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Food Meme

1. If you owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve?

I want to run a French truck stop-style restaurant. Two items on the menu every day based on what's available at the markets. A soup or pate to start; cheese and/or a simple tart to finish. Just a simple Prix Fixe joint where all the cooking is mine. I'd be open on Sundays only for lunch, and that would be the most complex meal of the week.

A few years ago, I saw an old firehouse for sale outside of Boston. I can see the whole restaurant there, with my apartment upstairs. In the summer the great doors would open so people could dine al fresco if they chose.


2. What is your favorite restaurant and why?

I don't know if they are still what they were, but I have to say either Ogenblijk in Brussels or the Bellevuechen near Remagen. Both were atmospheric with terrific food. They had completely different feels and food types, but some of my best memories come from those two restaurants.

This isn't to denigrate any of the "great" (Michelin two star or above) restaurants I've eaten at. Great restaurants mark special occasions and make me feel like a queen. Ask me about Anton Mossiman's menu surprise sometime. *G*

Still it's nice to have a restaurant where I can talk with friends, enjoy great food, and share pleasant surroundings.


3. What is your favorite fast food place?

Does IHOP count? If not, Carl's Junior for the chocolate malteds.


4. If you had to choose only one type of food to eat for a year, what would it be?

If we're talking ethnicity, I'd say Chinese because there are so many variations and possibilities. Belgian would work for the same reason.

If we're talking category, vegetables. I can live without meat, fish, and milk products -- though the last of those would be the greatest wrench -- but a day without vegetables seems like too much.


5. What is your favorite cereal?

It depends. For daily eating, I love Shredded Wheat and Bran. I can even make it into a hot cereal by adding hot milk.

When I want to feel like a kid, I go for Cap'n Crunch or Lucky Charms depending on which texture I'm craving.

Jamie Oliver is one of my favorite "TV Chefs."

There are a series of FREE podcasts available on iTunes dealing with the best way to prepare specific dishes. The first one is on omelettes.

My recipe for mashed potatoes.

Take one medium potato per person and cut it into chunks. They shouldn't be too large, but there's no need to cut them finely either. Peel them or not according to taste.

Put them in a heavy bottomed saucepan add 1/2 cup of skim milk (up to 1 and 1/2 cups for six people) and enough water to cover them. Bring to a boil and immediately turn down to a simmer so the milk doesn't scald. (Since we're not using all milk, it cuts down on the opportunity for scalding.) You may add a couple of black peppercorns or some peeled garlic to the pot.

Cover and cook for 15 minutes.

Test the potatoes for doneness with a fork. If they fall apart easily, they're done. A little firmer is fine, completely disintegrating is a little overcooked. If they aren't done, recover the pot and cook another 5 to 10 minutes before rechecking, adding more water if necessary.

Using a slotted spoon, put a portion of the done potatoes into a bowl with a little salt and begin mashing. Add more potatoes and use the cooking water to moisten them until they hold together. Grind a little black pepper over them and/or add 1 Tablespoon of butter, if you like.

As you can see, this recipe, sans butter, is fat free. The flavor is nice because you're putting the flavor back in by using the water/milk mixture they cooked in. What I'm not doing is using fat free cream, fat free sour cream, or fat free evaporated milk.

I firmly believe most recipes will accept substitutions (Do not try this theory with cakes, cookies, or other baked goods unless you really know what you're doing. I'm talking about cooking not baking.). Substitutes, created by corporations and often involving something called guar gum, are an entirely different animal.

If you don't need your potatoes fat free, add a little more butter during the mashing or use whole milk instead of skim in the cooking. If you're serving them as a side dish with a kosher meal, just use water, but add a little more salt or garlic. Boiled garlic can add a buttery texture without adding dairy. And boiled peppercorns will mash.

Many of us have dietary restrictions. But I find using All Fruit (especially the St. Dalfour brand) in making fruit tarts to be superior to trying to use Splenda. There was a line in the TV show Friends, "That's what evil tastes like," to describe a fake chocolate. All I can say is, they hadn't tasted Splenda -- it's actually worse than aspartame for me.

As an example of how to do this, let me give you my peach cobbler recipe.

Preheat the oven to 400F.

Make baking powder or Bisquik biscuits. The recipe here is very close to the one I use. (My cookbook with the biscuit recipe is in storage or I'd just write out my own from the Good Housekeeping Cookbook of 1964.)

Take a fairly deep casserole or souffle dish and grease it (vegetable shortening or butter according to taste). Cut fresh peaches into 1/2 inch to 1 inch chunks and put in the greased dish. I vary the size of the chunks in order to get a variety of texture.

Add 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla and 1/2 cup of peach all fruit jam to a small saucepan over low heat and melt the jam to a liquid. Add 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon or cardamom to the saucepan.

Pour the melted jam over the peaches. If there is not enough to cover the peaches, melt more, but don't add the vanilla or spices.

Roll out the biscuit dough. You can either do drop biscuits on top, or cut biscuits on top, or lay the rolled out dough over the top and cut a few vent holes.

Bake until the dough is cooked through, usually 20-25 minutes.

There was an article in today's Washington Post about the big slow food blow out in San Francisco. The article began by talking about the slow food movement as a bastion of the elite, and then continued by reinforcing the stereotype.

(As a side note, I find it interesting that one thing the organizers learned was not to compete with Burning Man if you're going to hold something in San Francisco.)

In a time of economic downturn, whether public or personal, the first thing many people do is try to cut back on their food budget.

The slow food movement could take advantage of this, but they need to change tactics to do so. There was evidently more than a little discussion of this aspect, but from reading this article and joining in a live chat on the subject a little later, I don't think the ideas sunk in.

Let me start by saying, part of the issue is the movement's name. The name was chosen to highlight the difference between traditional cooking methods and fast food. However, too many punters think they're talking about my twelve hour cassoulet recipe rather than the ten minute pasta salad recipe I've also posted.

Both of these qualify as slow food recipes because they use "artisanal" ingredients. In some ways the pasta salad recipe is more representative of the slow food movement because I use tinned tomatoes in the cassoulet.

I asked a question during a discussion at the Washington Post today, and Jane Black's response was, in part, "Alice Waters, like you, thinks teaching people to cook with simple ingredients will defeat that reputation. Once they see that they can make delicious polenta and a salad for less than it costs to eat at Applebees, she thinks they'll see the light."

First of all, how many of you think of polenta as a main course? Secondly, how many Americans in general will look at polenta and a salad and say "dinner?"

I think most will look at it and say, "Interesting corn bread, where's the meat?"

The slow food movement in Europe started as back to basics in an Italy that was getting to know bottled sauce for the first time. In the United States, I think we need to start with something like Macaroni and Cheese.

Ideas? What's the first dish that an American Slow Foods movement (and can someone come up with a better term while we're at it?) needs to tackle?

Puttanesca Sauce

The original meaning of slut was a descriptive term for a poor housekeeper. As a matter of fact, the term "slut's wool" was still in use in rural Virginia when I was in my teens rather than "dust bunny."

I mention this because the idea behind "Whore's Pasta," a literal translation of Puttanesca, is that the woman in question will only have the bare essentials in the pantry through laziness and poor housekeeping. Although I think if she's good at her work, she only has the bare essentials through lack of time.

If you order spaghetti Puttanesca in a restaurant, it will have capers, olives, and, usually anchovies in a tomato based sauce. When I think of puttanesca sauce, the huge hit of salty richness from those three ingredients is my first image.

However, the point of puttanesca is that it shouldn't require anything beyond olive oil, tomatoes (fresh or tinned), and either garlic or onion. Everything else is what's in your pantry.

Me, I love olives. eanja doesn't care for them, so when I made puttanesca at her place it was olive free. I have friends who hate anchovies. I'll leave it out in that case. If I don't have an onion, I'll just use garlic and vice-versa. On the other hand, I miss eanja's fresh herbs. I always just picked what ever looked or smelled particularly good.

So here's my basic recipe for puttanesca. Modify it to your heart's content.

Two (or more) Tablespoons of olive oil
1 or more Tablespoons of fresh herbs (I like oregano and rosemary, but I've used thyme and/or savory as well. Sage will work.) or 1 or more teaspoons of dried herbs (same list)
1 hot pepper (optional) -- use ground black pepper if you omit this.
1 onion -- I usually embrace the laziness factor and leave the chunks relatively large
1 or 2 cloves of garlic -- again, I usually just slice it
1 Bay leaf -- Told you, I liked the flavor

Put all of the above ingredients into a pan over medium heat to saute the onions to transparency. Stir occasionally and adjust the heat if necessary.

Once the onions are soft add:
1 tablespoon of tomato paste
1 anchovy or 1 teaspoon of anchovy paste

Stir these in until the anchovy begins to break up and the tomato paste is well distributed.

Add:
One can of tomatoes, chopped, diced, or crushed preferred. Whole is fine if that's what you have.
Clean the can with 1/2 cup of red wine.
Add a small can of sliced black olives or 1/2 cup of whole olives (preferably pitted). Green olives or a mix are also fine.
1 Tablespoon (or more) of capers -- salted are the best, I usually have the more common pickled ones in my fridge.

Stir it all together; put on a lid, and reduce the heat to a simmer.

If you put on water for boiling pasta (I like spaghetti, capellini, or linguine, but really, any pasta is fine. I also prefer whole wheat.) as soon as you begin the sauce preparation, you can have the whole meal ready as soon as the pasta is finished.

Or you can be more traditional and just let the sauce stay on a low simmer for several hours.

The sauce is excellent either way.

There exists something called watermelon pie. This is the better version than the one I originally saw.

This disturbs me even though the aforementioned pie is uncooked.

Part of the disturbance is cultural. I was taught to salt my water- and other melons to bring out their sweetness. I also salt peaches and nectarines for the same reason. (I don't understand why plums and apricots weren't treated the same way.) The recipe I saw calls for a cup of sugar.

I can feel the enamel on my teeth dissolving just from reading it.

After calling for all that sugar, there's a part where one mixes in whipped topping.

So, we've taken one of the most naturally sweet things in the world. It's not terribly high in calories and is supremely refreshing chilled on a summer's day. Then we turn it into an artificial high-calorie "treat."

What's wrong with Americans?!?

I got my recipe originally from the book Everybody Eats Well in Belgium. If you know Emanuelle's method for making fresh cheese and have the time, it's a great start. I generally use ricotta. It can be a dip for vegetables or spread on crackers or bread.

1 cup ricotta cheese
2 Tablespoons of fresh thyme chopped
2 Tablespoons of fresh parsley chopped
2 scallions or 1 shallot or 1 larger green onion
1 Tablespoon of vinegar (champagne, white wine, or thyme)
Salt and pepper to taste
Chopped radish
Chopped carrot

Mix it all together at least three hours before serving. Add a teaspoon of hazelnut or walnut oil, if you like the flavor.

Variations:
Substitute buttermilk for the vinegar
Substitute lemon or lime juice for the vinegar and use lemon or lime zest instead of thyme.
Substitute dill for both the parsley and the thyme
Use truffle oil for the optional oil.

They say French women don't get fat.

That's not entirely true. However, walking down a street in Western Europe presents a person with fewer opportunities to observe obesity.

Now, just a quick reminder here, by objective standards, I am obese. Technically, in spite of the forty plus pounds I've already shed, I'm morbidly obese. This is not a dig a fat people.

But Mireille Guiliano is on to something. There is a huge difference between Europeans, and my observation is mostly Belgians and Britons, and Americans in the way they view "the table."

Don't get me wrong, I've watched Londoners deaden the taste of food with Dad's Sauce and Belgians do it with cigarettes. What really strikes me is that Americans seem to do it with the food itself.

eanja told me a story about a friend of hers who looked in eanja's cupboards and asked, "How can you cook? You have nothing but ingredients."

This seems to be the big problem. We're used to seeing the finished object and have no idea how it gets there. Pizza is an excellent example. I can understand how those, like me, who aren't terribly good at baking might think frozen is the way to go. But frankly, frozen and other prepared doughs are already available widely. Roll it out, add your own toppings -- a luxury Mama Celeste doesn't really allow -- and bake for the same length of time a frozen pizza would take. If you have baking abilities, you can make and freeze your own crust dough for use later.

I can throw together a pseudo-puttanesca sauce while the water is boiling for the pasta it's going to top. If I have the time, yes, the taste is richer if I slow cook the sauce for several hours. But the actual preparation time, is still only about ten minutes.

One of the most dramatic examples came from the gentleman I refer to as "my not-quite-evil ex." He loved my cooking, but thought it took too long to prepare a meal on a week night. So he challenged me to see who could have a hot meal on the table first. We didn't own a microwave, so this limited the contest, fairly, to stuff that could be cooked in an oven or on a stove top. Because it was impromptu, we were limited to things we had on hand.

He prepared a frozen pizza with frozen vegetables on top of it. While he preheated the oven, I opened a can of beef broth, poured it into a saucepan and added two more cans of water to it. I took out a frozen beef chop and sliced it thinly, then chopped a clove of garlic.

He put the pizza concoction in the oven. I started my risotto rice. Twenty minutes of stirring later I added some frozen spinach and the beef to the last cup of boiling water for a minute before adding it to the rice.

I beat his time by one minute. Now there's no question that his meal was easier, in that he could walk away, but mine was just as fast, more nutritious, and tasted better. Not to mention I recognize all the words on my ingredients list (Arborio rice, beef, beef broth, red wine, olive oil, garlic, thyme, bay leaf, parmesan cheese, spinach). I really don't want to know what goes into Mama Celeste's cheese substitute.

Savoring food is easier when the food is flavorful. That means cooking with ingredients rather than packaged foods.

I have said that cookery is my art. It becomes an art through belief in yourself and experimentation. There's a certain fearlessness required.

That means you will make bad food. If you use good ingredients and pay attention to cooking time, it probably won't be terrible or inedible. But at some point you're going to make a meal where you take a bite and look at your fork and say, "what hath I wrought?"

This is fine. It will happen less and less as you learn just why soy sauce and vanilla aren't usually used in the same dish. A new stove will probably bring a two week streak of over, under, or oddly cooked food, but, once you adapt to each other, chances are it won't happen again.

There will be the occasional recipe that reads well but tastes wrong. Toss the recipe or adapt it. With experience your mistakes will be fewer and fewer.

What does one do about the ego hit, though? How does a person who has just burned water recover?

I watch "Semi-Homemade With Sandra Lee" on the Food Network.

I don't usually make fun of the afflicted; it's a low form of humor. But this woman is trying to give advice on cooking and clearly has no idea what she's doing.

There is comfort in the idea that no matter how bad my meal accidentally turned out, it's no where near what Sandra Lee has done on purpose. Seriously, I think one of her recipes involving frozen meatballs contravenes the Geneva Convention.

I have laughed harder at her show than at most comedies. Over at TWoP, if you go to the early days of the thread called "Open Letter to Sandra Lee" you can find the restraining order I took out on behalf of the French government for creating a souffle with no eggs. Her "French Pastry" dessert began with pound cake and instant custard mix.

gileswench can testify to the Christmas episode that I made her watch and the scary, scary cocktails.

As a matter of fact, Sandra Lee's presentations make me feel better about mine. Mine are basic, but they're about the food. Hers are fancy, themed, and over the top.

An example: In the aforementioned Christmas episode, she prepares a snowball cocktail. It uses blue brandy, which I understand as the shadows on snow have a distinctly bluish cast. However, the blue brandy isn't diluted much giving it a definite Tidy Bowl hue. She pours it in a glass rimmed with flaked coconut giving the overall drink a disconcerting aura of flecks of toilet paper around the bowl.

edited to add: I found the recipe at Food Network and there's a picture!

No one can top that.

In honor of DC heat, I've decided to do picnic foods.

This can be a side salad or a main course depending on how many people you spread it around. I believe the original for this recipe came out of a Seventeen magazine circa 1981. But I could be wrong.

The original recipe called for farfalle (bow ties). I like gemelli for this, but I haven't found them in whole wheat yet. If I use whole wheat pasta, it's rotini. Spaghetti and angel hair also work, if it's a main course. Don't use shells because you can't get the flavoring to pasta ratio right on the fork.


1 pound of tomatoes. More if you are trying to get rid of some or really love tomatoes. If you use whole tomatoes, skin them and chop them. Seed them if you don't like the seeds. I use the water I'm boiling for the pasta for the skinning and add the pasta afterward. If you use grape or cherry tomatoes, cut them in half. Life is too short to peel cherry tomatoes. Put it all in a large bowl. I prefer glass or pyrex. Anything except metal is fine. (I've mixed cherry tomatoes and large, peeled tomatoes in this recipe. It's very forgiving.)

1 large bunch (2/3 of a cup of leaves. More if you like) of Basil. Chop or chiffonade (roll the leaves into a long cigar and slice through them) the basil and add to the tomatoes.

2 Tablespoons of good olive oil. Add it to the tomatoes and basil.

Salt and fresh ground pepper to taste. Add to the bowl.

At this point you can stop and refrigerate the ingredients. I usually do that for about an hour and then pull them out of the refrigerator just as I start the water for the pasta. It isn't necessary, though.

1 pound of pasta. Prepare according to the directions on the box.

1 cup of grated mozzarella cheese.

1/2 cup of chopped walnuts.

Drain the pasta. Add some to the bowl with about a third of the mozzarella and nuts. Stir lightly and add more pasta, cheese, and nuts. The cheese should get a little stringy.

You can either serve it immediately or let it cool and chill it for awhile. I would use it within 24 hours, but I've known it to keep longer if well covered.

Variations:
Substitute sundried tomatoes for some or all of the fresh tomato.
Use pine nuts, pistachios, or slivered almonds in place of the walnuts. Pecans and cashews are too bland.
Try another fresh herb -- dill is good -- in place of the basil. I would keep it to ONE herb, not many.
If you really love spicy food, a seeded hot pepper cut into rings is a good addition. Warn your guests because the acid in the tomatoes seems to enhance the burn of the pepper.