Evolution

I started cooking when I was in college and moved into my first apartment with roommates from my dorm. I had an pretty limited repertoire, but I sort of fumbled around. I knew that I liked to cook and I came from a family that cooked so I tended to work with fresh foods...or at least throw them into my ramen. But, when I really started working in the kitchen was when I moved to Minneapolis for a few years of grad school. I headed out on my 21st birthday with three Wustof knives (a graduation present from my parents) some pans from Kmart, a beat-up paperback version of the Joy of Cooking, a copy of the Silver Palate with some notes from Mom in the back, Silver Palate New Basics and a blue spiral notebook that I'd copied some recipes in.

I pulled my notebook out the other day because I wanted to make White Chili; and I always forget something if I don't look at my notes. But I realized how much the recipe had changed as I've made it for 11 years.

When I was 21 it looked like this:

• 1 lb Boneless, skinless Turkey or Chicken
• 1/2 cup each carrots and celery
• 6 cups broth (at the time this meant buillon cubes--and not my homemade ones)
• 2 16oz cans navy beans
• 1 4oz can green chilies
• oregano
• cumin
• salt and pepper
• sour cream and shredded jack cheese to top
  

Simmer meat, vegetables in broth about 10 minutes. Drain all but one cup of liquid. Add the beans, chiles, spice and simmer 10 minutes. Top with sour cream and cheese.

At the ripe old age of 32 it looks like this:

• 1-1.5 lbs bone-on chicken breasts or quarters, skinned
• 1 1/2 cup dried white beans
• 4 cups real chicken broth
• 1/2 cup each carrots and celery
• Whatever herbs are around (oregano, thyme, bay leaf)
• Salt\Pepper
• Cumin
• 1 4 oz can of chiles
• 2 Limes
• Chipotle
• sour cream and shredded cheddar cheese

Soak the beans. Put chicken at bottom of heavy pan, add veggies and herbs, pour over beans with soaking water and chicken broth. Simmer for about an hour. Pull out chicken to cool. Add
the chilies, cumin, salt and pepper. Let the beans keep cooking. When chicken is cool, pull off the bone and shred by hand. Use immersion blender to puree the beans just a *touch* stir chicken back in with juice from the limes and chipotle sauce to taste. Top with sour cream and cheese.

It's much better now.

Salad-on-Noodles

When I was living in the Netherlands I had lots of time to play around with in the kitchen. One evening I had a really lovely warm goat cheese salad that I reimaged a few days later as a pasta dish with a pile of suateed spinach, goat cheese rounds from the oven on top with lots of olive oil and garlic and shallots.

I went down a similar path with my market beets from the weekend. Rather than tossing them into a salad I diced them and threw them into pasta with cheese and shallots a bit of butter and cana de capra. Good concept but a couple of changes: possibly roast beets a bit longer than I normally would for salads. I did kale on the side because that's what was in the fridge but maybe sauteed beet greens thrown in there on top of the pasta?

Adults Only

I got home from the market this morning and realized that, aside from some Honeycrisp apples, I filled my basket with a shockingly kid unfriendly roster. My goodies included:

• Kale
• Beets
• Bitter Salad Greens

And because the Mennonite farmers with the happy animals were there:

• Lamb Kidneys
• Chicken Livers
• Pork Hocks

Yikes! Take that Chicken Nuggets.

I'm thinking roasted beets for salad with goat cheese and also a little 70's gourmet retro Chicken Liver Pate (which I *did* like as a kid, but I know better than to consider that normal).

The kidneys I'm still trying to suss out what to do with. When I worked in a French restaurant as a waitress we'd periodically run a kidney special that wouldn't sell and then wind up eating kidneys as the staff meal just before they went off. I just have a small packet (and they're frozen) so I'm thinking of maybe doing a classic pan sauce with mustard and cream but then adding a pile of mushrooms. hmmm, there's duxelles in the freezer too...

Sometimes being a grown-up is okay.

Pork 'n' Beans

I consider it rather unfortunate that "pork 'n' beans" has become associated with cafeterias, sickly sweet orange sauce and junior high fart jokes. Because when fall comes around it's actually quite a fantastic combination.

I'm somewhere around three to four weeks behind at work and the stack keeps growing. I'd gone in to do some catch-up on Sat. for a few hours and I had noble intentions to go in for a while on (ack) Sunday. But at the market these caught my eye and were sitting in the fridge:


I decided that, really, there were better ways to live and I would just be behind Monday. So I sat down at the table and shelled the cranberry beans. Wow, they were crazy beautiful before they were cooked: fat and marbled red and white. Then I rendered fat from some bacon and sauteed onion, celery and fresh herbs from the porch (rosemary, thyme) deglazed with a little sherry* and threw in the beans with sundried tomato and let 'er simmer. It was one of those sort of thrown together improvisations that was soothing and a nice reminder of why I like fooling around in the kitchen so much. Take that Van Camp's.

*Actually rot-gut Chinese cooking rice wine from the Thai Market that is a surprisingly effective substitute. But it doesn't sound quite as nice. And you certainly don't want to sip it.

Kiss the Cryin' Good-bye

I am a serious onion weeper. It usually starts when I'm peeling them and then continues until they've been stirred into something and have been sauteed into submission. Previously, the only means I found of avoiding the onion weeping was when Brandon gave me googles to wear. Although effective, it did have the negative side effect of making me sort of blind since I don't have prescription googles. Plus there was the whole looking very stupid thing.

While working in the kitchen this morning the crying started with the peeling when I remembered hearing somewhere along the line that burning a small candle near your cutting board would draw away the sulfer fumes and reduce the weepies. So I tried it. Big improvement over normal and these were strong, fresh farmers market onions so this might become a regular practice.

Figs? On Pizza? Oh, yes!

I tend to think of recipes as a starting point rather than a set of rules to be followed. This is probably why I lean towards savory cooking rather than baking since baking requires a certain amount of obedience in order to avoid a pile of wet flour.

About a week ago, the paper appeared with a recipe for a pizza with fig and prosciutto. Being an enthusiastic fan of figs, I liked the notion but didn’t really approve of the idea of using fig jam as a base on the dough and provolone. It made the dish seem overwhelmed by sweet and creamy, more like a dessert than something for dinner.

For a while I’ve used Silver Palate’s pizza dough recipe (by the rules, yes, yes) but this time I tried Lynn Rossetto Kasper’s instructions. Sticky and a pain in the ass to work but WAAAAY better results. I even got bubbles in the crust like a real pizzeria.

Anyway, on top:

• Brushed the crust with olive oil and lightly sprinkled finely minced fresh rosemary
• Shaved a little parmesan over that
• Sliced figs and proscuitto
• Crumbles of blue cheese tucked in

And that, my friends, is a pizza worth making again served with a cheap Italian red on an autumn night.