing recipes, and will actually try to censor those ramblings less. I've been thinking about the things that had early influence on my love of food, and the thing is, my love of food and my love of stories are intertwined. There are recipes that can only be shared with the story that goes with them. And there are stories that require food. And blogs that don't do both wind up boring me. So I'm not your food-porn site. Suck it. Do not get off on my descriptions. Make the food, eat it, and feel peace with the world.

3. At some point I need to talk about the preponderance of female food-bloggers and how they go about claiming, adapting, or refuting the domesticity assumed in preparing food. In fact, that may become a running theme here.

4. I need to actually post. At least once a week.

Considering it's February, I'm a solid month behind on making these resolutions. Forget Douglas Adams and the whooshing sound deadlines make as they go flying by, I'm not even on schedule when it comes to creating the job.

Making Use of Odd Kitchen Tools (or why I love my baby cast-iron)

When I was 18, I got my first apartment. This wasn’t exactly how I’d intended my life, but at the time Emerson College gave housing priority to the people who were already in the dorms. This forced a third of the incoming freshmen and all of the transfer students into Boston’s cut-throat September rental market. The following year, they changed their policies to give priority to incoming freshmen, and these days they require that you live on-campus unless you get specific exemptions.

So basically, I got screwed.

Fear not though, because my family is composed almost entirely of pack-rats. I got my parent’s old dishes from when they were first living on their own. I got spare furniture from our basement (that I still have and love) and desks and chairs from aunts and uncles. And I got boxes of kitchen stuff and bags of linens that my grandmother had been storing in her attic for the eight years since my great-grandmother died. I got a lot of stuff that took some work to identify (an ancient oddly-shaped whisk comes to mind), a mish-mash of olive-green aluminum pots, and a 6 inch cast iron skillet.

At first, I didn’t know what to make of this baby skillet. It was too small for most of the cooking I did, and I was just starting to learn my way around daily cooking. I didn’t have much in the way of cookbooks (aka: I had one cookbook from the 1960s that had been in amongst my great-grandmother’s stuff) and our internet was dial-up (the cable company said our apartment didn’t exist. But the cable wire that came out of the wall worked. I think we were stealing from the upstairs neighbors, but I have no way of really knowing). So I subscribed to an recipe email list. Every day, I’d check my email to see what I’d been sent, and if it sounded good I saved the recipe in a text file. I never made most of them, but there are a couple of recipes that I still use. My favorite is also the one that first gave me a use for that itty bitty cast iron. No other pan travels from stovetop to oven the way that a cast iron skillet does.

Individual German Pancake

1 egg
¼ cup milk
¼ cup flour
1 T butter or margarine

Turn your oven to 475 degrees. Then put the butter in the itty bitty skillet and melt it on the stovetop. While the butter is melting, whisk the egg, then add the milk and whisk again. Finally, whisk in the flour. Pour the batter into the skillet once the butter is melted, and move the skillet into the oven for 12 minutes. Use a hot-pad, the skillet heats up fast. When the time is up, your pancake will be all super-puffy, but it will quickly fall. You can just pour syrup over it, or you can fill that space with fresh fruit or sweetened ricotta cheese.

Of course, if you’ve ever been to Bickford’s you’ll recognize this as the base for their “Big Apple” pancake. For a home version of that:

1 apple, peeled and chopped into itty bitty pieces
1 teaspoon sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ cup water
¼ cup honey
(all measurements approximate )

Toss the apples in the sugar and cinnamon. Add half of them to the pancake batter.

While the pancake cooks, put the water, honey and rest of the apple into a little tiny saucepan/pot. Bring to a simmer and whisk until it gets syrupy. Pour over pancake when you remove it (the apples will keep the pancake from falling quite as much). Enjoy!

I love that little bit of kitchen alchemy, it never fails to impress people who crash at my place, and takes almost no work. Of course, because I only had one skillet, there was a 13 minute wait-time between finished pancakes. So eventually I picked up a second itty-bitty cast iron (for surprisingly cheap) so I could make two at once.

This has come in handy because it is also the perfect size to make individual batches of hash browns, which are more work than I’m willing to do for just me. I like potatoes just about any way, but the combo of crunchy and soft afforded by good hash browns is heaven. Today, having only two eggs left and wanting a savory breakfast, I got creative:

Hash Browns and Eggs

2 medium potatoes
Cheddar cheese (or almost any kind of cheese, really)
2 eggs
Oil
Salt and pepper

I very generously coated the bottom of both my itty bitty cast iron skillets with oil over medium heat on the stove, then grated the potato with my cheese grater with the biggest holes (also the one I use for cheddar). You could grate the potatoes in a food processor with the grater blade, but I didn’t want to wash the whole food processor. I then mixed in what was probably a full teaspoon of salt, and three or four twists of freshly grated black pepper. I split the potatoes in half, and pressed them into the hot oily skillets the left them alone for about five minutes.

Using a metal fork, I went along the edges of the potatoes to make sure they were unstuck from the pan and crisp and golden. Then I used a metal spatula to go underneath and make sure they weren’t stuck there. I inverted a plate over the skillet, grabbed the whole mess with hot pads, and turned it over. Now I had the cooked side of the potatoes facing me on the plate. Once I’d made sure the skillet was still lightly oiled, I slid the potato mass back in and returned it to the heat. Then I grated cheese over it (to taste), and poked at the cheese so that there was less in the center than on the edges.

I turned on the broiler, then cracked an egg on top of each skillet of potatoes. The skillets then went under the broiler for about 4 minutes, or until the whites were set but the yolks still gooey. You can cook it longer if you like your yolks hard. I slid my toasty, cheesy, eggy hash browns out onto plates, and attempted to eat mine fast enough that Mr. Bo didn’t poach my breakfast when he finished his.

I feel like I’ve made that sound a lot more complicated than it was. Really, this was also very easy to make. I’m not big on complicated breakfasts, because I don’t function well before coffee.

I’ve also discovered other uses for the baby cast-irons, but those will be another post. This has gotten really long already.

Soup, Part 2

So it took more than a day, but I finally made that soup and polenta. It’s just as well, because fresh polenta doesn’t fry as well as cold, molded polenta does. Polenta, by the way, is just a fancy Italian way of saying corn meal mush. Massive staple for pioneers, and comfort food for my family. I’m particularly fond of frying cold cornmeal mush for breakfast and topping it with brown sugar or maple syrup. It’s also crazy easy to make:

1 cup cornmeal
3 cups water
¼ teaspoon salt

Boil two cups of the water with the salt in it. Stir the cornmeal into the other cup of water to make a slurry. When the two cups is boiling, pour the slurry in and stir until it thickens. No, keep stirring. Thicker. Yes, I know you have big huge bubbles and you’re afraid you’re going to burn it. Keep stirring. 15 minutes. You’re aiming for gloopy here. (it’s during this phase that fancy recipes will tell you to stir in some kind of cheese or spices. I don’t because I like the plain kind better for breakfasts)

Spoon into a greased mold (I used a loaf pan, but if you want circles clean aluminum cans work), cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate.

That had been in my fridge for a few days before I got around to making the soup. I had a couple breakfasts out of it, and still had more than enough left to fry a couple slices and top them with cheddar to go with the soup.

I received for my birthday a cookbook of soups, and this is part of what got me in the mood to make soup in the first place. The cookbook has a ton of really tasty-sounding recipes in it. The only catch is they’re all designed to serve at least eight to ten people. Mr. Bo and I will get bored with it long before we ever finish that kind of quantity of leftovers. Also, I don’t keep most of the ingredients on-hand. So I kind of cobbled this spicy black bean soup together from what I had, based vaguely on like five different recipes I looked at.

Spicy Black Bean Soup
Oil (whatever you like, you only need a little)
1 onion, chopped
½ t garlic
2 c water
1 bouillon cube (any flavor will do)
1 t cumin
1 t chili powder
1/8 t cayenne pepper
1 t oregano
4 large cherry tomatoes (1/3 to ½ cup) roughly chopped
1 16 oz can black beans, drained
Dash worcestershire sauce
Tabasco to taste
(cheese and crushed tortilla chips to garnish)

Sweat the onions in the oil with the garlic. Meanwhile, heat the water in the microwave and add the bouillon cube to the water. Once the onions are translucent, add the spicy spices and give them a moment before dumping in the water, oregano, and Worcestershire sauce. Add the tomatoes, and bring everything to a boil. Add the beans, and boil for about ten minutes longer, to ensure everything is good and cooked. Then puree in batches in the food processor or blender. I needed two batches in my food processor so as to not go over the “liquid fill” line. I made that mistake once. Hot soup all over everything! It was un-fun.

At this point, you might have soup. Taste it. Is it at the spice level you want? Is it thick enough? If the answer to the first question is no, add some Tabasco. Go easy on this. I didn’t, and we wound up with Fiery Death Soup. If it’s not thick enough, a low boil with regular stirring should evaporate some of the liquid.

Serve it with cheese or sour cream, and crushed tortilla chips, and the fried cheesy polenta on the side.

We solved the Fiery Death problem actually by crushing up a handful of tortilla chips into our bowls. Which also gave it nice crunchy bits in the creamy soup for contrast.