a tasty memoir

On a whim last week, I picked up a small hardback at the library called "Mrs. Blackwell's Heart-of-Texas Cookbook: A Tasty Memoir of the Depression." Two minutes in, I was wholly charmed.

While only a bit of narrative (co-authored by two sisters) links a slew of resourceful farmhouse recipes for all kinds of biscuits, potato dishes and gravies, it reads pretty much as if Laura Ingalls Wilder had been bumped forward about half a century and relocated to a part of East Texas where Corsicana was considered the big city. The book is the sisters' compilation of the recipes their mother used to feed their family of 11 day in and day out, and her secret seems to lie in leaving nothing behind. With the right treatment on the stove, Mrs. Blackwell seems to have found, any old scrap can nourish — as well as earn its place in lore. John Henry Faulk, the famed Texas storyteller, opens the book with the once-widespread belief that fried chicken gizzards "had magical powers: they made boys good-looking and girls' bosoms grow spacious."

Naturally, the section on holiday turkey starts with, "First, catch the turkey."

The 1930s quaintness continues:

• A caramel dessert is listed as "Burnt Sugar Pie."

• In harder times, brownies were a great luxury with only a quarter of the chocolate in my favorite supernatural brownies recipe.

• Dessert recipes call for vanilla, cinnamon, the usual. But these were available to Depression-era families only by way of a door-to-door condiment salesman.

Also, some recipes depend not on the calibration of your oven, but the reliable heat of Texas in August. Instructions for drying peaches or apples begin this way: "Select a place on the tin roof of a barn, smokehouse, or any building which is leeward to the outhouse." At the end of the summer, this should take 10 to 14 days. And make sure to account for any rain or heavy dew.

I put one super-simple recipe to the test and baked cookies that turned out thin but chewy and not much to look at — but tasty, as the memoir's title suggests. Mrs. Blackwell's Scotch cookies seemed like the sort of plain tea snack Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle would have referred to as a "cooky," a spelling that I used to think referred to something entirely different from the Oreos and Tollhouse cookies I knew.

I think she must have meant something like this. Sometimes quaint is quite nice.


Scotch cookies

From Mrs. Blackwell's Heart-of-Texas Cookbook

1/2 cup butter

2 cups brown sugar

2 eggs

2 cups flour

2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

Cream butter and sugar. Stir in eggs, then dry ingredients. Drop on greased cookie sheet and bake in moderate oven (I took this to mean 350 degrees) for 8 to 10 minutes.

the basil makes it

About 7 p.m. on Valentine's Day, my neighborhood grocery store was nowhere near empty of metallic red balloons, chocolate-dipped strawberries or cordate (thanks, V-day-themed Word Of The Day) boxes of candy. But the two rows that usually hold fresh basil were totally barren. So Miguel stopped by Whole Foods on his way home to grab the ingredient that tops and simply makes a dinner of skillet lasagna, probably our kitchen's most-repeated recipe. That store was out of basil too, so I called Farm to Market down the street, and they (again) saved the day.

The message here, if Feb. 14 grocery store shoppers are indeed onto something: ladies don't care about the stuff that'll get thrown out tomorrow. Cook us some Italian food!

A few years ago, I tore a page out of Cook's Country magazine with a recipe for skillet lasagna, and it's held with a magnet on the side of our refrigerator next to postcards from friends' travels to Puerto Rico, upstate New York and a national park in Utah. While it's not the most perfect-looking specimen (I leave that to Deb, my guru of precision and sharp corners), it's comforting and homey and takes under an hour to make — a feat when it comes to homemade lasagna. That means it tastes like something special, but you don't have to wait for a special day to make it.

For dessert, I made Food52's latest genius recipe, which takes only two ingredients and lots of science. Hervé This' water+chocolate+stirring=chocolate mousse recipe took about 10 minutes but produced a treat of the fanciest, shmanciest kind. It's as superlative as the genius title promises, but I'd add two bits of warning. 1) Wear an apron and not your favorite pale gray, easily spattered button-down shirt. 2) The line that says "This all happens fast as the mixture cools" means that the transition from a batter-like consistency to mousse is sudden, not fast in the sense that the whole process takes only a few turns of the whisk. Psyche yourself up to really use your biceps for a few minutes. It's worth it.

Skillet lasagna

from Cook's Country magazine
serves 4 to 6

one 28-ounce can diced tomatoes
water
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 medium onion, minced
salt
3 garlic cloves, minced
1/8 tsp. red pepper flakes
1 pound meatloaf mix (I always use ground beef)
10 curly-edged lasagna noodles, broken into 2-inch lengths
one 8-ounce can tomato sauce
1/2 cup plus 2 Tbsp. grated Parmesan cheese
pepper
1 cup ricotta cheese
several basil leaves, torn

Pour tomatoes with their juices into 1-quart liquid measuring cup. Add water until mixture measures 1 quart.

Heat oil in large nonstick skillet over medium heat until shimmering. Add onion and 1/2 tsp. salt and cook until onion begins to brown, about five minutes. Stir in garlic and pepper flakes and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add ground meat and cook, breaking apart meat, until no longer pink, about four minutes.

Scatter pasta over meat but do not stir. Pour diced tomatoes with juices and tomato sauce over pasta. Cover and bring to simmer. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer, stirring occasionally, until pasta is tender, about 20 minutes.

Remove skillet from heat and stir in 1/2 cup Parmesan. Season with salt and pepper. Dot with heaping tablespoons ricotta, cover and let stand off heat for five minutes. Sprinkle with basil and remaining 2 Tbsp. Parmesan.

Hervé This' chocolate mousse
via food52.com
Serves 4

3/4 cup (6 ounces) water
8 ounces chocolate (pick one toward the bittersweet end of the cocoa spectrum)
ice cubes

Simply pour water into a saucepan. Then, over medium-low heat, whisk in the chocolate. The result is a homogenous sauce.

Put the saucepan in a bowl partly filled with ice cubes (or pour into another bowl over the ice – it will chill faster), then whisk the chocolate sauce, either manually with a whisk or with an electric mixer (if using an electric mixer, watch closely – it will thicken faster). Whisking creates large air bubbles in the sauce, which steadily thickens. After a while strands of chocolate form inside the loops of the whisk. Pour or spoon immediately into ramekins, small bowls or jars and let set.

Note: Three things can go wrong. Here's how to fix them. If your chocolate doesn't contain enough fat, melt the mixture again, add some chocolate, and then whisk it again. If the mousse is not light enough, melt the mixture again, add some water, and whisk it once more. If you whisk it too much, so that it becomes grainy, this means that the foam has turned into an emulsion. In that case simply melt the mixture and whisk it again, adding nothing.

Serve immediately, or refrigerate. Top with whipped cream if desired. 

biscuits for breakfast

And now for the exact opposite of my last post: a homemade version of a handheld breakfast you might get at Whataburger. I'm about to use the word "grease" a lot.

Did you know that breakfast sandwiches made of biscuits, bacon, egg and cheese can enter your life through means not involving a drive-thru window? I had no idea until a hot dog restaurant called Frank showed me the light and gave me the idea for making a from-scratch version at home. So that's what Miguel and I did Christmas morning after picking up coffee from our new favorite coffee shop and bringing it home to drink while cooking and checking out our presents. (Like tickets to see The Lemonheads!)


This breakfast worked well as a two-person endeavor. I made the biscuit dough and refrigerated it before we left, then shaped and baked the biscuits while also overseeing the bacon. Meanwhile, Miguel handled the over-easy eggs. A major part of making this a super easy undertaking for a holiday morning was this secret: baking the bacon! After trying that method, there's no reason to go back to watching over grease sputtering from a frying pan and threatening to burn me. More than that, it turns out perfectly: not crinkled and shrunken, not overly browned and dry.

Buttermilk Biscuits


Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

Makes three really big biscuits

1.5 cups all purpose flour


1/2 tsp sugar


2 tsp baking powder


1/2 tsp salt


1/2 tsp baking soda


6 Tbsp. chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch pieces

1/2 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 425°F. Whisk flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and baking soda in large bowl to blend. Using fingertips, rub butter into dry ingredients until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add buttermilk and stir until evenly moistened. At this point, you can wrap the dough in plastic and put it in the refrigerator until you're ready to bake. Drop biscuits onto baking sheet in whatever size you want, spacing 2 inches apart. Bake until biscuits are golden brown on top, about 15 minutes. Cool slightly. Serve warm.

Baked bacon
From The Kitchn

Use a rimmed baking sheet to catch the grease and line it with aluminum foil. Put your oven rack in the middle position and preheat the oven to 375°. Lay the bacon strips out flat on the baking sheet, leaving space so they don't overlap. Pop the bacon in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes. If it's thick bacon that produces a lot of grease, drain the grease halfway through. When the larger grease bubbles subside and smaller bubbles appear on the bacon, you know it's done. If the bacon is already firm in the oven then it's cooked too long. Bacon firms up as it cools, generally. Drain the bacon on a plate lined with paper towels.


Non-fast-food breakfast sandwiches

Freshly baked buttermilk biscuits, sliced in half
Thick slices of Cheddar cheese
Baked bacon
Over-easy eggs
Salt and pepper for eggs

Stack 'em up!

so choice

It's Jan. 1, and I'm posting a vegan recipe, but I promise this is no cliche post-holiday diet thing. That would be impossible because I'm plowing through my traditional chocolate-covered cherries and various cookie Christmas gifts and showing no signs of slowing down. This recipe choice is about my deep love of peanut butter and my discovery of a blog written with a terrific voice, pleasing pictures and — come on! — sensational videos. It's Bon Appetempt, and I've been spending all of my spare moments reading through the archives.

I love that this blogger, Amelia, so strictly recreates highly styled photos from food glossies — check out these props! — but that her writing style is so loose and easygoing. I believe I'd like to eat lunch with her. Almond tofu (peanut in my case) with snap peas and soba noodles is the first recipe I've tried from Bon Appetempt, and from here on out baking tofu with sauce to imbue it with flavor is my preferred method. It's the first time I've made tofu that's not just an extra flavorless texture in a dish/not incredibly oily from failed frying. Let me tell you, it is so choice.

In the spirit of the source of inspiration... Bon Appetempt's version:

My version:

It wasn't until I went back to Bon Appetempt just now to fetch that tofu/soba photo that I realized how different my version looks, and not just because I added some carrots on top. Looks like I used a lot more snap peas and a lot fewer soba noodles. So Amelia's definitely the winner when it comes to replicating photos. But it's not the proportion of vegetables and noodles that matters most here — this peanut butter-maple syrup-sesame oil sauce could go on nearly anything, and you'd happily call it dinner.

Peanut Tofu with Snap Peas and Soba Noodles

Adapted from Lucid Food via Bon Appetempt

14 ounces extra-firm tofu, drained and sliced crosswise 1/4 inch thick

6 tablespoons peanut butter

2 tablespoons soy sauce

3 tablespoons maple syrup

1 tablespoon sesame oil, plus more as needed

5 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for the baking sheet

3 scallions, thinly sliced

1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger

2 cloves garlic, minced

3 cups snow or snap peas, ends trimmed and halved

8 ounces soba noodles

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

1 cup fresh cilantro, chopped

1 carrot, peeled then thinly shaved with a vegetable peeler

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Lay the tofu slices on a well-oiled baking sheet and season with salt. [Alternately, this is a great time to use a silicon baking mat.]

Combine the peanut butter, soy sauce, maple syrup and sesame oil and whisk until smooth. Rub 1/2 teaspoon of the almond butter mixture on each piece. Try not to get the sauce on the pan. Bake for 25 minutes. Flip the pieces and season lightly with salt. Rub the second side of each tofu slice with 1/2 teaspoon of the peanut butter mixture, reserving the extra. Bake for 25 minutes more. Let cool.

Slice the tofu lengthwise into strips. Heat a saute pan over high heat and add 2 tablespoons of the olive oil. Add the scallions, cook for 1 minute and add the tofu and ginger. After a minute, add the garlic and 1/2 cup water and stir well while cooking. Spoon in the remaining peanut butter mixture and stir well to combine. Cover.

Put the peas in a colander in the sink. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the noodles and return to a boil, then simmer, uncovered, for 6 minutes, until the noodles are just cooked through. Pour the noodles on top of the peas in the colander and drain out the water. Immediately pour the noodles and peas back into the pot. Add the remaining 3 tablespoons olive oil and toss to prevent the noodles from sticking. Stir in the tofu, rice vinegar, cilantro, slivers of carrot and salt to taste.

Serve immediately — with Sriracha if you're bolder than me.

if you know me, you'll be seeing these soon

Some years, I've gone a little nuts when it comes to making cookie tins for Christmas. Others, I take it a little easier. This year, I'm in that second frame of mind.

You see, I've realized you don't need an entire parade of tree-shaped, red-and-white-striped, bedecked holiday cookies to make a good gift — just one or two really great recipes. For me in 2011, that means chocolate crinkles and pains d'amande. Believe me, they're good. I gave some of each to my two office mates this morning and soon heard an "Oh, girl" come from across the room.

The crinkles strike me as such a classic Christmas cookie. They're snow-capped, dramatic in color contrast and abstract in design — each one comes out of the oven with a unique form. And they taste dreamy. The dough is exactly like fudge, so you can imagine how they bake up. I made double batches twice within the past week, both times with help from my buddy Alex, who somehow always got stuck with the most physically demanding part: stirring the dry ingredients into the wet. (Sadly for her, the recipe says to refrigerate the dough for at least three hours or overnight. So both times she's helped, it's gotten too late to start baking. I think I owe her a batch.) (By the way, as an editor, I think in most cases it's so useless to put things in parentheses. They're so Ann M. Martin. But I can't give them up.) (P.S. That reminds me, this deserves its own parenthetical home.)

Before baking.

After baking. I'm pretty fascinated with the crackling.

When I last made powdered sugar-covered cookies, I followed the instructions and took forever rolling each ball of dough in a shallow dish until it was covered in white. This time I wised up and poured the sugar into a largish plastic bag, then added the cookie dough and shook the bag around. It takes two seconds! This is when I learned there is no such thing as too much powdered sugar. What sticks with this method looks like an overwhelming amount, so I brushed some back into the bag. I was afraid of biting into a cookie and getting a repeat of what happened once when a gust of wind blew a funnel cake onto me at Westfest. The top cookie here shows why you shouldn't do that:

It seems some of the powdered sugar soaks into the dough as it bakes. Don't worry about adding too much. A lot = just right.

As for the pains d'amande, I don't know what I was expecting with these. I sort of just took Food 52's "genius recipe" title at its word, and that was not a bad move. They're biscotti-like and the kind of thing I think my parents will enjoy having with their morning coffee when they get to the point of being overloaded with desserts and candy as gifts, which happens to them every Christmas because they are some of the most popular people I know. Another reason for the overload is that my parents give a box of chocolate-covered cherries to each family member as part of a tradition that started in lean years when buying presents for everyone was a tall order. But the thing is, not everyone likes chocolate-covered cherries, so they (and I) end up with the extra boxes. All that to say: these thin almond cookies are subtle but not ordinary.

They taste like very thin biscotti.

To make sure the pains d'amande were tasty enough to wrap up and give away, I took the advice of some commenters and added splashes of vanilla and almond extracts, and it paid off. The cookies look fairly plain, but a bite tastes just enough of cinnamon, vanilla and almond. Another tip for making these: have a friend over. Step 2 says to wait 30 minutes while the butter and sugar cools, and there are no other steps to do in the meantime. This is a good chance to lean against a counter and talk about college and boyfriends and Ryan Gosling and Big Freedia.

Merry Christmas, folks!



Chocolate crinkles
By way of Bakin' Love
Makes about three dozen cookies

8 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
4 tbsp unsalted butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 cup chopped pecans
Powdered sugar

In a glass bowl set over a small pot with just a bit of water, melt the chocolate and butter together over medium heat.

Beat the eggs and sugar until fluffy. Add vanilla. Add chocolate mixture.

Mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl. Add to chocolate mixture. Cover and refrigerate three to four hours or overnight.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and fill a shallow bowl with powdered sugar. Make 1 1/2 inch rounds with the dough and roll them in the powdered sugar until they are completely coated. Place the balls of dough on the baking sheet about 1.5 inches apart.

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes until the edges are firm but the centers are still soft. Cool on wire rack.



Flo Braker's Pains D'Amande
From Sweet Miniatures by Flo Braker
Makes about 7 dozen cookies

2 1/3 cups unsifted all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 stick unsalted butter, chilled and cut into quarters
1 1/3 cups turbinado or raw sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/3 cup water
3 ounces (1 cup) sliced almonds

Sift the flour and baking soda onto a sheet of waxed paper; set aside.

In a 1 1/2-quart saucepan over low heat, combine the butter, sugar, cinnamon and water. Stir occasionally just until the butter melts. Do not allow the mixture to boil. David Lebovitz recommends not letting the sugar melt thoroughly — the crunchy bits make for wonderful texture in the cookie. (Beth note: That sounds great, but I'm not sure how you'd keep the sugar from melting unless you add it last.) Remove from heat and stir in the almonds. Pour this mixture into a 3-quart mixing bowl; set aside for about 30 minutes at room temperature until lukewarm, about 90 degrees F.

Add the dry ingredients all at once; stir thoroughly until blended.

Press the soft dough into an 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch pan, preferably straight-sided (such as a 1 1/2 quart Pyrex loaf pan) lined with plastic wrap. Cover surface with plastic wrap and refrigerate or freeze until firm.

Adjust rack to lower third of oven and preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Line two large cool baking sheets with parchment paper.

Lift out the firm dough from the pan onto a cutting board. Slice as thinly as you can from the shorter end, aiming for about 1/8 of an inch. Space them 1/4 inch apart on the baking sheets. (The dough slices as though it were fudge.)

Bake, one sheet at a time, for 8 to 10 minutes, or until the undersides are light golden; then turn cookies over and bake for an additional 8 to 10 minutes, or until crisp and honey-colored. Place baking sheet on a wire rack to cool. Lift cookies from parchment when cool.
  
Stack cookies in an airtight container and store at room temperature up to 10 days.

a nod to mimee

Geez, Louise, I've got some catching up to do. I've done lots of cooking since that last post this summer, but a new job has left me little time for blogging. Beyond my own cooking, I did a daring amount of eating on a trip to France and Italy in September, and I plan to record that here, too. It was the best kind of vacation: I had ice cream or gelato nearly every day – and sometimes twice.

A Speculoos-flavored cone in Paris. It's ice cream made out of cookies!

But let's start with my most recent kitchen marathon: Thanksgiving! I spent the day at my brother's house, and I brought Parker House rolls, a bourbon pumpkin pie with pecan streusel and a cranberry family favorite. In the kitchen the day before the holiday, I thought about how magazines love to refer to recipes "just like Grandma used to make," hinting at such comforting quilted blankies as tradition and Old World simplicity. But I have to say, that comparison never has rung true for me about my North Texas-bred, non-cookie-baking grandmother.

Sweet as she was, Mimee, my mom's mom, was not much of a cook. Like most women of her generation, she did cook nearly every meal for her household; they just didn't taste very good, to be honest. Still, she sustained four children and her husband and even sewed all of her children's clothes until they were in high school. At that point, my mom and her sisters begged to have store-bought clothes — with tags! — like seemingly everyone else in Fort Worth in the '60s. Mimee responded by ordering a box of cloth labels embroidered with "Mr. Fine of Dallas" — a real brand? I might never know — and stitching them into the necks of their shirts and dresses. No one can say she wasn't resourceful.

Mimee's father owned a bakery. I bet he made great rolls. I used this recipe.

She had her charms, too. One of my favorite of my grandmother's idiosyncrasies was the way she adapted to the invention of the answering machine. She left messages at our house as though she were leaving my mom a note, signing it aloud at the end: "Mother."

This was a SUPER boozy pie. It was more mellow and much better eaten cold. It came from here.

The best thing I can say about eating at Mimee's house is that she was very generous with ice cream. She would stock up on neopolitan from the Braum's down the street when we'd visit from Austin. Otherwise, she made tuna sandwiches that were too wet and served cottage cheese alongside everything. Along with green bell peppers, cottage cheese is one of the few foods I still absolutely can't stand.

But in my opinion Mimee had one shining recipe, a cranberry side she brought to our family's Thanksgiving table every year. It was one of those totally outdated fruit concoctions with Jell-O (flavor: anything red) as the main ingredient, but we all loved it. She made a similar dish with green Jell-O, pineapple, pecans and cottage cheese like the one at Luby's, but the Thanksgiving one was blessedly free of curdy dairy products.

I don't have Mimee's original recipe, and I don't know where she came across it. So the past few Thanksgivings, I've been making a reimagined version that cuts the Jell-O but keeps the freshness. It's uncooked and really quick. It's also something I do by feel each time without a recipe to follow. So this year — only after I'd puckered the mouths of Miguel's family with a too-tart version I brought to an early Thanksgiving dinner the weekend before — I wrote down the measurements of the correctly sweetened version I brought over to my brother's. It's a keeper.

A Nod to Mimee Cranberry Relish

Seems to serve any size group of Thanksgiving guests; with all the other food around, most people take only a few spoonfuls.

12-ounce bag of fresh cranberries

two medium-sized juicy oranges

1/4 cup sugar

Rinse the cranberries in a small colander and toss them into a food processor. Zest one orange over the cranberries. Squeeze in the juice of the oranges, add the lid and let the food processor go until it's pretty much just stirring the tiny bits of slightly liquified berries. Pour it into a bowl, stir in the sugar and taste it. Add in a tablespoon more of sugar if needed. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

pain d'epi

Just as June ended, I was still reaping the benefits of a lovely Christmas gift from Miguel — cooking classes at the Whole Foods Culinary Center. I went to a class called Basic Breads: Baguettes and Ficelles last weekend. And I made this!

(It's supposed to resemble a wheat stalk.)

The first of three cooking classes was a demo followed by a lunch much fancier than I would normally have on a weekday: panzanella with chicken sausage, garlicky shrimp with arugula pesto over orzo and a slice of lemon pine nut tart. Yum. I took good notes on toasting croutons, an idea for a Texas-style pesto (with cilantro, pecans and jalapeno) and this mondegreen that seemingly everyone in the class misheard during some coaching on the tart: "Get ready, because this involves a lot of whiskey!" Turns out, the instructor had said the filling needs a good deal of whisking. I believe we should be open to both.

My notes on class No. 2 — where I wore an apron and learned hands-on about French cooking Lyon-style — contain this similar bit of marginalia quoting, as it happened, the same instructor: "Quiche — it's based on a cuss word." I was prepared to nerd out over some amusingly raunchy French idiom, but once again, we'd all misheard him. Custard, he'd said. Well, sure.

The bread class was more straightforward. I kneaded while listening to tips on feeding starters called pâte fermentée and poolish that give breads their flavor. And I continued kneading while a brick of Irish butter was set out and we were told about the happy, happy cows it came from. I did a lot of kneading.

Perhaps the best thing I learned was how to give a baguette that fancy leafy look above, in which case it's called pain d'epi. This site describes the technique with step-by-step photos. All you need is scissors!