You Say Tomato, I Say 'Meh'

Yes, I know it's unusual. Yes, I know some would consider it anti-American. But it's true.

I don't like tomato sauce.

Sure, I've had good tomato sauces from time to time. But if a sauce is red and being spooned over spaghetti, the chances are pretty good that I won't care for it.

Maybe it's not quite accurate to say that I don't like it. It's more that I find it boring. Uninteresting. It just doesn't invite me to take a second bite.

This really hasn't been much of a problem. I just don't order pasta in restaurants. (I don't care for average alfredo sauces either.)

But a few weeks ago, I made eggplant lasagna for a group of friends. People liked it, but there were a number of things that disappointed me.

Such as the sauce. It was okay. But, it was, to my mind, completely unremarkable.

And so, I've begun a quest to develop a tomato sauce that I can have confidence in. A sauce with depth, with complexity, with interesting-ness. ("Mommy, 'interesting-ness' isn't a word!" "No, darling, it isn't, and I never want to hear you say it!")

In my quest, though, I didn't want to get away from pantry ingredients. I didn't want to include a lot of fresh herbs that would make the sauce too expensive to make frequently.

I decided that the way to go might lie in glutamates, the ingredients that add that "umami" thing the foodies like to talk about.  So, my first stab at this, made last weekend, included tomato paste, which is typical, and Thai fish sauce and sesame oil. ("Mommy, he added fish sauce! EWWWW!" "Don't worry, sweetie, I won't make you try it.")

The result was okay on pasta that night. A couple of days later, it was pretty good on my pizza. And last night, the last of it was FABULOUS with mozerella over spaghetti.

So, I think I'm on the right track. In the next batch I make, I'll swap out the fish sauce for the more Italian anchovy paste. I'm also harboring dark thoughts involving dried mushrooms AND their soaking liquid. We'll see.

It's a work in progress. When I've got something like a recipe, I'll share it here.

Ramped-up Milk Toast

A disinclination to leave well enough alone may be my greatest strength as a cook. It is also probably my greatest weakness. Compulsive adding sometimes improves, sometimes it detracts.

My dad was one of four children to have grown up in Liverpool, United Kingdom. Saturday morning breakfast consisted of the end crusts from the week's bread cooked in milk with a little sugar. My brain refuses to cough up what the family called this concoction, so I'll just call it "milk toast". (I don't know if my grandmother toasted the bread or not.) I had this once or twice on visits to my grandparents. As far as I can remember, we never had it at home.

But, the once or twice I had it as a kid left a powerful impression of warmth, sweetness, and carb-y happiness. Perhaps a dozen times as an adult, I have made this milk toast as best as I can remember it.

Tonight found me in A Mood. I was feeling deeply frustrated with my inability to move forward on some projects, or even find time to try.  As I surveyed my kitchen, I spotted the leftover bagels on the counter and thought of milk toast.

I cut two bagels (about 4 or 5 inches in diameter) into bite size chunks and threw them into a small pan. I was going to grab the milk when my inability to leave well enough alone kicked in. Before I added the milk, I threw in a couple of dollops of part-skim ricotta cheese I had from something I never made. I then added enough milk to cover the bread. For sweetener, I used a tablespoon or two of real maple syrup I'd purchased with a Christmas gift certificate from my boss. I heated the concoction until it had been barely bubbly around the edges for just a few minutes.

My friends, on this particular evening, my ramped-up milk toast fit the definition of "comfort food" for me like a key fits a lock. The bagels maintained some structure as sandwich bread would not. The cheesed added just a bit of creaminess to the skim milk. The sweetness from the maple syrup was absolutely perfect.

This was one of those times when not leaving well enough alone paid wonderfully warm dividends.

Bagels, and Much More

I'm struggling a little bit with how to organize this write-up of my weekend in the kitchen. The chronological approach, which serves my purposes otherwise, has the downside of "burying the lead". Well, consider it buried. (I think it liked daisies.) If you're just here for the bagels, skip ahead to Sunday.

Friday

My workplace is open President's Day, and I chose to take my floating holiday on Friday to make this a three-day weekend. I spent most of my day off twitching, but did manage to cook a couple of things. I made a stove top macaroni and cheese which was really good and will be my go-to for that dish in the future. It was the FOURTH mac 'n' cheese I shared with my neighbor lady and the first she liked.

I also roasted a chicken. When it was done, I remove the hindquarters and carved off the breast meat. I threw the carcass into a pot with some carrots and onions and water to cover. I also threw in the neck and gizzards from inside the chicken, and I seasoned with salt, pepper, star anise, and ginger. When strained, the resulting stock was pretty good.

(The chicken breasts and stock will be coming up again in this post. And again. And again.)

Saturday

My biggest objective for Saturday was to make whole wheat bread. I've made this recipe twice previously and been pleased with everything except the limited rise I've gotten. (The rise is really only an issue because I want the slices to be big enough for sandwiches.) As an experiment, since I understand whole wheat flours tend to be low gluten, I added about 1 tbsp of vital wheat gluten for each cup of flour. It turned out really well.

I used one and a half of the chicken breasts in a chicken salad with fennel and basil, the recipe being from the "Healthy Family Cookbook" from America's Test Kitchen. It was...okay. I'm not sure I'll make it again.

I used some of the chicken stock I'd made for "Carrot Ginger Soup", also from the "Healthy Family Cookbook". It's pretty tasty. The chicken stock also served as the cooking liquid for some bulgur I did in my rice cooker.

The highlight of the day, though, was the pizza I made. It was a cheese pizza on a whole wheat crust, both recipes coming from the "Healthy Family Cookbook". I was REALLY tired by the time I got to it, but wanted to get it done, because I want the method under my belt. Here's what it looked like out of the oven:

(Please note: the shape is not "odd", it's "rustic". So there!)

The pizza really was good. And, I have another pizza's worth of dough in my freezer for next time I have a pizza urge!

Sunday (and finally with the bagels)

If you've been kind enough to read my other entries, you may have gathered that I don't always have good reasons for what I want to cook. But, I really love bagels, and when I found what looked like a manageable recipe in the iOs app version of Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything". (I assume it's in the print version as well.)

Here's the basic procedure: 1) Make the dough; 2) Let rise until doubled; 3) Form bagels, 4) Let rise again; 5) Boil (1 minute a side); 6) Bake.

Some illustrations:

Formed, before 2nd rise

Being boiled

Before baking. The bench knife is about 6"wide.

The final product.

I was quite pleased - tasty and with a very nice chew. Would a New York deli maker have been proud of them? No. Are they better then most of the bagels I've had in the Midwest? Yes.

The last two dishes I made were sort of designed as ingredient use-ups. I made a frittata (sort of - forgot the cheese) with the yolks left over from my angel food cake. It was flavored with a shallot I've had lying around and half a chopped andouille sausage link.

I finished up with a version of Mark Bittmn's "Simplest Paella" (also from "How to Cook Everything"), which I'd made before. It's easy because it just uses a normal skillet, and once all the ingredients are in it finishes in the oven. About half the stock was the tag end of the batch I'd made on Friday. I also threw in the last of the chicken breast, the rest of the andouille sausage, and some baby shrimp. It's really good.

Is it any surprise that I ran my (smallish) dishwasher four times this weekend?

Tiny Bubbles

"Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble..." Shakespeare, 'Macbeth'

Many years ago - I was still living at home, in fact - I attempted to make an angel food cake. I remember how tired my arm got from holding the electric egg beater, and I also remember how the end result was more of an angel food discus.

When I began to seriously considered getting a stand mixer, one of the first uses that occurred to me was to have another showdown with my old enemy angel food. I've looked at a few recipes, and when I recently acquired the "America's Test Kitchen Healthy Family Baking Book" I found a recipe I decided I could probably trust. I also acquired a tube pan.

This last Tuesday found me In A Mood. The frustrations of the day suddenly coalesced in a weird recklessness, so I bought a dozen eggs on the way home from work and headed immediately into the kitchen.

The thing with angel food, see, is bubbles. You start by creating your bubbles by whipping air into egg whites that have been fortified with sugar (powdered in a food processor) and cream of tarter. You then provide structure for your bubbles by adding your dry ingredients, carefully folding so as to disturb as few as your bubbles as possible. After baking, you let your cake cool upside down so that your bubbles are not crushed by the weight of the structure you provided for them.

Here is what my bubbles looked like after I removed them from the pan:

And here is a slice of my bubbles:

Thanks to a good recipe, a reasonable level of care and obedience on my part, and perhaps a little luck, my bubbles were fabulous. They were moist, tender yet with a satisfying bit of chew, and were bundled together in a very nice consistency. My very favorite thing, which was true only of that first very fresh piece, was that the browned surfaces were covered with what seemed to be an extremely thin layer of candy, so there was a tiny bit of crunch. That layer was gone by morning, I'm assuming due to having 'melted' in moisture absorbed from the air. It was still wonderful, though, and the people I shared it with loved it.

A few days after making my cake, I happened to see an episode of the America's Test Kitchen program "Cook's Country" in which they demonstrated precisely the recipe I had followed. It was weird but gratifying to watch them step through the procedure I had followed, and it seemed to me that I really had done it pretty much right. They seemed to get more bubbles whipped into their eggs than I did, and thus their finished cake had maybe an inch more rise, but I don't feel even a scintilla of regret - they're the experts, after all, and who knows if they were able to get their fabulous result on the first take?

I have to say that while there was some toil and even a bit of trouble in making my bubbles, I don't have any trouble contemplating making this again. It really was a success.

Cooking Versus Baking

So, as I've mentioned, I'm taking tentative steps into the world of baking. And I have some thoughts about baking as a craft, from the standpoint of a nearly-total beginner.

It's often said that people are either cooks or bakers. I don't know how close that really is to true, but I do find that there are some things about baking the run a bit counter to my personality.

Baking is exacting, and I'm a bit slapdash. Baking calls for attention to detail, which leaves me a bit impatient. And, in baking, a recipe can fail for any of a forest or reasons, leaving an infant such as myself scratching my head in puzzlement. Teaching myself to cook is hard enough -- I really suspect that baking is best learned in apprenticeship.

Of course, there is tremendous creativity in baking. But, I fear that until such time as I master many more of the skills, my creativity will be pretty much confined  to recipe selection. Baking is like the Elizabethan sonnet: part of the beauty comes from the rigid structure. In baking, the structure is not from rhyming schemes and meters but from chemistry and physics, and if the structure is not adhered to the recipe will fail. Most of the things I cook allow me to improvise is I go along, but in baking success can only come from slavish devotion to the recipe.

From my tiny chair here in baking kindergarten, it seems like there are hundreds of little techniques that will have to be somehow learned if I'm going to do much baking. Maybe I'd feel the same about cooking if I was in cooking kindergarten (instead of my lofty advancement to to the third grade). But, it seems more than a little intimidating.

Still, it's also fun. I've made some tasty things, and I look forward to learning some of the lore. My core goals are pretty limited - I want a few different breads in my repertoire, and I'd like to find a dessert or two that I can really have confidence in.

This weekend, I want to make bagels!

Small Plates: A Dim Sum Approach to Blogging

I haven't done all that much cooking since I last posted, and much that I have done either didn't seem worth blogging about at all or I wasn't sure how to make a whole post about it. So, I'll give you a series of "small plates" (or "dim sum" if you prefer) to catch up a bit.

Making a Stand
After about two months after I decided to get one, I bought a KitchenAid stand mixer. This is actually fairly big news: I've never done a lot of baking, except for spates of making bread and cornbread a few years ago. So, I now find myself enrolled in Baking Kindergarten, taught by cookbooks, cooking shows, and my long-suffering friends. Baking is more technique-driven than the cooking I've done, and it's much less forgiving of my tendency to modify recipes as I go. Eventually I'll have enough understanding to modify recipes, but I'm not there yet.

The first thing I made was a loaf of whole-wheat bread - it was important to me that my mixer's 'maiden voyage' was for something healthy. It was pretty good - I didn't get all the rise I'd have wanted, but both flavor and texture were good.

The second project was peanut butter cookies, which were less successful. They were a little underdone, I think, but the biggest thing was that I used natural style peanut butter without thinking about the lower sugar content. Oh, well...

Last Monday before work I made a batch of muffins. The recipe was quite plain, like blueberry muffins without blueberries. They turned out well.

Yesterday, I made ginger snaps, following a recipe by Alton Brown. While making them, I discovered that even with a measured scoop I struggled to get uniformly sized cookies. Next time, I may try forming them into a log (as with icebox cookies) and cutting off slices. They are, by the way, delicious. I shared some with a friend and have some to go with lunches.

But it's my project today that I'm proud of. Roughly thirty years ago, I had dinner with some friend at the home of a friend of Lebanese ancestry. The dinner he made was amazing - I especially remember a soup that included short pieces of young zucchini stuffed with sausage. But what really blew me away was that he made pita bread - right there, as we watched, in his oven.  I found this amazing, and ever since I've wanted to try it.

Finally, today was the day. In reality, it couldn't have been simpler. I mixed the dough in my food processor, let it rise right there in the processor's bowl, formed them into balls, let them rise a bit more, then rolled them out and baked them on a griddle.  (I could have done it in the oven, but the griddle made more sense to me.)

 My pita is excellent! They're soft and subtly flavorful, and can even be made into pockets with a little bit of knife work. (I also looked at a recipe that called for an overnight rise in the refrigerator, and I wonder if the separation inside would be better with that method.)

Roast Chicken, and Mayo Clinic
One of the things on my culinary bucket list was to find a method for roast chicken that I wouldn't need to look up in a cookbook, and I think I can cross this off. The method I used is from Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything". Basically, you preheat a cast iron skillet in a 450 degree oven while drying off the bird and rubbing it with oil, salt, and pepper.  You put the chicken in the pan, breast side up, and roast until done.

Most of the chicken went for a chicken salad I improvised. I appear to be out of mayonnaise, however, so I decided to make some in my stand mixer. This stuff is not something to chat with your cardiologist about: while there are other ingredients, fundamentally I talked three egg yolks into playing host to two cups of oil. The flavor was good, but it's MUCH richer than store-bough mayo. Here's my lunch, composed of the chicken salad in a pita, some carrot sticks, and one of my ginger snaps:

 Get Me to a (Different) Greek
 Recently I saw a chef named Laura Calder make a Greek Salad on her Cooking Channel show "French Food at Home". (I categorically deny having a crush on Ms. Calder. Okay, maybe a little one.) I was intrigued by the recipe because she chopped most of the veggies into much smaller chunks than have been in the Greek Salads I've had, and it seemed worth trying. So I tried it, and the result was: meh. The salad seemed underflavored (though I may have made a mistake), but the biggest problem was that I sliced my onion in a mandolin without cutting it into wedges, and the circular pieces of onion made the salad annoying to eat.  I think I'll try a different recipe next time, though I did like the smaller cut on the veggies.

(By the way, the episode of "French Food at Home" was about picnic food. The host explained that while Greek Salad is obviously not French, she'd never been on a picnic in France that didn't include it. Go figure.)

Ain't That the Truth!

My fortune cookie tonight read:

"Cooking is easy. Washing dishes is the hard part."