Duck!

I regard Thanksgiving as the 'birthday' of my stepping up my cooking, so I'd been thinking for several weeks about what I might cook yesterday. I'm subject to periods of grayness in my life, however, and as the holiday approached, I just didn't feel up to a big project. I did buy a duck, however: I can get one this time of year, it's special enough to be festive, and I knew I could roast it without a lot of fuss. I also bought the makings for a side dish I've wanted to try that I didn't think would tax my somewhat-frayed nerves.

As it turned out, it was a better day cooking than I'd had in some time. I wound up doing three dishes, all of which were reasonably successful. This wasn't as much as I've often tried to do, and I didn't end the day frustrated or exhausted.

A Foul Deed

I roasted the duck according to Mark Bittman's recipe in the iPad version of "How to Cook Everything". The method is fairly similar to roasting a chicken, the biggest difference being piercing the skin to render off some of the bird's fat.  (Fat, after all is a big part of how it stays afloat. Duck is a very rich meat.) Basting with a little soy sauce provided both flavor and color.

I found the duck to be quite tasty. I had a leg and a breast with my meal. I used some of the leftovers in a salad this afternoon and plan to use the rest in a hash tonight.

The Root of the Matter

A couple of decades ago, I shared a holiday meal with the family of my brother-in-law. One of his aunts brought a dish of mashed carrots and parsnips. I was hesitant to try it, not even being sure what a parsnip was, but it was good. I've thought about that dish from time to time in recent years, and decided that it would be at my Thanksgiving meal yesterday.

I did look at a recipe online (I don't know where: my apologies to the author) and adopted the method. I chunked up roughly equal amounts of the carrots and parsnips and boiled them until quite tender. I then mashed them with butter, salt, and a little nutmeg.

As simple as it is, this dish is my favorite of the day. It is tasty, and has the warm, comforting feel of mashed potatoes at half the carbs. It's easy enough for a weeknight, and my stepmother  (who, as it turns out, grew up with the dish and used to make it regularly) says it reheats beautifully. (As part of my experiment, I only made enough for my meal.)

A Little Dessert

I haven't done any baking in a long time, and I decided yesterday afternoon that I'd try to find a recipe that seemed doable and didn't call for anything I didn't have on hand. I chose the "Easy Pound Cake" from the America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book and used the recipe variation for "Ginger Pound Cake". (I did, after a bit of research online, substitute nutmeg for the mace I didn't have.)

It wasn't quite trouble free. I had almost all the flour incorporated into the batter when I started wondering when I was supposed to add salt. I checked the recipe and found that I had omitted not only the salt but baking powder. (Oops.) The out-of-order addition of the leavener may be why I didn't get all the rise I think I was supposed to. But it was delicious anyway, and felt quite light, in contrast to the heaviness I associate with pound cake.

(I'm sure the pound cake had nothing to do with a certain number I saw before bed. But most of the cake is now in my freezer, destined to be shared with my coworkers.)


As I said: it was a good day cooking.

Pasta, Again, and Dates!

When I first wrote about making pasta a couple of weeks ago, I'd mentioned that I didn't like the flavor of my pasta. Last weekend, as part of an effort to make ravioli, I made pasta again, and again didn't like it. It tasted a little earthy, even a little earthy. I started to wonder if something was wrong.

I did a little research, and I also sought advice on cookingforums.net.  I identified three possible problems. First is that I was using unbleached flour. This didn't seem likely, because there isn't much of a taste difference for most people, but who knows?  My flour could have gone a little bad. I didn't like that option much, either, since I'd bought it only this spring and kept it sealed since, but I couldn't disprove it. Finally, there might be contaminants in my pasta machine - not unlikely, since it had been sitting unused on various shelves for years. I had run it though the dishwasher (a mistake apparently) but again, who knows?

Yes, I probably should have eliminated one possibility at a time, but I didn't have the patience. I figured out how to dissemble my pasta machine enough to give it a good cleaning and did so. I also bought fresh, bleached all purpose flour. Finally, I eliminated one other variable by choosing a recipe using only flour, water, salt, and a little butter.

I made my dough and set it to rest. I faked together a filling from ground chicken, salt, egg, fresh parsley, some fresh thyme I had (see below), bread crumbs, and crushed red pepper.

I rolled out my dough, more successfully than last time, and made the raviolis. I put some of the raviolis in boiling water and the rest on a baking sheet in the freezer. When those in the pot floated, I removed them and dressed them with butter and some commercial spaghetti sauce I like.

My ravioli were tasty, the pasta tasted find, and the use of the bleached flour even made them look more appetizing. 

I love the taste of victory. Also the taste of ravioli.

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We had a retirement party for a colleague on Thursday, and her boss asked me to contribute something. After looking at a bunch of recipes, I chose to make the bacon-wrapped dates from the iPad app "How to Cook Everything" by Mark Bittman. This was harder than I anticipated. Stripping thyme leaves was not as straightforward as the instructions straightforward, the dates were sticky, and the raw bacon was (surprise!) greasy. I was a mess, and I was sure that as the fat melted during roasting the bacon would fall off the toothpicks.

In fact, it worked great. The bacon tightened up around the dates very nicely, and the thyme inside the dates was a very nice touch. They disappeared instantly at the party, all the praise a beginning cook really needs. Yay!

Remembrance of Goulash Past: Meals and Memories

As it happens, two of my very favorite food memories involve dishes called 'goulash'.

When I was a kid, I belonged to the Boy Scouts for a while, and even attended summer camp one year. On one rainy day at camp, for reasons I don't remember, I stayed back from the planned activity and instead helped the adult leaders prepare for lunch. The meal was what I then thought goulash to be, a combination of elbow macaroni, mild tomato sauce, and crumbled hamburger that had little in common with the traditional dish from Eastern Europe.

It was a great meal nonetheless. Mostly it was the circumstances: I had my portion while standing under the dining fly with the leaders before the other boys arrived, sheltered from the rain, feeling safe and accepted to a degree that was rare for me. The goulash itself was delicious and (for me, anyway) an embodiment of comfort food.

Many years later, I traveled to the borough of Queens in New York City to visit family. By this time, I was vaguely aware that there was a food called goulash that was much different than what I'd grown up with, but had no real idea what the 'real thing' might be. For my first meal in New York City, we went to a largish restaurant that felt much more like a diner than a fine dining place. When I saw 'goulash' on the specials board, I felt compelled to order it.

The dish that was served to me was tender cubes of beef, tasting strongly of what I now know as paprika, resting on a bed of egg noodles. There was a little broth, but not really enough to call a pasta sauce. I can no longer taste it in my "mind's mouth", but I found it stunningly delicious.

As i write, there's an interesting contrast that occurs. Outside the realm of cookbooks, meals are profoundly impacted by the circumstances in which we eat them. Is the meal an occasion, or are we just filling our bellies? Who, if anyone, are we with and how do we feel about them? Are we falling in love with our companion or coming to grips with love that is no longer? In the camp experience, the memories of the meal are powered by its circumstances: the food was good, but I'd eaten identical dishes many times. On the other hand, though my pleasure in the New York City goulash was enhanced by the excitement of my visit to the city, it is the food itself that I think about.

Oddly, I find myself reluctant to try making Hungarian goulash in my own kitchen. It seems impossible to make a dish of the quality of that I had in Queens, especially given that memory has likely added flavor not on the original plate. Nor could I recreate the circumstances of the scout camp goulash and the comfort that memory brings me.

A number of years ago. I (and my then non-existent cooking skills) were invited to a potluck put on by a group with a VERY culturally diverse membership. We were all invited to bring foods from our own culture that were important to us. I was stumped: I could not think of a single food, other than those everyone would already know, that fit the guideline. It was then that I first thought about this idea of the flavor added to food by a meal's circumstances. Sure, I could have made root beer floats for my friends, but I could not have made a root beer float eaten on a hot Iowa summer day when you're ten years old. That flavoring is not found in my kitchen or yours.

But goodness, that float was delicious.

Matters of Trust

I'd never have thought that trust would have such an important role in learning to cook, but I find that I've been thinking about just that.

There are cookbook authors/publishers that I trust, that I don't trust, and that I trust on some things but not on others. Once I bought a magazine - not from a big-name publisher, but they publish a lot of recipes from home cooks - and made four recipes from it in the same weekend. None of them worked. Although I know I made mistakes, I've not bought anything from them since. This may not be fair - but I just don't trust them.

There are food brands I trust and food brands I don't. This is especially important with ingredients I'm less familiar with, because I'm not going to be able to judge quality for myself.

I struggle, sometimes, with trusting a recipe even when I have every reason to do so. The other day I was following a procedure for making fried eggs, that being one of the everyday cooking skills I have yet to master. This procedure (from the Cook's Illustrated Cookbook) called for preheating the pan over low heat, adding butter, adding the eggs, and covering. About two-thirds of the way through the time designated for the doneness I wanted, I became convinced that the sounds coming from my pan didn't indicate that my eggs weren't burning to a crisp and pulled my pan off the heat. No burning, runny yolks.  (I tried this again a day or two later, maintained my faith, and had lovely eggs.)

(Early on in my cooking adventures, I followed a home cook's recipe for a particular item. The writer noted that, at a particular point, it was going to look like it was going to go horribly wrong, and what was going to happen, and that it was okay. I was grateful, because exactly that thing happened and I would have paniced without the writer's assurance. Now THAT's a well written recipe!)

On the other hand, sometimes I need to trust my instincts and I'm sorry when I don't. I am just not experienced enough to have this kind of instinct on my own hook, but I think sometimes my brain will call up a tidbit I've seen on cooking shows without telling me about it. I broiled some eggplant slices recently, following something I'd seen the day before. Something told me to salt the slices and let them sit to reduce the moisture, but it wasn't done in the previous days show, so I didn't. Annnnnnnd my slices were mushy rather than crispy. I should have trusted my instincts. That's often the case. (Except for those times when I did and shouldn't have.)

It's just a matter of trust.




 

Pasta la Vista

So, I've long wanted to try making pasta.

Make pasta? But aren't you...?

Hush.

As I say, I've long wanted to try it, and I even had a friend give me her manual pasta maker (without instructions). And I've seen it done many times on cooking shows. But handling the long sheets of dough as I used the maker really looked like it would exceed my limited dexterity. My intimidation on this point and my ignorance on the operation of my machine kept my machine hidden away for months.

When my awesome friend Karen mentioned making her own pasta, I was inspired sufficiently to find brand and model on my machine and do a web search for a manual. It turns out to be very common and I found a number of how-tos. I also learned that I was missing a clamp, but Karen (AKA The Pasta Muse) pointed out that I could probably buy one online: three ays later, I had a clamp in my hands.

It was time for the dough-y experiment. I found and made a recipe for a really simple pasta, set up a machine, and got to work.

Technically, and that's the only way that mattered, it was a success. The dough had less tendency to stick to itself than I feared, especially since I dusted it with flour often. The machine was easy to use, and I soon had what I'd describe as thin fettuccini.

Taste-wise, it was something less than a total success.  I think my skill in cooking fresh pasta needs work, and I think I'll look at different recipes. Finally, since I like pasta to have some body, I won't make it so thin next time.

But, as is often the case when I'm doing something really new to me, this was more about proof-of-concept than dinner, and I'm delighted with the result.

Accidental Pozole

In my last post, I mentioned having made what I called an 'accidental pozole'. Since I'm sure you've been consumed with curiosity as to what I may have meant by that, I'm here to meet you're needs. I'm selfless that way.

Pozole is a spicy soup of Mexican origin.  A web search shows that their are many different versions, but the versions I've seen have been made with pork and hominy. (Hominy is corn that has been soaked in an alkaline solution.)  The only pozole I've had was a canned version I ate a month or so ago.

I had thawed a some pork cushion meat, intending to mark green chile stew. I was too lazy to cut the pork up and brown it in batches, so I decided to braise my roast whole. I rubbed it with salt, pepper, and paprika and browned it, then added a quart of chicken stock and covered it to let it cook.

When my pork was cooked, I decided to make a soup with the cooking liquid. I started by adding a jar of Goya brand sofrito. (I specify the brand because sofrito seems to refer to so many different things. I do love this stuff, however.) I also added some diced potato, diced carrot, a can of hominy, a can of diced green chiles, some of the cooked pork, some masa harina (the cornmeal used in tamales), and probably some things I've forgotten. I had no particular plan in mind, I just wanted to take advantage of my cooking liquid.

Once the vegetables were cooked,  I had a pot ful of soup that reminded me sharply of the canned pozole I had had. It was rich, it was spicy, and the masa had added some wonderful thickness to the broth. (A thin soup never really seems quite like food to me.)

It was wonderful. Would someone that knew call it pozole? I don't know. But it made me happy.

Still Alive and Cooking

Early in the summer, I wrote here about my typical failure to do much cooking in the summer -- and fell into the same trap as usual. I did SOME cooking, and even a couple of semi-interesting things, like carrot-green chimichurri sauce and some accidental pozole. But, mostly I didn't cook.

I do see to be gearing up again, though. I hope to have my first try at home made pasta soon, inspired by my friend Karen. And my accidental pozole was yummy enough that I'd like to do it on purpose. I'm mulling other things as well, such as another showdown with my old nemesis cooked sugar. (Maybe I should make a show about doing that in a motor home and call it 'Breaking Brittle'. Or not.)

We'll see what comes out of my Beginner's Skillet.