Pulled pork followup:

This morning, I took the pork out of the freezer and tried this recipe, with some substitutions. It was spectacular - all of us loved it. And I really like that the only things I had to buy for it were the pork and the buns - everything else, I already had in the cupboards.

• I cut the recipe in half, because my pork roast was 2-3 lb. big instead of 4-6 lb.
• But I still used one whole onion, because (a) I had regular yellow onions, which are smaller than Vidalia, (b) I like onions, (c) half an onion in the fridge is sort of a pain.
  
• I substituted cumin for the paprika, because either paprika or cayenne pepper give me hives. I haven't pinned down which it is, and since I don't like either of them, I see no reason to bother. We keep neither on hand.
  
• I omitted the red pepper flakes and the cayenne pepper, for the same reason.
• I substituted a heaping 1/2 tsp. of minced garlic for the garlic salt, because that's the kind of garlic I keep on hand and use in everything. I did not try to add more salt to make up for the difference between just-garlic and garlic-plus-salt, and in the end it didn't need it.
  
• It was sort of a hassle to get the pork roast out of its grocery store wrappings; I had to do it while running it under cold water to thaw the ice. Since running the roast under cold water was the first step of the recipe anyway, I didn't feel too bad about this. I don't think I would change having frozen it in the same vacuum-sealed package it came in, though; it's supposed to avoid freezer-burn like that.
• My pork roast was just a little longer than the diameter of my crockpot; frozen and incompressible, it didn't lie flat. So it laid in at an angle at first. After it had an hour or so in there to thaw, I pushed it down a bit with a fork, though it still didn't go flat. But by the end, it had shrunk down and settled nicely to the bottom of the pot.
  
• I may have drizzled more like half of the vinegar sauce on to begin with.
• Drizzling the vinegar over a tilted frozen roast partially rinsed the spice rub off, down into the onions. I couldn't see how to prevent this, so I decided not to worry about it.
  
• I put it in the crockpot at 7:30am, and finished it off at 4:30pm. I didn't do anything in the last 1/2 hour. I thought about letting it go another half hour after I messed with it, but the pork was cooked through and The Little Dude had started yelling for crackers and apples and cookies, so clearly it was time to eat. Now.
  
• I didn't ever drain it. I used two forks to pull it apart right there in the crockpot, and I poured all the rest of the vinegar sauce on and stirred it up with one of the forks. I also used the forks to serve it. Limited number of new dirty dishes! I approve.
  
• It was nice and juicy, not saucy at all, and it was great. The only thing I'd change from this in the next go round would be to use a second onion. Sitting on the bottom, where the vinegar sauce and the pork juices pooled, those onions got really tasty.
  
• I picked up whole wheat buns from the store because they were out of my favorite potato rolls. But actually, I think the whole wheat went much better with the pulled pork than the potato would have. Serendipity!
• There was enough for us all - 2 adults, 1 toddler - to eat our fill, with plenty of leftovers; at least another meal.
  

Absolute success.

Standardizing my chili

Sometimes you look in the fridge, and you're like, goddamn, there is nothing in here. It's nice to have something stashed away in the pantry and freezer for those days, y'know? Or just for when the craving hits.

Chili is like that, for me. It's very easy to keep canned beans and tomatoes on hand at all times. I used to make it with ground beef, but then my husband requested that we not eat ground beef at every meal, so I decided to try substituting. (He exaggerated. We did not have ground beef for every meal.) Over the years, I tried ground turkey (gross), ground chicken (OK), steak chunks (very good, but not something I keep on hand), leftover roast chicken (ditto), and finally, when I started feeding The Little Dude real food, just beans.

Bean chili was OK. What I liked best about it was that I didn't have to spend any time browning meat; I could just throw everything in the pot as-is. I also liked that The Little Dude was a big, big fan; that every ingredient was the right size for him to eat easily; and that I could freeze leftovers in little portions for him.

I still had some nostalgia for the ground beef, so I tried it again recently. Ugh. The texture is just nowhere near as nice as black beans, or garbanzos, or black-eyed peas. (I do not like kidney beans, though. The skins creep me out.) The ground beef didn't add any significant flavor, and I had to spend all that time browning it and washing the pan. W T F. So not worth it; never again.

The major problem with my recipe these days is that I've never measured anything. So if I go too long without making it, I find myself wondering how many cans of beans go in. It's difficult to give the recipe out upon request, because I "measure" the spices in fractions of the chili's surface area, as I sprinkle them. And I'm always forgetting the onions or something.

So today, I pulled out some measuring spoons for the spices, and I'm writing it down. This is a version that we're very happy with, that I would be using as the bones of any further chili experimentation (like substituting various chile peppers, or adding new and intriguing vegetables or spices - I hear good things about cocoa in chili, for example):

2 (14 oz.) cans beans, drained and rinsed (Black beans, garbanzos, or black-eyed peas are good.)
1 (14 oz.) can diced tomatoes
1 (14 oz.) can tomato sauce
1.5 bell peppers, red/orange/yellow, diced (this just happens to be the portion size I stuck in the freezer after chopping up the six peppers sitting idle in the veggie drawer - it could as easily be 1 or 2)
1 cup frozen corn
1.5 tsp. ground cinnamon
1.5 tsp. ground cloves
3 tsp. ground cumin
1/4 tsp. ground chipotle chili pepper (I am no expert, but it seems to me this is spicier than the other chili powders I've tried, so this measurement may not be the same for other varieties)
1 fat onion, or 2 small onions
1 tbsp. minced garlic

It tastes about like I expect it to taste, spice-wise. (I did have to taste-test and add more to get it that way - the number recorded is the final total.) It may actually be more like 2 tsp./4 tsp. instead of 1.5 tsp./3 tsp., but I'm running low on cumin, and this is pretty close. I do know it's two parts cumin to one each of cinnamon and cloves.

It's a little saucy; I think it could support some more chunky ingredients, like meat, more corn or peppers, some additional veggie, or possibly another can of beans. (Though I tried three cans of beans once, and it wasn't saucy enough anymore. But I wasn't measuring on that attempt either, so for all I know, I changed something else, too.)

It's about the right amount of chili pepper for us, as far as the heat goes. I think it could be spicier and I'd still like it, but The Little Dude would not agree. He makes this spectacular jaw-dropped expression when food is too spicy, like he's trying to air his whole mouth out; he sticks his fingers in his mouth like he wants to wipe the capsaicin off his tongue.

I'm a little sad about this, because although I am not a particular fan of spicy, I do like the chipotle flavor, and there's not enough of that. I haven't figured out how to get the one without the other, though. For all I know, it may not be possible. I had been thinking I'd try to get an actual chipotle pepper and seed it or something, but I see now that I look at Wikipedia that it's actually a smoked-dried jalapeno. That would explain why I never see it in the produce aisle.

We top the chili with shredded cheese just before serving, if we have it. (Which we usually do.) Sometimes, if I remember about it when I'm already chopping the first onion(s), I also chop up another onion very finely, and set it aside to sprinkle on top with the cheese later.

I cooked tonight's chili on the stove, for about an hour. I've done it as short as just twenty minutes or whatever it was to heat everything up - the veggies were still a little crunchy, which was interesting, and not bad - and I've done it all day on low in the crock-pot. It seems pretty forgiving.

The Little Dude, upon discovering that chili was in the works, was super mad that he had to wait for it. "Mine! My din! MINE!" He went so far as to shake the bars of the baby gate in rage as he yelled. That was what determined how long the chili cooked. Whatever benefits there may be to letting it stew longer, they do not outweigh the demands of a hungry toddler.

Pulled pork "research":

I've been thinking about pulled pork lately. There's a recipe I kind of like out of the Betty Crocker cookbook, but Jerry's not a big fan and I'm not addicted, so I never make it anymore. It's very barbecue saucey, which is how I always assumed pulled pork was just supposed to be.

But in the past year or two, I've seen it done a different way. At the annual summer picnic at work, they've served barbecue from Dinosaur, which is just the seasoned pork, and you add the sauce at the last minute, right there on your bun. At the Ithaca Bakery, there's one where the sauce is based on strawberry jam, and it also seemed like it was added as a last-minute condiment. At Trillium on campus, there was a North Carolina pulled pork that was just the pork, with a vinegar sauce that we could put on top if we liked. All of those were very intriguing; I was surprised at how much flavor just the pork itself had.

I really like that this style doesn't involve jarred barbecue sauce. I haven't discovered a jarred sauce that I really like - I don't have any reason to keep it on hand, and don't like any of the ones I've tried enough to be motivated to experiment with it. Plus, industrial food is industrial. So I'm glad to ditch it.

So I'm currently looking up recipes, and I found this porknography website rich in the How of pulled pork. I really like how the dude explains exactly why all the important elements are important. Alas, I'm not going to do mine by the method he describes; it requires infrastructure I don't have (a smoker, etc.), and more planning-ahead skills than I can dredge up. What I have is a crock-pot. Nonetheless: there the link is, for reference.

It seems like the thing to do in a crock-pot is going to be to rub the pork in the appropriate spices, give it some liquid, and let it go. I seem to recall the Betty Crocker recipe using a lot of root beer to cook in, and then pouring much of it off before adding the barbecue sauce. That seems to be a typical crockpot approach - pork, cola, onions, and at the end, possibly omittable, jarred barbecue sauce. I don't generally like soda, but I make an exception for root beer - so it seems like that method, minus the BBQ sauce, might be acceptable, but not necessarily intriguing.

The most Googly recipe (i.e. a top hit, and one that several of the next hits on the front page either refer to, or are remarkably similar to) seems to be this one; it looks similar to the one I had in Trillium. It doesn't use any cola or jarred sauces, and some of the hits explicitly call it a Carolina pulled pork. I think that's the variation I'll try.

You know, eventually.

Corn crab cakes

I've been promising Laurel for weeks now that I'd post my crab cakes recipe. I found the original in a Southern Living compilation that I checked out of the library. That's a really beautiful book, by the way. There were too many recipes that looked really good for me to try them all. But I had to do the crab cakes, because every time I go to a new restaurant I want their crab cakes, and I'm sad if their crab cakes suck, and I've been trying for years to make a good one at home, but failing.

I was failing, apparently, primarily because I was using imitation crab meat. It turns out that it is nothing at all like the real thing. I am very sad that crab costs as much as it does; the grocery bill spikes every week I give in to this recipe again.

That said, a pound of crab - although it is an appalling $20 - makes 8 or 10 good-sized cakes with this recipe. And since you refrigerate the cakes for a few hours, or up to a day, before frying them, this can actually be prepared one night and then made for dinner twice - half the first night, and half the second. I haven't done the ingredient-price-math, but I think, all told, it actually isn't that bad a hit to the wallet as a fancy dinner could be. Especially since it's two fancy dinners if it's only 2 or 3 of you - or enough for guests, without having to double it. Unless you've got a lot of guests. With a salad, a loaf of nice bakery bread, a glass of Riesling, slightly chilled... oh, God. I may never order a restaurant crab cake again; it might not measure up.

Corn crab cakes
adapted from Southern Living: 40 years of our best recipes

Part I: frying pan
2-3 tbsp. butter
1 large bell pepper (Orange, red, or yellow; I tend to buy a pack of all three, and use half an orange and half a red. Then I use the rest of the peppers in chili, or on a pizza.)
1 cup frozen corn
1 onion, chopped

Part II: small bowl, or 1-cup Pyrex measuring cup
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 egg
2 tsp. Old Bay seasoning
2 tsp. Worcestshire sauce
3/4 tsp. dry mustard

Part III: large mixing bowl
1 tbsp. minced garlic
1 cup finely crushed crackers (I use 1 sleeve of Ritz crackers, which we have on hand for eating anyway)
1 lb. fresh lump crabmeat, drained and picked (whatever that means - the can of crabmeat my supermarket carries appears to have no juices, and have no shells to pick out)

First, deal with Part I: melt the butter in the frying pan, and start sauteeing the Part I ingredients.

While they're cooking, mix together the Part II ingredients. I tend to measure out the mayo into a 1-cup Pyrex liquid measuring cup, add the eggs and spices right into it, and stir them up with a spoon.

Then, chuck the Part III ingredients into the large mixing bowl. It doesn't matter if you mix them up or not. They're just waiting there for the other stuff. When Part I is done cooking to your satisfaction, throw all the ingredients - I, II, and III - together in the mixing bowl, and mix.

(Aside: the original recipe suggests that you handle the crabmeat as little as possible, to keep the crab lumps lumpy; they break apart easily. I'm a little dubious about this. For one thing, do I really care? I like crab, and I like corn, and the closer together they are, the happier I am. Granted, their original recipe did not contain corn, so clearly they are not responsible for the consequences of my adulterations and my tastes. But for another: if the crab lumps aren't already broken and mixed uniformly throughout the crabcake, I suspect that they might provide fault lines along which the cake can break when I try to flip it. One of the other reasons my crabcake attempts fail is because I am a terrible crabcake flipper. Sometimes my salmon-cake attempts are reduced to salmon hash. It can be an ugly business.)

Get a plate or cookie sheet out, and line it with wax paper or something similar. Now start taking handfuls of crab mixture and forming them into balls of roughly the size you want your crabcakes to be; set them on the wax paper. Put them in the fridge for at least 1, but up to 24 hours. (I've actually done it for 48. They still seemed OK to me.) This is important: whether it's the lower temperature, or the time it gives the cracker crumbs to absorb the liquids and do some starchy-bindy thing, it helps the crab cakes hold together when you're frying and flipping them.

In your frying pan again, pour a layer of frying oil to cover the bottom. (Not olive oil; it smokes at frying temperatures, I hear. But canola or peanut or generic vegetable oil work.) You want enough oil in the bottom that it's not going to all get absorbed and then risk the cakes sticking to the pan when it runs out, but not so much that you're going to have a big pond to clean up afterwards. Original recipe suggests 1/2 tbsp. butter, 1/2 tbsp. oil; this seems inadequate, to me. Especially if your stove is slightly slanted and all that oil runs to one side of the pan. I don't like it. I coat the pan, so as to not run into these problems.

Heat the oil. I hear you get better browning if the oil is hot from the get-go. Then lay as many crab cakes in the oil as you can fit in your pan, but still leave room for your spatula to easily get in and flip them. (For me and my 8- or 9-inch skillet, that's four.) Don't crowd them. Flatten the cakes after you put them in the pan. (You can flatten them beforehand, even before you put them in the fridge, but I find if you do that, that they sometimes fall apart when you try to move them. I'd rather risk a little oil spit on my hand from being too close to the pan while putting them in. Maybe my priorities are backwards, I don't know.)

Here's the part I don't understand well enough to give good instructions on: cook them until their bottoms are browned, and then flip them and do it again. Sometimes I guess wrong on when it's time to flip them, and the first crab cake is ugly or broken. I usually err on the side of the premature flip, rather than on the burnt side.

Repeat until all the crab cakes you want to eat that night are cooked. Leave the others in the fridge to cook tomorrow, if there are any remaining.

Devour.

Coconut-ginger cookie experiment, continued:

In this trial, I used coconut oil instead of shortening/butter, and added 2 tsp. coconut extract. I did two batches; one was with the original molasses, and the other was with an equal amount of honey instead.

That's the honey cookie on the left, and the molasses on the right. I actually baked these weeks ago, but it took me forever to get around to uploading this picture from my phone. Oops.

Things learned:

• You still can't taste any coconut.
• Honey cookies spread just a little bit more than molasses cookies, but not problematically so.
• Molasses has a slightly stronger flavor than the honey, and I think it stands up to the spices a little better. The spices seemed more... obvious, in the honey cookie. Honey was still a perfectly acceptable substitute, though.
• Putting the dough in the fridge for a long time really solidifies it. It does soften up when you work with it, if you can dig a chunk out with a spoon, or leave it out on the counter to warm up a bit. I discovered this the next day; I didn't bake it all at once, because there was a lot of it. I'm going to roll it into balls, roll it in the sugar, and freeze the dough like that for later baking. I never thought I'd see the day that I could bake cookies faster than I could eat them.
• [Upon finally uploading the picture to this post and coming back to it, I report the results of freezing the cookies: instead of 10 minutes to bake, it takes 13. The cookies spread less, and they're softer on the inside (while still being crunchy on the outside) - a little closer to my ideal, actually. I don't think I can overstate how impressed I am at this result. You can do all the work of cookies far ahead of time, stick them in the freezer, and then have hot, fresh cookies right out of the oven any time you want. The dough balls held their integrity really well in the freezer, too - they didn't smash together pre-freezing and be hard to peel apart at all. They're just... hard dough balls. Easiest cookies ever; I am so totally doing that more often - mixing the cookies, rolling all of them into balls and in sugar, baking just enough for the day's cravings, and then freezing the rest of them.]
  

Remaining questions:

Did I get a bum coconut extract? Is it really not powerful enough, or are the spices too strong? (I meant to halve them, but I forgot.) I'm going for a very unsubtle coconut flavor, without resorting to flaky coconut bits. I really hate the texture of those.

I don't know whether I'll try the next iteration with molasses or honey. I think I like the molasses better - perhaps from long familiarity - but the honey seems like it might let other flavors come through better.

Alternatively, at Joy of Baking they have a substitute table that suggests you could replace molasses with "3/4 cup (180 ml) light or dark brown sugar heated to dissolve in 1/4 cup (60 ml) liquid" - what if I used coconut milk for that liquid?

Chocolate chip cookie dough (edible)

Today I got this insane craving for a chocolate chip cookie ice cream sundae. But alas, we had no chocolate chip cookies on hand, and no eggs. And anyway, I wanted it NOW. The solution: Cookie Dough for Ice Cream (Eggless).

I approximately followed the suggestions in the first comment (the one voted most helpful) and also cut the recipe in half, and this is what I came up with:

3 tbsp brown sugar
3 tbsp white sugar
2 tbsp softened butter
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 tbsp milk (I used 2% which was all we had)
1/2 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup chocolate chips (I didn't measure these, just added what looked like an appropriate amount)

I accidentally added 2 tablespoons of milk and it was a bit too runny, but adding a bit more flour and brown sugar helped. Then, instead of rolling the dough up and freezing it, I put a few spoonfuls of it in a bowl and microwaved it for about 30 seconds until the chocolate chips started getting all melty... mmmmmmmmm. And then put some vanilla ice cream on top. I would have put hot fudge on top of that if we'd had any. The final product wasn't that pretty (thus no picture) but wow did it taste heavenly! The recipe made enough for about 2 more servings.

Pancetta in pastas

The other week, I made the "Linguine with Slow-Cooked Zucchini, Basil, and Cream" from this NPR story. It turned out pretty well, although I think I didn't use a big enough pan to hold all the zucchini properly, so they didn't cook down quite right, so I'm not really sure that the texture of my dish was what the author intended. I didn't really see the "lovely, pulpy sauce", although it was still quite good.

It was the first time I'd tried pancetta. Usually I substitute bacon, because bacon is what I happen to have. But the pancetta was good enough that I decided to buy a couple more packages to keep in the freezer and use in, y'know, whatever I feel like. I don't know that I'd go around recommending it as a pantry staple as some fancy chefs seem to, though; I really like that conveniently pre-diced, perfectly-sized 4 oz. package, but it costs $4. That's a luxury item, not a staple. Rather like the bottles of red wine whose absence we diligently avoid, I think.

This is what I'm doing lately with pancetta:

1. Pull a 4 oz. box of diced pancetta from the freezer, open it and drop it in a cast-iron skillet with a tablespoon or two of butter. Fry till hot and possibly a little crispy, and then remove the pancetta.
2. Melt a stick of butter* in the same pan, and then throw in 4 onions, sliced up. (I cut them in half to split the rings into C's, and then slice it up into C-shaped fries. Saute the onions; the closer to caramelized the better, but sometimes you're hungry and you just can't wait that long. I tend to cook the onions on medium heat.
   
3. Meanwhile, start a pot of water boiling for pasta.
4. When the onions are cooked to your satisfaction, return the pancetta to the pan. Add 1.5 cups of frozen peas (OR: 1 bunch of asparagus, with the woody ends snapped off, and chopped into 1-inch-ish pieces, OR whatever equivalent green thing you crave). Turn the heat down to low once the green things are cooked, just to keep everything nice and hot.
   
5. When the water boils (which may be in the middle of cooking the onions still - you can wait on step 5 until your veggies are 10 minutes from finished), throw in roughly 1.5 cups dry rotini pasta (OR the equivalent amount of whatever your favorite pasta shape is; the Little Dude's just happens to be rotini). Cook it according to the package directions; mine was about 10 minutes.
6. Drain the pasta, and toss it with the onions/greens/pancetta/butter.
7. Sprinkle some grated Parmesan cheese** over the pasta - I think it was about half a cup, maybe up to a cup - and stir it all up.
8. OM NOM NOM.
   

I'm afraid I didn't take any pictures when I made this the first time; I was very hungry and we ate it up by the time it occurred to me I ought to. It was really, really good, and I want it again. The Little Dude agreed; he ate all his up and wanted more. I'll try to remember to take a picture next time.

Edited to add: come to think of it, the first time I made this, I also threw in a 6-inch sprig of rosemary from the herb garden with the onions as they cooked (snipped in half, and removed near the end of the onion cooking when it had gotten all wilty and used-up), and the juice of one clementine orange at the same time as the peas.

* I admit, this may be an excessive amount of butter. The Butter Police will not come after you if you choose to use less. I'm not sure how much is sufficient to just cook all the vegetables without adding a butter-sauce, though, since I've never tried it. Half a stick, maybe?
** Parm Police warning: real cheese, not the Kraft powder or its knockoffs. There's a part of me that cringes at the pomposity I hear in these words, but: it is seriously not the same. If all I had on hand was the bottle of Kraft, I would skip this step, or just use a little salt; the flavors I want to add just don't exist in the Kraft. I think they might be killed by whatever they do to allow it to be sold unrefrigerated.

Graco's ginger cookies, and attempts at a coconut-ginger cookie

This was one of the last cookies. I took a picture of it, and then I ate it.

I'm committing the sin of editing an adored family recipe. Graco's ginger cookies, as originally passed down, call for shortening, which I am no longer comfortable cooking with, on account of it being a tub of industrialized goo. This was really the only recipe I have that requires it, the only reason I have ever kept shortening on hand at all.

Here are the ingredients, which are to be all mixed together, rolled into balls which are then rolled in granulated sugar, and baked for 10 minutes at 350 degrees:

• 3/4 cup shortening
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup molasses
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp. ground cloves
• 1 tsp. ground ginger
• 1/8 tsp. salt
• 2 tsp. baking soda
• 2 cups flour

A while back, I successfully replaced the shortening with butter; I'd read that butter causes cookies to spread more, so I added a teaspoon of baking powder for more mid-cooking rising action, and chilled the dough before rolling it to make sure it wasn't starting off already half-melted even before it went in the oven. That worked really well.

But then I read that coconut butter is a decent substitute for shortening, too, being solid at room temperature. I immediately started carrying around this flavor in my head of a coconut-ginger cookie, and became addicted before I even began.

It didn't really work out quite like I'd hoped, though it did work really well. I bought a jar of virgin coconut oil, which looked pretty solid in the air conditioned grocery store, but melted down in the summer heat of my kitchen. It was super easy to mix the cookies, and the dough looked the right texture, but starting with a liquid fat instead of a solid one made me concerned about spreading again. So I added the baking powder and chilled the dough for maybe twenty minutes, as I had for the butter version. (I'm not sure if chilling was necessary: the exposed dough got sort of crunchy, and then softened up in my hands immediately as I rolled it. The heat of my hands may have undone all the work of the fridge, though it also may have only undone it on the outside bit, leaving a net loss of heat on the cookie. I do not know, and may try without the fridge next time.)

They were still really fabulous cookies, but you couldn't taste the coconut. I don't know if coconut oil just doesn't have a strong flavor, or if the spices are just overpowering, or what. The spices actually tasted stronger than I remembered from the other variations.

So the results of that experiment are thus: coconut oil is definitely a good substitute for shortening, but it failed to provide enough coconut flavor to live up to the imaginary cookie in my head. Laurel and I talked about it a bit, and came up with a couple of ideas. One was to cut the spices; one was to add coconut extract; one was to use the fat off the top of a can of coconut milk. Laurel had used that in some other recipe and it was super coconutty.

We ate all the cookies, so it was time to make more. I didn't have any extract on hand, but I did have the coconut milk, so that's the experiment I tried. One can of coconut milk did have about 3/4 cup of fat on top.

I report: coconut milk fat does not behave in the same manner as butter, shortening, or coconut oil. It might be more analogous to cream than to butter? The dough was more like drop-cookie dough than ball-cookie dough. Brownie dough, maybe. I added another half cup of flour, but it came nowhere near fixing it. I didn't even try to make them into cookies; they just weren't the right texture at all, and I wouldn't have been able to roll them in sugar. I could be wrong, but I was sure that they would spread into big, thin, crispy cookies, instead of being crunchy for only the outer millimeter, and then chewy the rest of the way through.

I coated a pyrex baking pan (roughly 8x12, I think - not my biggest one, but not my square 9x9 either) in coconut oil, and I dumped all the dough into it to bake as brownies, 350 degrees for 30 minutes. They have indeed baked up, and risen to about twice the original height of the dough, filling the pan; a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. They smell good. They taste OK. I think I accidentally made gingerbread. It doesn't taste like coconut at all, either.

Next time, I'm going to use coconut oil, cut the spices in half, and add a teaspoon or two of coconut extract. I wonder if the molasses are also interfering with the coconut flavor, actually. One of my friends substituted honey for the molasses, once, and it worked out well for him. That might be the iteration after.

Strawberry muffins

I made these strawberry muffins the other night, because we had a lot of strawberries left over this past week. I swapped in walnut oil instead of vegetable oil, and "white wheat flour" for the all-purpose. I've never noticed a difference between the white wheat and the all-purpose, texture-wise. The white wheat is supposed to be whole wheat flour made from an albino-ish species of wheat. I'm not actually sure if's as good as traditional whole wheat, healthwise.

Anyway, they were pretty good; Jerry and I liked them. I liked them best hot out of the oven.

I was hoping I could talk the Little Dude into eating them, but so far he's refused. Last night he at least consented to nibble at the top, before he experimentally peeled off the paper, and then put the muffin on his plate along with his other food scraps to toss into the garbage.

Pizza/Spaghetti Sauce

I kept meaning to make a post about spaghetti sauce but never did. Turns out that was a good thing, since after Heather told me about San Marzano tomatoes, I came up with a much simpler and better tasting (imo) sauce. Here it is:

olive oil
28-oz can San Marzano tomatoes
1 small-medium onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced/crushed/whatever
~1/2 cup dry red wine
~1 tsp salt or to taste
freshly ground pepper to taste
pinch cayenne pepper or red pepper flakes
splash balsamic vinegar
several fresh basil leaves, chopped

Saute the onion in olive oil until translucent. Add garlic, cook for another minute, and then add red wine, turn up heat, and let it cook until most of the liquid has boiled off.

Meanwhile, put the tomatoes through a food processor or blender until they're mostly chopped up, but some texture is left (you can just crush them by hand if you like a chunkier sauce, but I found that with the long cooking time it's plenty chunky even with this step). Add tomatoes to the pot, heat to boiling, and then turn down to ~medium heat. Add black and cayenne pepper, then continue to heat uncovered for about 2 hours, or until sauce is the desired consistency (less time for spaghetti sauce, more for pizza). Add salt, basil leaves and balsamic and heat for another minute or so.

This made enough for one pizza with a little left over for dipping breadsticks. I used to have to add a lot of brown sugar to get this sauce sweet enough, but the San Marzano tomatoes were quite sweet already (as Heather had warned me, thankfully!), and I didn't have to add any. For spaghetti sauce, I might still add a little, as I like that sweeter.

Morocco meatballs

These are the meatballs I made and froze last month. The sauce came together really quickly, actually - I should have started the roast potatoes cooking first. I kept the recipe very simple this time; I wanted to see what effect the ras el hanout would have before I started throwing in sage or bourbon or god only knows what else. Maybe when we taste it, we will say: mmm, I bet X would be fabulous in this!

• 1 onion, chopped
  
• olive oil
• 1 tbsp. minced garlic
• 1 large can (28-32 oz.?) tomatoes - my can read "kitchen cut", which appears to be diced with a lot of sauce
• 1 tbsp. ras el hanout
  
• 1/2 the recipe of Morocco meatballs

I sauteed the onion, then tossed in the garlic and tomatoes, and stirred. Added the ras el hanout, stirred again. I let it cook for a few minutes, then threw in the meatballs too, and let it all cook on low heat while the potatoes cooked - about half an hour, till I decided I didn't want it getting any thicker, turned off the heat, and put the lid on. The potatoes looked like they only needed a little while longer, so I figured the meatballs would cool enough to eat, or something.

The potatoes are:

• 1 bag baby red potatoes, quartered
  
• olive oil
• salt, from the salt shaker
• a handful of chives, chopped up
  

I tossed the potatoes in the oil and salt and put them in the oven at 375 degrees, and it ended up taking 45 minutes. When they came out, I tossed in the chives - also a monster plant in my herb garden - and stirred it up.

The Little Dude had not yet woken up from his nap, so I put both the dutch oven full of meatballs and the roasting pan full of potatoes back in the warm oven, to wait.

It was OK, but not awesome. It was... too tomatoey? Not savory enough? Maybe it needed more ras el hanout, or tomato is the wrong sauce for these meatballs. I'm not sure what the other options are, though. And I'm not sure how you'd make... whatever canned cream of mushroom soup is supposed to emulate.

Beefy veggie brown rice

My husband laughed when I told him we were starting a cooking blog. "Let me know if you need any comic relief," he said. "I'll make white rice." He's much better at rice than I am, actually.

I hear brown rice is much better for you, anyway, so I've decided to learn to cook it. I also think we don't eat enough leafy greens, so I decided to hide some spinach in it.

I like Fine Cooking's choose-your-own-adventure recipes a lot. What I did with the brown rice here is sort of based on their risotto, except of course I'm breaking the rule about the arborio, right from the get-go.

• ~ 1 cup carrots, chopped
• 5 oz. shiitake mushrooms, chopped
• olive oil to saute them in
• ~1.5 cups brown rice, uncooked
• 2 containers beef stock (~6 cups)
  
• 5 oz. baby spinach
• handful fresh sage leaves (from my monster sage plant), chopped
• ~ 3 oz. shredded asiago/fontina/parm cheese mix
  

First, I chopped up the mushrooms and carrots, and sauteed them in some olive oil until they were soft. (I'm never sure how much oil to use. Recipes always claim something like 2 tbsp., but that never looks like enough to me; it looks suspiciously like it'll burn to the bottom of the pan with that little. So I add more, until it looks right.)

While that was going, I put all the beef stock in a pot and simmered it. I think it's supposed to absorb into the rice better if everything's hot.

When the vegetables were done, I added a ladleful of the beef stock to deglaze the pan, waited for it to cook down a bit, and then I threw in the rice. Actually, looking at the recipe now, I think I should have toasted the rice in the oil before I'd diluted it with the broth. But whatever. I toasted the rice in my broth-adulterated oil, and then ladled in more broth - enough to cover all the rice.

At this stage, you stir the rice, wait for it to cook down until when you scrape your spoon across the bottom of the pan, the rice/broth is slower to fill the gap in again, and then ladle in another cup or so of broth. Repeat, until the broth is absorbed and the rice is the texture you want it.

But after about half an hour of this, I was getting to the end of the stock - maybe a cup and a half left - and my rice was still crunchy. So I dumped all the stock in and I covered the pan, and for about 15 minutes, I let it cook like regular rice rather than like risotto. That fixed it right up; it absorbed much of the broth and wasn't crunchy anymore.

At that point, I threw in my spinach and sage, and stirred and cooked it until the spinach wilted. (It always looks so discouraging at first: the spinach just sits there, taking up all that space, and for like two minutes I stand there wondering if it's ever going to wilt. But then it does.) Then I took it off the heat, and I added the cheese, a little bit at a time because the rice already tasted good, and I didn't know how much cheese would be too much and ruin it.

I call this one a success: we all liked it, even the toddler. Although he did find the spinach and pick some of it out.

Chicken tagine (using the ras el hanout)

Lazy, lazy. I bought the ingredients for this last weekend, and my rule of thumb is to try to use perishables within the week. So really, this is my last window to make this recipe before I kick myself and throw out some of the ingredients.

While I was researching the ras el hanout mix (can you call it research, if it's an hour's work on the internet? I like to think I was using at least some of the scientific skills I was taught in college, weeding through all this... data), I found this recipe for a chicken tagine. It looked good; most of the things it has in it, we like.

But this is not that recipe. I don't have a tagine pot, I don't have preserved lemons, I don't feel like measuring all those various spices out when most of them are already in my ras el hanout (and adding them in will muddy the ras el hanout experiment itself), and I can't cook chicken breasts to save my life. Actually, that's not true. I could cook them to save my life; they don't have to be good to provide enough sustenance for survival.

I'm not good with 95% lean ground beef, either. I think it's the lack of fat. It makes things hard to cook, and it pisses me off. I'm not into this low-fat thing. I mean, I'll buy olive oil and use it instead of butter or bacon grease; OK. And I can see the sense in not stuffing your face with deep-fried chicken and fries. But cutting fat out of every little thing, just for the sake of cutting fat? I don't trust it. Your brain is made with fats, you know. So chicken breasts can suck it. (I occasionally still try to find a way to cook them well, for the challenge of it. It galls me that the entire nation is all crazed for this meat, and I can't cook it. I've had some success butterflying it, pounding it flat with a tenderizer, breading it, and then frying it in a pan, but that was more work than I like.)

Good God, where was I? Oh, right: this is not that recipe.

What I have is a crockpot. Here's what I threw in it:

• 1 package boneless, skinless chicken thighs (mine was 1.29 lb.)
• 1 package baby carrots (1 lb. - minus a couple I held back, because the little guy likes to nibble on carrots)
• ~1/4 to 1/2 cup green olives stuffed with garlic cloves, from the olive bar at Wegman's. (I don't know exactly how many were in there - I got a whole pint-ish-sized tub of them originally, but we've been eating them straight all week. Which I knew would happen, which is why I bought more than I needed.)
• 1 14-oz. can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
• ~ 1 tbsp. minced garlic (I scraped out the last of what was in my jar. It might have been less than a tbsp.)
• 1 tbsp. ras el hanout (see earlier post)
  
• ~ 1 tbsp. lemon juice (I didn't measure that either; I squeezed it straight into the crockpot.)
• 1 32-oz. box chicken broth (I used the Swanson's Natural Goodness kind; one of my cooking magazines recommended it as the best one, for lower-fat-and-salt reasons. I think canned soups are one of the french fry type offenders, so, ok.)

I put this in the crockpot in the morning, turned it on low, and let it go all day, until dinnertime. I didn't chop anything up. I figured the crockpot would tenderize it (and it did). I'd never actually crockpotted chicken thighs before, but they cook better than breasts in every other way I've tried. And it worked out; they fell apart very easily, without being that gross powdery dry texture I've somehow managed to give chicken breasts when I cook them in liquid.

The olives lost their characteristic saltiness after hours in the pot. I don't really know anything about olives, besides that they're salty. But this seems to suggest that one should choose olives that are still going to taste good when their salt is gone. I have no idea how you would tell, though. I seem to have lucked out, in that these olives were not offensive. They might even have been good, but it's hard to tell when you're surprised by the total re-definition of the food. I don't know if maybe there's some other variety that would really taste spectacular in this situation.

Anyway, the tagine was really good. It was sort of light, and the broth was nice - just spiced enough to taste interesting, but not overpowering. I think it would be a really good chicken soup analogue, when sick.

It reminded Jerry of medieval food (that's a compliment); he says these spices were often used back then. And even the Little Dude, who had thus far refused to eat chicken in non-nugget form, consented to eat this. He started picking out the chicken pieces after a few mouthfuls, but nonetheless: he did eat some chicken!

We had a loaf of bakery bread (rosemary-salt-olive oil, I think), and dunked pieces into the broth. I tell you, that was to die for.

Margherita pizza (attempt)

Yesterday, Heather made pizza at our house and left the remaining half jar of pizza sauce. William actually used the word "delicious" to describe the pizza, which is VERY unusual for him. So today I decided to use up the jar on another pizza. We had a ton of basil from our CSA share that we needed to use up, plus some fresh mozzarella. So, margherita pizza! Well, something close to it, anyway. I didn't have a store-bought crust but also didn't feel like spending hours on a totally-from-scratch crust. I've never tried my bread machine for anything other than a finished bread product, so this was the perfect opportunity to try it.

I found a recipe for Bread Machine Pizza Dough on food.com that looked simple enough. The only change I made was to add a dash of garlic powder and some ground Italian herbs. After a few minutes of kneading, it looked like the dough might be too dry, so I added maybe a tablespoon or two more of olive oil and used a rubber spatula to help the machine pick up the flaky bits from around the side of the pan until a single ball of dough had formed. Then I left it for the hour and a half of the dough setting.

It looked like the recipe was going to make enough dough for two pizzas, and I wasn't sure if the half-can of pizza sauce was going to be enough, so while the dough was mixing I made extra pizza sauce out of one can (14.5 oz) tomato sauce, one clove of garlic (crushed), a few basil leaves, about 1/2 a teaspoon of onion powder, and some salt and pepper to taste. I let this simmer for about half an hour.

When the dough was done, I divided it in half and spread it out on two baking sheets that were covered in olive oil and then a sprinkling of corn meal. I was really happy with this dough recipe - it seemed like the perfect consistency and was really easy to stretch out. The recipe I usually use tends to get holes in it and is almost too elastic to work with. This one really held its shape. My other recipe says that putting indentations in the crust with your fingers prevents it from bubbling, so I did that, then left it for about 10 minutes to rise just a bit.



Then I put it in the oven at 450 for five minutes (in hindsight I could have skipped this step, since the bottom ended up burning in places by the end). Meanwhile, I sliced up about two balls of fresh mozzarella and cut up a few basil leaves.



After the crusts came out of the oven, I spread the sauce over them and topped them with the mozzarella and basil, and put them back in the oven at the same temp for about eight minutes.

A strange thing happened with the mozzarella. We had two brands: Sargento and BelGioioso. The Sargento, when melted, had the look and consistency of normal mozzarella (kind of translucent and stringy?), whereas the BelGioioso was more opaque and not as stringy, which was more what I expected. But neither one of them was exactly like the cheese I'd seen on margherita pizzas that we've gotten from local restaurants, which was almost the consistency of stiff ricotta (?). So that remains somewhat of a mystery.

The other problem was the slightly burned crust, which I think could be solved by just not pre-baking the crust, or maybe not baking the full pizza for as long (I was hoping the sauce would become a bit less saucy during baking, but eight minutes was apparently not enough for that, so maybe cooking more liquid off the sauce would be another solution).

The ironic part was that I never even got to use Heather's sauce on this pizza since the 14-oz can of tomato sauce was exactly enough for the two pizzas, and I figured Heather's sauce would keep for longer than mine. So more experimenting later.

Anyway, the final product was quite tasty, and this pizza dough recipe is my new favorite. William didn't touch it, but I suspect he would have liked it if he tried it. And now he is threatening to make a big mess if I don't get off the computer, so off I go.

ETA: The next day, William ate FOUR pieces of this for lunch. I'm marking this recipe as William Approved™.

The spice must flow: ras el hanout

The intarwebz, she sez that ras el hanout can be made of up to thirty ingredients; that each shop has its own blend, and the merchants compete with each other for the best one. A lot of the ingredients are obscure to an American market, and I got the impression that some recipes strive for secret ingredients that would be obscure anywhere. I've got the best recipe around, you'll never guess what's in it! The name itself means something like "top of the shop". (That translation seems to be rampant on the internet, in the exact same words, all over the place. I suspect a lot of people of copy-pasting, so I'm not real sure you can consider its ubiquity to be any indicator of the accuracy of translation.)

This flexibility in the recipe is a little unfortunate, because it means that you absolutely will not be able to look up a recipe and have it be pretty close to whatever the ideal is. It's not like shortbread, which is just flour and butter and sugar or whatever, with only minor fluctuations. There's no ideal.

But it's also a little liberating, because if you happen to not like one of the ingredients, you can just ditch it from your recipe next time around, and you can still call it ras el hanout. It's not like chili, where if you ditch the chile peppers because you can't handle the heat, the Chili Police get all up in arms if you try to call it chili. Or beans, or ground beef, or whatever else a particular sect of Chili Police do not dig. But ras el hanout, it appears, is very anarchic, and does not bother with Police.

So what I did was google "ras el hanout recipe", collected the first dozen or so hits, discarded the few that were over-laden with too-obscure ingredients, and averaged the rest. For example, they all contained cinnamon; 1.5 tsp., 3 sticks, 1 tsp., 1.5 tsp., 1 tsp., 3/4 tsp., 2 tsp., 3/4 tsp., 2 tsp. The ones with 3/4 tsp. cinnamon actually had about half the amount of all the ingredients, compared to other recipes, so I doubled those recipes when I made the comparison. I added them all up, divided by the number of recipes with cinnamon, and came up with something resembling 1.5 tsp. cinnamon. (This was tricky when some recipes called for an item in its un-ground form. I made some educated guesses on how to convert it.)

I admit to manipulating data, too. I rounded up on ingredients I like, and down on ones I didn't. In particular, I took a whiff of my coriander, wrinkled my nose, remembered the less-than-ideal results last time I used it in something, and reduced that one from its calculated average of 1.5 tsp. to a mere .5 tsp, just because I didn't like it. I may not use it at all, next time.

What I came up with was this (all spices pre-ground):

2 tsp. cumin
1.5 tsp. cinnamon
0.5 tsp. cloves
1 tsp. cardamom
2 tsp. ginger
0.5 tsp. coriander
1.5 tsp. nutmeg (But actually my ground nutmeg was very expired, so I pulled out my whole nutmeg and ran as much of one nut across a grater as I could without grating my fingers)
1 tsp. turmeric
0.5 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. allspice

So, we'll see how it does. It smelled really good, in the meatballs; I also plan to put it in the sauce, when I cook those up for dinner.

I put it in my coffee grounds this morning, that being another recommended use of the spice. It was pretty good, but not perfect; I blame the coriander, and possibly the turmeric. Possibly there's not enough cloves for my taste. I've never used cardamom or allspice before, but they smelled complementary to the cinnamon/cloves/ginger that I like so much.

We'll see. It made a fair amount of spice blend, so I'll have quite a bit of opportunity to play with it before mixing up the next iteration.

Not-my-mother's strawberry freezer jam

I have a lot of posts that I've been meaning to make that I haven't gotten around to, but I wanted to write this one down before I forget. Anyway, when I was growing up, my mom had a huge garden and canned and froze enough veggies and fruit to last the whole year. I've already tried and failed the garden thing (although I do intend to give it another try when I have more time to devote to it), I have never canned anything, and we have a decent sized deep freezer that's mostly empty. This year my goal is to fix the last one. This weekend I attempted to make strawberry freezer jam for the first time, and I'm happy (and surprised) to report it was mostly a success. Someday I'd like to make the normal cooked and canned jam, but I do not have that much faith in my cooking skillz to not give everyone food poisoning or something. So freezer jam it is for now.

First, after reading that once you thaw out freezer jam, it only keeps in the fridge for a week, I decided to get a dozen 4-oz canning jars that can go in the freezer. I figure 4 oz of jam is a reasonable amount to eat in one week, but 8 oz might go to waste.

We have a U-pick strawberry patch (Brookside Berry Farm) right down the road from us, which is where we picked the berries, and their website has a recipe for strawberry freezer jam that uses Pomona's Pectin. The recipe that my mother uses requires 4 cups of sugar per quart of berries, which seems like a lot considering how sweet the berries already are. But this pectin only requires about a cup of sugar or honey.

So here's what I did, pretty much following the instructions in the box of pectin:

Washed the berries, hulled them, and mashed them up until I had 4 cups of mashed berries.



Mixed 1/2 teaspoon of the calcium powder (in the pectin box) into 1/2 cup of water and kept it in a jar for later. Mixed 1 cup of sugar and the juice of about half a lemon into the berries. Mixed 1 tablespoon (might have to check this) pectin powder into 3/4 cup of boiling water with the handheld mixer until it was all mixed up and jelly-like consistency, and then poured this mixture into the berries and mixed it all together. At this point, it started looking more like jam. Then put 4 teaspoons of the calcium water into the jam to get it to "gel." The instructions say to keep adding calcium water, a teaspoon at a time, until it gels, but mine looked about right after just 4 teaspoons, so I left it at that. Then I filled the jars up to 1/2 inch of the tops, put on the lids, and put them in the freezer. That was it!



I should mention that I haven't actually checked the ones in the freezer yet to make sure they didn't explode or anything. But the jar we kept out tasted quite good, and was spreadable on bread, although maybe not quite as firm as the kind you buy at the store.

Meatball variations: NOT LAZY

Laurel and I were talking the other day, and discovered that we have different approaches to meatballs: I make a big production of the meatballs, and she makes a big production of the sauce. I drooled over her description of her sauce, actually: so much more intriguing than a jar of store brand. What's even worse than my sauce issues, though, is that my meatballs are such a big production that lately I've just been buying the frozen ones.

Anyway, now I crave meatballs. Good meatballs, with fabulous sauce. And it occurred to me: you can freeze meatballs. As long as it's going to be a big production anyway, why not just make a lot, and freeze the extras?

My original recipe comes from our maternal great-grandmother. This is probably the source of my meatball/sauce behavior: her recipe uses canned tomato soup as the sauce. The recipe is designed in such a way that the meatballs themselves transform the sauce - literally, I mean, not one of those food-critic literary wordplays. The meatballs are rolled in flour, browned on the stove, and then plopped in a dutch oven with the tomato soup and put into the oven for an hour or so. The meatballs are very tender and juicy; the meatball juices and the browning-flour leach into the soup, thickening and flavoring it. The meatballs themselves are influential ingredients in the sauce.

But I haven't made the original recipe in years, not since my mother-in-law of Italian descent told me what she puts in her meatballs - lots of garlic and Parmesan cheese. Since then, I've been making what I call "Marriage meatballs" - my Graco's recipe, plus lots of garlic and Parm. In tomato soup, of course.

And yet a third meatball variation I've been wanting to try: this is a longer story. A couple of years ago, we were living in an apartment complex, and some guy knocked on our door. Jerry answered. The guy was selling magazines. After some long negotiations, Jerry agreed to buy a two-year subscription to Rachael Ray Everyday. He bought it for me; he knew I liked Rachael on TV. This was very selfless of him, since he hates her voice so much that even looking at a picture of her irritates him. Sometimes, when he's done something to piss me off, I leave one of those magazines lying around, face up. HAW HAW. Poor guy. What a reward. When the first issue of the subscription came, he growled that he was disappointed; he had really hoped the magazine guy had been running a scam.

So anyway, even though it's not a great cooking magazine - there's a lot of omg let's be healthy!!11 recipes calling for absurdities such as replacing the milk in your hot chocolate with mini-marshmallows (putatively to cut calories - I would need a whole 'nother post to describe all the things are wrong with that), and froo froo fashion and travel stuff in which I am not interested - we've been getting it in the mail. Sometimes there's some interesting stuff in it. Once, there was this North African lamb slider recipe. I made it, wasn't a fan of the harissa, but loved the cumin/cinnamon/cloves spices in the burgers. Flavors of Morocco, I think it said. I tried it later in a tomato sauce for pasta, and liked it.

So: Morocco! Some internet "research" revealed that there's this spice blend they use, called ras el hanout, which can have like a zillion ingredients, and is different from shop to shop. I mixed some up - that'll be a different post - and used it in another meatball variation.

Today, I made a double batch of the Marriage Meatballs, and a single batch of the Moroccan ones. Not that I think they necessarily make meatballs like this in Morocco, mind you. I wonder what they call American bastardization of their elements of cooking, over there. Ah, well.

I think, for clarity's sake, I'm going to start with the ingredients, before I get into the process.

Graco's Meatballs

1 lb. ground beef
1 egg
1/2 onion, chopped
1/4 cup cornmeal
1/2 cup milk
1/4 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. dry mustard
1/4 tsp. ground sage

Variation: I like Worcestshire sauce, and tend to put it in all things beef. It's been a long time since I've looked at this recipe, and I'm surprised it's not in there. I replaced maybe 1/8 of a cup of the milk with Worcestshire sauce. (Done by pouring the Worcestshire sauce into the measuring cup first, and then filling it to the 1/2 cup line with milk.)

Variation: Marriage Meatballs: Add 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese and 2 tbsp. minced garlic.

Variation: Moroccan Meatballs: Omit sage and dry mustard. Add 2 tsp. ras el hanout, and 2 tbsp. minced garlic. I wanted to use ground lamb instead of ground beef - lamb seems a big Moroccan ingredient, from what I can tell - but the grocery store didn't have any this weekend. My guess is that it's the wrong season, and I should look again in September.

OK. So the first stage of this exercise is to mix all the ingredients. I left the meat for last, and the cornmeal for next-to-last: I'm pretty sure the point of the cornmeal is to react with the milk/eggs/meat somehow, and since I was making a lot, it would take me some time to get things all together. I thought if I added the cornmeal first, it might be sitting there doing its thing for a long time before it was supposed to.
[Pictured here: cornmeal added, but not meat. The double recipe of the Marriage Meatballs, on the right, has been stirred already; the Moroccan Meatballs on the left have not, yet.)

And I left the meat for last for several reasons. One is that I wanted to mix all the other stuff together before trying to mix it into the meat, to make sure it would all get evenly distributed. And because you can mix most of the stuff with a spoon, but once you add the meat, it takes more work to mix. Finally, because I bought one of those big, $1.99/lb., 6-lb. packages of ground beef on discount, and I was going to be guessing how much was a pound. I felt like if I left it for last, I could add what I thought was about right, and then if it turned out too squashy, I could just add another handful of meat. Which I did wind up doing.

I'm not really sure how you're supposed to mix ground beef for stuff like this. I find even a sturdy wooden spoon inadequate to the task, and I don't own a stand mixer. (I've read chef-nattering about "overmixing" meat, so actually I'm not even sure if a stand mixer would be any good.) What I do is take off my ring, wash my hands, and stick'em right in there to mix by hand. I recommend being prepared to wash your hands in very warm running water midway through the process; these ingredients almost all came out of the fridge, and it is cold.

It's going to be squashy, because of the liquids. It makes a very tender, fall-apart meatball. If the mixture is too squashy and fall-apart before you even start making it into balls, add more ground beef, until you feel like your meatballs will hold together through the rolling and frying processes. So really, it does help to have more ground beef available than you think you need. You can always freeze that, too, or make cheeseburgers. I'm going to pack up the rest of it in the freezer, for future sloppy joes.

Once it's all mixed up, I think it's best to set the stage for the rest of the process, so all your equipment is prepared before you actually need to use it. There are two stations: one for flouring, and one for frying. All the flouring station needs is your meatball mixture, a bowl of flour, and a plate to put the rolled, floured meatballs on. You can move the plate at will to the other station, when you're ready to fry those meatballs.


The frying station needs your frying pan, your oil, a slotted spoon to fish the meatballs out with, and some paper-towel-laden cookie sheets (or something similar) for the meatballs to drain on.

When I was a kid, helping Dad make these meatballs, sometimes I'd have the choice of which station to work at. I liked the flouring one better; it was messier, but it didn't spit hot oil at me, nor did I have to mess with meatballs stuck to the pan, or with trying to get every side of a round meatball to touch the bottom of the flat pan to brown. When I moved out on my own, I tried baking the meatballs, but I was dissatisfied with the results for some reason I have forgotten. It might have involved hamburger grease overflowing my cookie sheet. I also tried deep-frying them in a wok; I liked the resulting meatballs and the ease of cooking them, but I think I wasn't a fan of how much oil I had to dispose of afterwards.

I was going to do the wok method today, since it involves stirring the meatballs in a medium they don't mind moving through, rather than painstakingly rolling them across a flat-bottom pan. But it turns out that using your wok for a Halloween candy dish and setting it aside on a shelf untended for years isn't really good for the wok; it was all grungy and rusty when I pulled it out. I guess I'm going to have to fix that somehow. So for today, I was stuck with a flat-bottom pan.

And actually, it was fine. It turns out that if you just increase the amount of oil you use - I used about a centimeter deep - it's a lot easier. The oil never runs out, so the meatballs never stick to the pan. Because the oil is almost as deep as half the meatball is tall, it cooks half the meatball all at once, so you only have to turn the meatball over once, not endlessly roll it around the pan. It's still messy cleanup because of all that oil and meatball grunge, later, but it came up pretty easily.

Anyway, once you have all that set up, you can start the oil heating, and then go to town:

1. Pick off a bit of meatball mixture, and roll it into a ball, maybe about 1-inch or 1.5-inches in diameter.
2. Roll this meatball in the flour.
3. Place it on the plate.
4. Repeat 1-3 until either the plate is full, or you have enough meatballs for a batch to fry.
5. Put some meatballs in the pan. Don't fill the pan! You want to leave room, both so that you have room to roll the meatballs over, and so that you don't drop the temperature of the oil too much. I don't really know the details, but if your oil is too cold, it doesn't brown things right. (I've never seen this on beef, but I've seen it on battered shrimp.) Anyway, I put in as many meatballs as fit in a circle around the edge of the pan, and then pushed them in towards the middle, where it was hotter.
6. Fry till brown on that side. It'll take a couple of minutes, but I didn't really time it, and there didn't really seem to be any consequences for leaving them a couple minutes more beyond what they needed. I had the heat to just barely under 3 (on a scale of Lo-2-3-4-5-6-hi), and that seemed a pretty good, stable temperature for the long-term frying.
7. Roll the meatballs over (I used two spoons for this, though you might be able to use the slotted spoon itself), and fry them on the other side for a few minutes.
8. Fish the meatballs out with a slotted spoon, and put them on the paper towels to drain.
9. Whenever you have a few minutes (like while the meatballs are frying), roll and flour more meatballs. You could also have a buddy doing that; it would save a million trips back and forth from the sink, washing your hands.
10. Repeat until all the meatballs are cooked.

In Graco's original recipe, you put the meatballs in the oven for another hour afterwards, so I never worried about whether they were cooked through or not. (In the less-oil browning method, I rather suspect they weren't.) But I cut one of these open - one of the larger ones, from a batch I didn't cook as long; that would be the most likely to be not fully cooked - and it was, in fact, cooked in the middle. So these guys could really go in a sauce at nearly the last minute, if they had to, and just heat up, and be fine.

This makes a lot of meatballs. The three batches filled up the two pizza pans I set out for draining them on. Possibly overflowed, actually; I packed up the Marriage Meatballs into 3 quart-sized freezer bags before I started the Moroccans, which I put into 2 quart-sized freezer bags. They weren't all on the pizza pans and paper towels at the same time, is what I'm saying, but they definitely would have at least filled them up, which is why I cleaned up the one before starting the other.

A single batch of meatballs should feed at least four, possibly six to eight, depending on what you serve it with. It took me all morning to make the triple batch; it would have gone faster had I used two pans instead of one, or only done a single batch, or had a second person at one of the stations. But it couldn't possibly have taken less than an hour, even for two people and a single batch; and then you still need the sauce. As previously mentioned - big production.

UPDATE: First pass at the Moroccan meatballs here.

Choose-your-own-adventure Salad

Sometimes, I don't feel like cooking at all. That's when I make salad.

• green leafy stuff
• fruit
• cheese
• nuts
• oil and vinegar

That's most of the major food groups, right? At least, according to two food pyramids ago or so.

Tonight was a spinach/arugula mix, blueberries, Dubliner cheese, walnuts, and balsamic vinegar with olive oil.

I often do it as spinach, strawberries, blue cheese crumbles, and walnuts, with the balsamic/olive oil. Once, I used apples, cider vinegar, and walnut oil; that was also good. The cider/walnut vinaigrette has a much lighter touch.

So far, the combination only seems to go wrong when I get the wrong ratio of oil and vinegar, but I can never remember what the right ratio is. I think it's 2:1, or possibly 3:1, with a little salt and pepper. I tend not to try to remember - I have one of those vinaigrette bottles where you fill it up to the "V" line with vinegar, and to the "O" with oil. Although it was a bit strong on the vinegar tonight, so maybe that's not the best way to do it. It might vary by the type of vinegar used, too.

The toddler did not approve; he ate all the berries, then sucked dressing off the greens and tossed them to the floor. We're still working on him on this salad thing.

Scrambled eggs with caramelized onion; Ginger cookie coffee

On Monday, I had the misfortune to be scheduled for some bloodwork. You know, the kind where you sit down on a bench, and they put some kind of tourniquet on your arm, have you make a fist, start poking the inside of your elbow with a needle, and then expect you to not use that fist to punch them in the nose when they declare you have tricky veins, and could they see the other arm, please.

And then when they do draw the blood, your vision goes black and you fall over.

They didn't have a "first thing in the morning" appointment available, so I instead got that weird ten-o'clock-ish appointment that's at just the wrong hour for expecting to go to work for any reasonable amount of time before having to turn around and leave again for your doctor's appointment. So I stayed home, drank a lot of water, and made a big breakfast in hopes that it would prevent me falling over this time.

I don't usually drink coffee, but there are days, man, y'know? I like flavors, and I prefer decaf, because I get all jittery otherwise. These are not things my husband is into, and he is a much bigger coffee drinker, so I try to keep my grubby hands off the main coffeepot. Some time ago, my mother-in-law gave us this little tiny coffeepot, just big enough for me. I'd been keeping it downstairs, in the "guest apartment" that is the finished basement, but I've been feeling an itch for coffee lately, so I brought it upstairs to play.

Our family has this ginger cookie recipe, handed down through at least four generations now. It is, for me, one of those recipes that defines you: I am not a chocolate chip cookie girl. Chocolate chip cookie favoritism is for conformists and capitalist sheep brainwashed by Nestle. I am a ginger cookie girl; not the crunchy boxed kind that break your teeth when you try to bite into them, but the soft, chewy kind that your parents taught you how to bake; the kind you threw a tantrum over when you were four years old in footie pajamas; the kind where you eat six out of every dozen before they even have a chance to cool. The cookies themselves take some time and effort to make; sometimes I put their spice combination in other things. Like coffee.

I made about two "cups" of coffee, as measured by the machine (is there a more miserly measure than this? What is this, literal cups, like half-pints? Who drinks in those doses?), with the appropriate amount of coffee grounds as suggested by the coffee jar. I think it was about two tablespoons. Then I added 1/8 tsp. each of ground cinnamon, ground ginger, and ground cloves, to the coffee grounds, and stirred them up. I popped the grounds into the machine and hit the button. Bam! Ginger cookie coffee. It was pretty good.
I like mine with milk and sugar. I tried molasses instead of sugar once - because the cookie recipe calls for molasses - but it didn't really work out. Maybe I didn't add enough, but it seemed like it would take a ridiculous amount of molasses to bring it to the same sweetness as a packet of sugar or two.

I've also had a craving for caramelized onions lately. Usually these don't rate very high on my list of ingredients, because they take so long to cook. But I want what I want, and I had time, so I decided to make some scrambled eggs with them.

I melted some butter in my egg pan - I can no longer remember how much, but it was probably on the order of half a stick - and sliced up an onion, which I then chucked into the pan and let saute until it turned brown. I stirred it sometimes, but mostly I made my coffee and toast and read my book, one of the Song of Ice and Fire series. I've been re-reading, since it's been a while, and I want to have it all fresh in my head when the next one comes out in mid-July. Exciting!

When the onions were done, I cracked two eggs straight into the pan and stirred them up, along with a handful of shredded cheese. It was a risky business, since they started cooking right away. I suppose, strictly speaking, I should have cracked the eggs in a bowl, scrambled them there first, and then added them to the onions, but that would be an extra dish to wash, so I just cracked into the pan and stirred fast.

I will grant you that the results were not pretty. I'm not sure it gets much uglier than slimy brown gook in your eggs. It tasted really good, though, and it was nice, to have a yummy, relaxing breakfast by myself, with the boys at work/daycare. (As opposed to no breakfast at all, racing out the door, to be honest.)

And I did not pass out when they drew the blood! I was still made into a pincushion, though. Damn trick veins!

The mysteries of lemon-cream pasta remain mysterious

I had intended to make the Creamy Lemon Pasta from the Moosewood Simple Suppers book. I had the lemon, the cup of cream, the fettucine, the butter, the Parmesan. I was going to put peas and sage in it. I was going to follow the recipe exactly. I was going to be a good little cook.

I put the pasta water on to boil. I zested and juiced the lemon. I chopped the fresh sage leaves. I melted the butter. I opened the cream.

The cream had separated. It's been in my fridge a while; I haven't been feeling well, so haven't been cooking as often as I meant to when I bought the groceries. The date on the carton was several days prior. I don't often cook with cream - no, make that never - so I have no instinct for it. It didn't smell funny, but my husband is always mocking me for my inferior sense of smell. I dunno. I decided to chuck it.

And then I didn't know what to do next. I am aware that milk is a poor substitute for cream, so I went looking in my freezer for ice cream; it's done well for my coffee before. There was butter pecan, peanut butter swirl, both relatively freshly purchased but not really appropriate for a pasta. There were two half-eaten tubs of vanilla, both of which looked pretty unpalatable upon opening. I chucked those too.

That left me with only milk, after all. Oh, well. So I added the milk to the melted butter, heated it up, and moved on to the next step. Lemon juice.

I gotta say, I don't understand how lemon-cream sauce works. Is there something special about the cream, that makes it not curdle when you add the lemon juice? Does all the extra fat buffer it? Because let me tell you, the milk curdled instantly. I stirred it for a minute, trying to tell myself this wouldn't be so bad, before I admitted that was an egregious lie, and there was no saving this mess. Goodbye, mess.

The pasta was, by now, boiling. Yet again, I was going to be done with the pasta before the sauce.

So I had in front of me the following: fettucine, boiling. A cup of frozen peas I'd already cooked in the microwave. A cup of grated Parmesan. A freshly washed pan. A mouthful of swear words and a wooden spoon itching to smack somebody. Probably me; I hate when I do this to myself.

I pulled a new stick of butter out of the fridge, put it into the pan to melt, and marched back out to the herb garden for new sage, because I like sage.

Also, look at this monster sage plant in my herb garden. It clearly wants to share.

So: a stick of butter, four sage leaves cut into thin strips. I had a hankering for caramelized onions. Why the hell not? It takes forever, but I already screwed up the pasta/sauce timing. So I chopped up an onion and tossed that in too. I should've done a second one. That onion was good.

When the onions were brown, I threw the peas in, too. Then I added the pasta (which had been done and drained quite some time ago, and was beginning to stick to itself), discovered that the whole pound of pasta the lemony recipe had called for was way too much for what I'd actually made, and pulled half of it out again. Half a box, next time.

I tossed the pasta and sauce together, and then added the cup of grated Parm and tossed it some more. It was not so easy to toss the second time, when the cheese melted and made all the pasta stick together, but I persevered, and divided it up into a couple of bowls.

And actually, it tasted fabulous.