Just like Trinidad, only freezing

This was our second annual “Trinidad Weekend.” The time in the dead of winter where we cook nothing but Trinidad food. The only thing is that it didn’t make it seem any warmer. I picked this weekend because it was so cold. But next year I think we’ll do it around Carnival.

So no, it still seemed cold this weekend but it went well. I made some doubles (more on that later), Karen made curry chicken, channa & potato with bus up shut roti on Saturday, bake and shark for lunch Sunday, and stew chicken with macaroni pie and pigeon peas for dinner Sunday. Good times. I finished the weekend off on Monday with a solo run on Mummy’s oxtail soup. Well, not completely solo, Karen made the dumplings.  I followed her recipe exactly, and noticed some things that I apparently forgot to write down. But I managed it all right and Karen said it rocked. And guess what secret ingredient I added:

Do you see it in there? Yes, I know it looks like witches’ brew, but pay attention. I added a habanero pepper in to the soup, just like everyone says you’re supposed to. It didn’t burst, and the soup wasn’t hot at all. And it looked a lot nicer in the bowls, too. Even Jonathan and Ben tried some and liked it. Ben likes all my soups. Good boy.

You know you watch too much Food Network when…

Two moments in time:

At the local butcher shop a 7-year-old Isaac is seen, face pressed to the glass of the seafood display, uttering “Wow! Look at the salmon!”

And one morning, I’m getting everyone ready for the day. Molto Mario comes on the TV and 4-year-old Jonathan says “Look! It’s Mario Batali!”

Apparently Isaac has expensive taste in fish. And I have no idea how Jonny learned to recognize Mario by sight.  We never say  his last name in our house, he’s just Mario.

Tonight we dine in Hell

Bad movie tie-in, I know. But the smoke from this one was so caustic that maybe it’s not too far off.

I started with the typical inspiration: The Soup. I’m getting pretty cocky these days with soup, adding and replacing ingredients as I please. It hasn’t ended in disaster so far. This time I took the recipe in the book as just a general outline to follow since I obviously know more than those hacks at the Culinary Institute of America. Sorry, but when you hear the words potato and sour cream what do you think? Chives. It’s not rocket surgery.

So I had a good idea for the soup, but what about the sandwich? We’ve got chicken breast, but how many different kinds of chicken sandwiches can you come up with? Well, I had this recipe from Mario Batali’s cookbook for a whole roast chicken called The Devil’s Chicken (Pollo al Diavolvo). It involved rubbing the almost-cooked chicken down with a paste of dijon mustard and crushed black peppercorns. But the true beauty of this recipe was the “salad” side that he included. It used flat leaf parsley, halved cherry tomatoes, and red onions sliced thin. We’ve made this with lots of different dishes, and even used it in sandwiches before. Karen has added sliced baby cucumbers into the mix somewhere along the way as well. So I took this idea and turned that paste into a marinade for the chicken breast. Way cool, Mark’s the hero.

I’ve said it before. When I’m cooking meat on the stove top I use high heat. I don’t know why, so don’t ask. The end result tends to be smoke. The dinner isn’t always ruined, but sometimes the windows get opened in January. And it’s worse on the second floor. You see, we’ve got this set of stairs from the kitchen to the second floor so all the smoke goes straight up. Add a quarter cup of black pepper to the fog and you’ve got something that’s near impossible to breathe.

The chicken was scorched past recognition cooked perfectly, and the soup was also a hit. The compliments sounded something like this:

“Good *cough* dinner, hon. I really like *choke* the *cough* chicken. *hack* “

For the second time ever in her life in my cooking career, Karen didn’t need to add pepper sauce. A quarter cup of black pepper will do that. I, however, needed a half gallon of milk to make it through the meal. And some eye drops.

Santa will thank you

Karen recently got a cookbook revolving around chocolate and coffee. Sometimes they’re together, sometimes they’re showcased separately. Flipping through the book there was one recipe in particular that caught my eye. It seemed as though the book would fall open to the page of its own accord. And it does now, since I’ve spent so much time drooling over the picture. It was called “White Hot Chocolate” and I was instantly hooked. Karen was unconvinced because white chocolate isn’t real chocolate, but I said “I’m making it, do you want some or not?”  She did.

So I got the idea, wouldn’t Santa like this? It’d keep him warm for his wintry trek, and it’s got a splash of liquor to keep his cheeks rosy. So go ahead, make Santa happy and ditch the milk for something more interesting. This is what he really wants.

I made this with skim milk, but I can imagine it’s ten times better with whole milk. Good idea, I think I’ll go make some more.

In praise of soup

This is what Pennsylvania looks like this week:

That’s Fahrenheit folks, not Celsius. So what’s the cure for all this cold and snow? A plane ticket to Trinidad? Probably, but soup is cheaper.

There is nothing on earth that warms you up like soup, so to all you prospective visitors from the Caribbean be warned. I’m a soup nut.

Luckily Karen had suggested Italian wedding soup this past weekend and we had all the ingredients on hand. That way I didn’t have to leave the house and go to the store. Lots of accidents out there. In the past we’ve built a Frankenstein soup using these two recipes:

Wedding soup from Food Network Kitchens
Wedding soup from Giada

This time I used Giada’s recipe straight up. Except for one thing. She said to grate the onion. Onions are wet and slippery and I like my fingers thank you. I diced it as small as my knife would make it. Wedding soup is pretty easy once the meatballs are made. I made them kind of big this time, it was tough to judge at the beginning how big they would turn out. And some of them fell apart in the soup. Who knows, maybe that’s supposed to happen. I’ll keep thinking that way.

Neither recipe called for acine de pepe, but we put some in anyway. We like it. Karen dumped in about a cup. And it turns out that a cup of acine de pepe is approximately 12 billion little pasta balls.

Soup was good and Karen was pleasantly surprised to see it already making when she came home.

Do buffaloes have wings?

The local grocery store sold Karen a rancid chicken on Saturday. It was a seven pounder destined for the table of a family in our church, so while Karen set about making the other preparations I returned the offending bird and got a replacement chicken:

Did you catch it? Look at the picture again. Yes, friends, that’s not a chicken. It was right next to the Purdue broilers, but that is most definitely a breast of turkey. Karen said “That’s not a chicken!” To this I replied “What?! Of course it’s a chicken!” After cursing I went back a second time and got a real chicken. It probably would have been easier to raise my own at this point. I suppose this raises the question of how I can cook a chicken if I don’t know what one looks like.

Suddenly I have something in common with Jessica Simpson…

A little reward, you’ve earned it…

This is my 100th post. I always knew I was this long-winded, but I didn’t know you had it in you to stick around this long. Thank you. For your diligence I reward you with a story that is now legend in our household lore.

The Burgers

It was October 2006 and raining and really too cold outside for grilling, but we’d made burgers for the grill. Karen’s mom was visiting so I wanted to “treat” her to my hamburgers. Well, we have an indoor grill, and let’s face it, cooking with a gas grill isn’t real BBQ anyway.

For those of you unfamiliar with our kitchen we had a Jenn-Air range that was about as old as I am. And Jenn-Air ranges come with an indoor grill insert and, well, let me show you what it looks like:

So your food sits on the grill grates (on the right), under that is the heating element, and under that is where those knobbly looking things go. They’re heavy and they have wire supports for the heating element. Apparently they do a good job of collecting grease too, but we’ll get to that. We’ve cooked steaks on the grill before with moderate success. It’s actually not a bad idea for when it’s raining. But we’d never cooked burgers on the grill before, and I figured it would be just like steaks. Oh, and another thing, this time I left the heat turned all the way up to high. And why not? Charcoal grills have no real heat control anyway, right? I’m not really sure what the instructions say to do in this instance, but real men don’t need instructions, right?

So I’m cooking burgers. I’m the man, I cook the burgers. They’re about three quarters done and I see this tiny flame peek out from underneath the heating element. Hmm. A little bit of grease, it should burn itself out soon, I think. It doesn’t. It starts growing. Apparently burgers have a lot of fat in them, but then I already knew that. I turn the heat off. The flame (at this point I should say flames) keep getting bigger, until they are reaching up and licking the bottom of the microwave.

“help” I say very sheepishly. From the dining room I hear Karen say “What now?”

“f- f- fire” I say sheepishly. Everyone comes in. Karen, Karen’s mom, Karen’s sister. At this point I’m thinking two things: Where are the boys? Ben is asleep in his swing, Isaac is asleep in bed, Jonny is in the bathtub. The other thing I’m thinking is Who the f— puts wallpaper behind a stove? Seriously, shouldn’t there be tile back there? The previous owners of this house did nothing right.

Wait, the stove is still on fire. I’m wishing at this point that we had a fire extinguisher. Karen put a pot lid on the grill, but the fire is under the grill so that doesn’t work. We don’t have enough baking soda. So we all wonder what to do. How much time until the wallpaper catches fire? I make an executive decision. Everything has to go. I grab my kitchen tongs and, starting from the top down, I take each piece individually outside to the back porch.

“WAIT!” says Karen, “Save the burgers!” I can see the headline now: Woman Rescues Burgers, Serves Them To Firemen While Her House Burns Down. Once the burgers are safe I take everything else outside in the cold and rain.

The burgers weren’t very good, but now we have a fire extinguisher in the kitchen.

Later that week the same exact thing happened to Bobby Flay on Iron Chef America. That’s why I like him so much. He’s so much like me. He put the fire out by emptying a box of kosher salt on it. Good to know.

Filling the house with smoke….again

I like my cast iron skillets, they make me feel so frontier-ly. That’s a lie. I like them because Alton Brown says I should. He’s always right, you know.

I had this idea for acorn squash risotto from my Mario Batali cookbook. But what to serve with it? I searched the Food Network for roasted chicken recipes, and there it was on the third page of results: Lemon and sage roasted chicken. It sounded good, and it sounded easy, which is better. I wanted to be able to focus my attention on the risotto, which I’ve heard is easy to ruin if you don’t mind it well. Gordon Ramsay is always screaming at those idiots on Hell’s Kitchen because they invariably ruin the risotto at least once each night. And I can understand it now, because to have four or five things going at once, including one or two risotto skillets, would be very hard to keep track of. Here’s how mine looked when I was done:

Anyway, as it turned out the chicken recipe I found was from Michael Symon, Food Network’s new Iron Chef who hails from Cleveland, OH. Go Cleveland! First the Cavs go to the finals, the Indians make the ALCS, it looks like the Browns are playoff bound, and now this. An Iron Chef. How is it that I can bring football into anything?

I was talking about something, wasn’t I? Oh yes, my cast iron skillet. I quartered the chicken and heated both pans but good, put some olive oil and butter in, and dropped in the chicken, skin side down.

SMOKE! Lots of it, too. Around that time Karen came home and asked if we have fire insurance. “Don’t worry,” explained Mark, “I’ve got the fire extinguisher right here.”

This seems to happen any time I’m searing a piece of meat; the house fills with smoke. I’ve stopped trying to make burgers inside because of this. That and I did almost burn the house down last year making burgers on the electric grill on our now deceased Jenn-Air range. Maybe the pans are too hot, or perhaps I need a real hood to take the smoke out of the house. If I knew the answer I wouldn’t still be doing it, would I?

Here’s the chicken after it was done. In this particularly dramatic image of the chicken thigh one of the sage leaves breaks through the skin in a manner reminiscent of the Alien movies:

It came out okay. The flavor was good, but I brought the chicken out too soon. We had to finish off some of the bigger pieces in the microwave. Once again I was faced with the paradox of almost burning the chicken while undercooking it.  Maybe next time I’ll actually use my digital thermometer.

Another thing. If you look at the recipe it calls for 6oz. of butter for 6 chicken breasts. That’s a stick and a half of butter, folks. I used about 2 Tablespoons of olive oil and 1 Tablespoon of butter in each pan, and that even seemed like too much fat. If chef Symon continues cooking like this he’ll be rivaling Mario’s girth in about a year.

Daddy, why does my dinner glow in the dark?

I’ve made Mario Batali’s tomato sauce before.  Actually I’m pleased with how easy it is, and it tastes really good.  These days I’ll make a batch and what I don’t use I’ll freeze into little tomato-sicles for easy parceling later.

One of the steps in making the tomato sauce is to add half of a medium sized carrot, finely grated.  And you’re supposed to saute it with the onions and garlic.  The carrot is supposed to combat the acidity of the tomatoes.  Well, on Saturday I made a double recipe.  So I doubled everything in the recipe.  Maybe I didn’t let it brown long enough, maybe I shouldn’t have put in a whole carrot, maybe the carrot was just too big.  Sunday night Karen made a casserole with my tomato sauce, and it was orange.

Doesn’t that one piece of penne look like a finger? It wasn’t just any orange, though.  This looked inspired by the 1988 Denver Broncos’ uniforms.   We’ll call it “Elway Orange.”  It sounds better than “Uranium 238 Orange.”

And in case you’re wondering why the Steelers won this week, you’ll find out on Karen’s blog.  Ben’s support for the team was pivotal, and he’ll be wearing that for every game from here on out.

Boycott the doughboy

The biggest shock I received while working in the dairy section at Wal-Mart was just how little cooking we do as Americans. From TV dinners to frozen pizza, so much of what we eat is prepared for us. And no item brought that home to me as much as those Pillsbury biscuits.

I can understand why the crescent rolls are big sellers. I’ve looked up how to make them. They’re time consuming and difficult to prepare. But biscuits are supposed to be a staple of southern cooking, aren’t they? Don’t they come together so fast that your oven may not even have time to preheat? Well those things flew off the shelf. There’s even a local restaurant owner that stops by Wal-Mart and buys them out twice a week. Appalled, I decided to make some myself thinking that if I, a northeastern boy, can make biscuits, then anyone can.

And wouldn’t you know it, Alton made biscuits on Friday’s Good Eats rerun. So I got to see a master biscuit maker in action: Alton’s grandmother. And on Alton’s online recipe for biscuits she even comments that the recipe on the back of the bag of White Lily flour is hard to beat. I live in rural Pennsylvania so I can’t get White Lily flour. So I got this:

Gold Medal has their own recipe for biscuits on the back of their bag. Nicole from Pinch my Salt actually posted the recipe on the back of White Lily’s bag. She also did her homework and listed the protein content for all types of flours. That way I knew I wasn’t too far off with this flour. Way cool. (Go vote for her as the best food blog.) So should I use Alton’s recipe, White Lily’s or Gold Medal’s? Well since I’ve got Gold Medal flour I used their recipe.

Except I didn’t. I watched Good Eats and Alton said to replace some of the shortening with butter and it will taste better. I am fearless in the face of substitutions!

Looking around at the different recipes out there I must say that the one on the back of Gold Medal self-rising flour has twice the fat as all the others. I mean, EIGHT tablespoons of shortening? Really? I tried to use less, but it wouldn’t crumble the way the bag said it would. Oh, and another thing. Grocery stores here in Podunk don’t have all this low fat or fat free buttermilk. No, these biscuits were made with WHOLE buttermilk. Schedule my bypass for next Tuesday please.  (UPDATE: Karen tells me that the local Wal-Mart sells low fat buttermilk, but I really haven’t been in there since I picked up my last paycheck.)

I apparently used a very large biscuit cutter because I only got eight biscuits out. That’s what, one tablespoon of fat per hockey puck, right? They may not have been much to look at,

but they browned up kind of nice. And with all that shortening in there my biscuits definitely had flaky layers. They didn’t all rise the same, though, because I made them in my 12 year old toaster oven.

Okay, so here’s the point. These weren’t a home run, but they were a hit. Even the kids ate them. If a self-proclaimed wannabe in the kitchen can do this well on his first try then anyone can do this. These turned out good and I’ll definitely do it again. Next time I’ll try a recipe with less fat.

See you at the gym.