Salad Days

I’m trying to be more mindful about what I eat. Since my work schedule is really interfering with my exercise routine, and since I’m currently exerting about 25 more pounds of force on the Earth than I’m comfortable with, I’ve decided to start being far more discriminating about what I do or do not eat. To that end, I’ve started eating a lot more greens.

Now, I have been - in the past, mind you - the kind of person who’s ALWAYS been happy to eat salad because I used all those lovely veggies merely as vehicles for dressing: usually Italian dressing, and usually a lot of it. Of course, that paradigm isn’t going to do anything about helping me meet my healthy eating goals, so I’ve had to come up with a way to change the way I approach a bowl of lettuce. What I need is a dressing that can be drizzled sparingly, but that packs a wallop of flavor.

Enter my dear friend, Organic Mama. She and I share not only a passion for language, but a passion for cooking, as well. She’s been inviting me to her Passover Seders for years now, and every year she indulges me by serving this dressing with the salads. It’s SERIOUS yumminess, it’s kicky enough to get me through a field of greens with as little as a tablespoon or so of dressing, and it really needs to be shared.

1/2 cup olive oil
1/6 Balsamic vinegar
1/6 apple cider vinegar
3 tablespoons maple syrup
1 tablespoon stone ground mustard
1 clove crushed garlic
1/8 teaspoon black pepper
salt to taste

Mix all ingredients together in a carafe or jar with a tight fitting lid and shake it well. I alter the recipe both by doubling it (it’s easier to pour out 1/3 of a cup of the vinegars than to figure out how much 1/6 would look like) and by grating the garlic cloves instead of crushing them; I’m overly fond of garlic, and I find that grating it allows the garlic to more uniformly float in the suspension. I often forget the salt and pepper, too, but I’ve not found that to diminish the yumminess in any way, shape, or fashion.

Enjoy!!

Rhubarb-Pecan Bread

A few years ago, I took a graduate class titled “Literature in Early America.” The class was taught by an amiable professor who also happens to be one of the country’s leading experts in Shaker history, literature, and culture. The class covered a whole lot of other literary traditions, but that little group figured heavily into the mix.

The class was a lot of fun, not only because the professor was a lot of fun, but because he was genuinely interested in allowing us to learn in ways that made sense to us; he didn’t prescribe assignments so much as make suggestions for our investigation. For example, one of the projects he offered up was a gravestone study. We studied the art and iconography of colonial gravestones! In a LIT class! It was fantastic! I got to research on of my (adopted) ancestor’s stones in a nearby town and wrote quite convincingly that his stone was more ornate and larger than his parents’ simple carved boulders because he managed to achieve a much higher status in the community; he became a Supreme Court judge - one of the first in the colony.

But I digress…

The final project for the class was left almost entirely up to the discretion of the student, and I decided that I would study the Shakers. We have a couple of Shaker villages in New England - one of which is still a living community - and I’ve always been interested in their art and, more importantly, their cuisine. I came up with the idea to do my final project around a Shaker meal, that I would cook for my class, and relate the idea of cooking to the foundation and maintenance of family. In Shaker tradition, the group is considered a family, and that concept of relation is essential to their community and their faith. I would investigate how cooking and sharing meals together helps to create and strengthen familial bonds, and then connect all that to some poetry and songs that the Shakers hold as foundational to their faith.

My professor loved the idea (as did my classmates, who were looking forward to a home-cooked meal in class). After an introduction to Sister Frances through my professor, I was invited to spend a day in the kitchen, helping her prepare the noon meal for the family. We talked about her history in the kitchen, we talked about my children and my schooling and my plans to be a teacher (doesn’t she just look like a friendly grandma who would ask me about such things?). We baked chickens and peeled potatoes. We set the table, said prayers with the family, and ate together. We had a lovely afternoon and, when it was all over, I left with a couple of recipes and some memories that I pull out every spring around rhubarb season.

One of the recipes I was given was this one. It’s for a quick bread whose main flavors are rhubarb and pecan, and it’s fantastically yummy (and easy; remember what I said about how much I love yummy and easy?). Because good things should ALWAYS be shared, I’m sharing this - another of my favorite recipes - with you.

Rhubarb Pecan Bread

Preset your oven to 350•

1 1/2c brown sugar
1 beaten egg
2/3c vegetable oil

Combine these in a large bowl and set aside.

1t baking soda
1t vanilla
1c buttermilk
1t salt

Whisk these together in a measuring bowl.

Measure out 2 1/2 c flour and add to the sugar, egg, and oil, alternating with the milk mixture.

Stir in 1/2c chopped pecans and 1 1/2c chopped rhubarb (I usually add more rhubarb than that, but that’s just me).

Pour into greased and floured pans, sprinkle with sugar, and bake 1 hour or until the loaves test done. I tend to bake these in mini-loaf pans, so they’re portable and giftable.

(*I nailed the final assignment. I brought in Shaker fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans and scallions, the rhubarb bread and a Mother Ann cake. How could I POSSIBLY get a bad grade for that?)

Cooking with a Southern Accent, Volume I

As many of you know, I spent this past weekend with my blogging friends Bo and Saintseester in their home state of Alabama.  I had a amazing time, and they fed me very, very well.  Here is the first in a series of recipes I’m going to post about my gastronomical adventures in the Southland (no recipes for collard greens, though, so don’t panic).  I hope you try them, and that you enjoy them as heartily as I did.

Today’s post is one of the incredibly yummy things that Seester offered us for Sunday brunch.

This was, I’m pretty sure, my first exposure to grits, and my thinking is that it won’t be my last.  The notes in the recipe are Seester’s:

Sausage & Cheese Grits Casserole

4 ½ cups water (I used a little less)
¾ stick butter or margarine
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup quick grits
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese (divided)
½ cup grated parmesan cheese
¾ cup milk
4 large eggs, lightly beaten
2 (12 oz tubes) packages maple-flavored pork sausage

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Spray a 13×9x2 baking dish with cooking spray.

In heavy large saucepan, heat water, butter and salt on high until it boils.  Stir in grits, reduce heat. Simmer for 15 minutes or until grits are creamy, stirring occasionally.

While grits are simmering, brown sausage.  Drain.

Stir in 1 cup cheddar cheese and parmesan cheese until melted. Stir in milk and eggs.  Stir browned sausage into grits mixture.  Pour into prepared dish. Bake for 1 hour or until a knife inserted comes out almost clean.

Sprinkle remaining 1 cup cheddar over top. Back for 2 more minutes, until cheese is melted.

I have found this recipe to be a little bit thin when it first comes out of the oven. Sometimes I let it sit before serving to give it a chance to thicken.

Kwee-Chee *Edited Again*

Otherwise known as quiche.

The dictionary defines quiche as a pie-like dish consisting of an unsweetened pastry shell filled with a custard and usually containing cheese and other ingredients, as vegetables, seafood, or ham. Pretty much all of my cookbooks say about the same thing.

Since Organic Mama bought WAY more eggs than she needed for the fixings for her daughter’s bat mitzvah, she needs some good, egg-intensive dishes. For her, I’m posting my favorite quiche recipe.

I don’t fuss with crust. I find that I can never get both the quiche and the crust done quite to my liking, so I skip the crust part altogether. I make up for this by serving my quiche with some sort of hearty bread - usually a crusty French bread accompanied by a little too much butter.

If you DO want to have a crusted quiche, make (or buy) enough pie dough for a 9-inch pan. Dock the pastry (poke it full of little holes with a fork), weight it down with pie weights or dried beans, and pre-bake it in a 375° oven for about 30 minutes. Remove the crust and allow it to cool completely, and turn the oven down to 300°.

If you choose NOT to fuss with crust, butter a 9-inch pie plate and set it aside. Beat together 4 eggs with 2 cups of light cream (the dairy you use can be varied to your liking and/or what happens to be in your fridge at the moment). To this, stir in a pinch of salt and a grind or two of pepper and set aside.

In the bottom of your pie plate (or, alternately, in your pre-baked and cooled crust), put whatever extras you’d like to have in your quiche. My personal favorites are stewed tomatoes, onion and bacon (both the onion and the bacon having been cooked together over medium heat until soft and crisp, respectively), then a little too much grated sharp Cheddar cheese. Really, though, the possibilities are just about endless: spinach and goat cheese or feta, asparagus and gruyere, ham and swiss- really, let your imagination go. Here, for example, we have tonight’s offering; turkey ham, diced red onion, and chopped asparagus with Cheddar:

I sometimes use quiche as a “fridge-purge” dish; I’ll root around in my refrigerator and come up with all kinds of interesting combinations. As far as quantities for the extras go, use your best judgment. About a half cup of each (maybe a little heavier on the cheese) for a 9 inch pie pan would probably do it.

On top of your extras, gently pour over the egg and cream, sprinkle over more of your cheese (if you have any left over), and bake in the center of a pre-heated 300° oven and bake 30-45 minutes, or until the quiche is slightly browned and set (if you’re using a crust and it starts to brown too much, as it’s likely to do, make a little ring of tin foil to shield it). How long it takes will depend on how deep the pie plate is and the accuracy of your oven’s thermostat. I do a doneness test by poking the center of the quiche with a knife; if the knife comes out mostly clean, we’re in business.

Let the quiche cool for about 10 minutes - it’ll slice more cooperatively that way - and serve hot or cold. Honestly, I tend to at least double this recipe and make the quiche in a buttered, rectangular glass cake pan - one little pie never seems sufficient, especially since it fridges so well and makes for a fantastic next-day lunch.

Our favorite accompaniment to quiche is a dark green salad tossed with some sort of zingy vinaigrette, but that’s just us.

YUM!

*I changed the cooking directions from the original suggestion.  Cooking a custard too fast will cause it to split - you’ll end up with what amounts to essentially scrambled eggs floating in a puddle of water.  Low and slow is the way to go with custards.  Your patience will be rewarded, Grasshopper…*

BBQ!

I was going to wait until summer to publish this post - barbecue really is a summertime dish, I think - but Doc went and started a conversation about barbecue over at his place, and I threatened to start a fight by posting my recipe. Never let it be said that Chili doesn’t put up when she speaks up, so here it is.

Depending on the source, I either get a lot of crap or a lot of praise for my homemade barbecue sauce. My immediate family - up to and including the Bowyer clan - loves it. Those outside of my circle aren’t as easy a sell, though. Barbecue sauce is one of those highly personal preferences, I think; if it’s not exactly what you think “good” barbecue sauce is, then it’s just not good. I like a lot of barbecue sauces - mostly from restaurants; the stuff in bottles always tastes like I imagine burned plastic would taste - but I really do think my sauce is at least as good as any of those slathered on restaurant ribs. Of course, I’m a little biased, so take my opinion for what it’s worth.

I made this recipe up ENTIRELY out of my head; there is no place to lay credit for this as an original or an inspiration. Here it is:

Take half a pound of hickory smoked bacon and cut it into small pieces (I don’t bother peeling the rashers away from each other; there’s no need for that kind of fussiness). Drop the pieces into the bowl of a food processor and blitz them until they form a paste. Scrape this into a medium-large sauce pan, then drop a medium-to-large, quartered yellow onion into the food processor and blitz that until it’s mush. Scrape the onion into the bacon, turn the heat to medium, and cook the whole mess, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes (and trust me, it’s a mess - at this point, the recipe really resembles nothing so much as a pot full of vomit. Were it not for the gorgeous smell of bacon and onions - two of my favorite things - I literally might not be able to make it past this step).

Once the bacon is cooked through (it won’t get brown - or, rather, it shouldn’t - but after ten minutes over medium heat, it should be sufficiently cooked), upend a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup into the pot and turn the heat down; it’s going to blop and burble all over your stove if you don’t. I usually use most of a standard size bottle (and I’m sorry, but all I have in my fridge at this moment is a “family size” bottle, so I don’t really know what the “standard” size is. Besides, I do all this by eye (and tongue), anyway, if you’ve not already guessed from my oh-so-precise measurements). Scoop in a few tablespoons of brown sugar (more or less, depending on your fancy), a shake or two of cayenne pepper (more or less, depending on your fancy) and a few tablespoons of mustard (again, more or less…) into the sauce. Stir it all together and let it simmer for about 10 minutes, then go back and taste it again, adjusting for sweetness or spice as you see fit.

That’s it!!

This stuff freezes beautifully. Because of all the vinegar in the ketchup, it never really gets ice-cube hard - it settles into a consistency not unlike fruit sorbet - so I find I can spoon out just what I need without having to defrost the whole batch. My most common use for this is “pulled chicken” sandwiches: I poach a few chicken breasts, shred the meat with forks, then stir it around in a little too much sauce and serve it in toasted bulky rolls with chips and (if I’ve got some) cole slaw.

YUM!

Beanie’s Favorite Dinner

In honor of my younger daughter’s ninth birthday, I offer you the recipe for her favorite dinner; macaroni and cheese.

Once I figured out how yummy and stupid-easy it was to make mac-and-cheese from scratch, I’ve never since bought a box of the orange stuff. Seriously, you can have the sauce made in the time it takes the elbows to boil, and buying pre-grated cheese takes all of the “work” out of this process.

The recipe as it appears on the back of the Prince elbow macaroni box - my main inspiration for this dish - is as follows:

Preheat the oven to 350°.

Cook 8 oz of elbows according to package directions (boil in 3 quarts of water and 2 teaspoons of salt for 6-8 minutes, depending on desired firmness). Drain and set aside.

In a medium saucepan over medium heat, melt 3 tablespoons of butter, then stir in 3 tablespoons of all-purpose flour. Carefully stir in 2 1/2 cups milk and cook, stirring constantly, until sauce thickens. Add 1/4 cup minced onions and 2 cups of shredded Cheddar cheese and stir until cheese melts. Season with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon of pepper. Mix sauce into elbows, pour into a buttered 2-quart baking dish, top with 1/2 cup of bread crumbs and bake for 30 minutes.

I alter that recipe quite a bit, actually. For starters, I double the sauce; there’s really not enough sauce in the original, especially if you’re going to have leftovers the next day. I cook slightly less onion than is called for in a doubled batch, minced almost to invisibility, in the butter, then I stir in the flour and cook the mess together for a good 4 minutes or so, just to make sure the raw flour taste is cooked out. I heat the milk in the microwave for a bit, too, which makes its integration into the roux much easier. I leave the salt and pepper out altogether and add about half again as much cheese as is called for (and I use the good stuff, too; Cabot Hunter Cheddar). Finally, I toast the bread crumbs (a combination of Italian-seasoned and panko) in a little butter before putting them on top of the dish and popping it in the oven. I suppose one could also sprinkle shredded cheese on top of the crumbs, but any that I save over to do that gets eaten by passing children and husbands (and the occasional kitty cat).

For reasons I can’t explain, we almost always serve green beans with anything with Cheddar as its main component. The original recipe is supposed to make 4-6 servings, but the doubled version feeds the four of us with enough left over for a healthy lunch the next day.

YUM!

First Course

I’ve been meaning to open this site for a while now; not only do I love to share recipes (and I love to receive recipes that others are willing to share), but I’ve long longed for a place where I can keep all my favorites in one easy-to-search spot.

Welcome, then, my friends, to Mrs. Chili’s online kitchen! Pull up a chair and grab a spoon!

Almost all of my favorite recipes are what I proudly call “stupid-easy.” They’re concoctions that are crazy-simple to put together but which consistently earn me acclaim and adoration and the reputation as a Goddess of the Kitchen. I sometimes feel guilty about accepting the accolades for these dishes - I’m certain that if my diners knew how easy these recipes are to throw together, they might be a little more stingy with their praise.

My plan here is to give you the recipe as I found it (if such a thing exists; often, I make stuff up as I go), then give you the modifications that I’m likely to make when I cook the recipe myself. If you come up with another way of tweaking with the instructions or the ingredients, be sure to let me know!

The first recipe I’m going to share here is one of my most favorite comfort foods, and truly one of my most simple recipes - seriously; five ingredients and no special skills required. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I do.

Vanilla Rice Pudding

In the bowl of a slow cooker or a large saucepan, combine

1/2 cup of arborio rice

3 cups of milk, 1 cup of cream

1/4 cup of granulated sugar

1 tablespoon of vanilla extract.

Simmer on low, covered, until the rice is al dente and the mixture is thick.

Sometimes, I’ll go exactly half and half on the milk and cream - 2 cups of each - and sometimes I’ll go with 3 cups of actual half-and-half and one cup of milk if I’m out of heavy cream. I tend to go a tiny bit heavy on both the sugar and the vanilla, and I’ve discovered vanilla bean paste (which I buy at Trader Joe’s) which imparts a lovely speckled look to the dish. I suppose one can also split and scrape a vanilla bean and leave it to simmer in the rice, but I almost never have whole vanilla beans around my kitchen.

How quickly I want this in a bowl is going to determine which cooking method I’ll use - the stovetop is a bit quicker than the slow cooker, but the stovetop also requires a bit more of my attention than the Crock Pot. I’ve also been known to stir everything together in a lidded baking dish and put it in a 250° oven, but only if I’ve got all day.

I serve this both warm and cold though, to be honest, I only eat it cold right out of the container while standing in front of the open refrigerator door.

YUM!