My Garlic Shame

I recently asked a fellow foodie for ideas on how to spruce up chicken thighs.  I typically just smother them with barbecue sauce and throw them on the grill.  But when it's dark, raining, and 40 degrees outside, there's no way I'm firing up the old Smokey Joe.  I also don't want to wait until Spring to cook the Costco-sized package of thighs that is lurking in my freezer.  Chicken thighs, however, just stump me.  I never know how to make them, which begs the question of why I buy them, but this is a cooking blog not psychoanalysis.  In any event, this guy shoots me about 3 recipes in 30 seconds flat like he's a contestant on Iron Chef or something.   Lightly breaded with rosemary and garlic, sauteed with mushrooms, garlic, and tomatoes, and the one that really got my attention:  lemon juice, garlic, and  olive oil.  And then the words that made my mouth water:  make sure you use lots of garlic.  That was it.  Nothing but lemon juice, olive oil, and lots of garlic; lots and lots of garlic.  Perfect and frightfully simple for a working mom desperate to save some chicken thighs from freezer burn, and with all that garlic, destined to pack a flavor punch.

Except for one thing.  I didn't have any garlic.  For God's sake, I'm ITALIAN.  I NEVER run out of garlic.  My people weren't known as "garlic eaters" for nothing.  How was this possible?  I have 8 different kinds of pasta in my pantry, olives, anchovies, capers, and cans of tomatoes that would rival a food pantry for the homeless, but no garlic.  I felt my poor dead Italian grandmother spin in her grave.  This was bad.  No garlic in the house, except (shudder) for some garlic powder.  I felt like a fallen foodie.   I wound up making the thighs with bread crumbs, Parmesan, and rosemary.  They were actually really good, and I'm sharing the recipe here, but I'm haunted by chicken thighs with lemon juice and garlic.  As soon as I get some garlic, I'll let you know how they turn out.

Parmesan Breaded Chicken Thighs

1.   Remove the skin from 8 chicken thighs.  Chicken thighs are fatty enough.  Dredge in thigh in a little olive oil and set aside.

2.   Finely chop about 4 pieces of old bread in a food processor.  OK, you got me--pull out the store bought canister of prepared bread crumbs.  They work just as well.

3.  Add 1/2 cup of grated Parmesan cheese--the stuff in the green jar is  fine.   Save the good stuff for salads, risotto, or pasta.

4.  Add 2 Tbsp dried parsley.  Mix the dried ingredients together thoroughly.

5.  Coat each thigh with the bread crumb mixture and put in a roasting pan.   Bake for 1 hours at 350 degrees.

Brussels X Sprouts

I hate to exercise.  As far as I'm concerned it's two 4-letter words joined at the hip:   EXER*CISE;  F*** THIS. Same thing.

So you'll probably be surprised to discover that I joined a new gym this weekend: X SPORTS.  It has  free weights, stair climbers, tread mills, ellipticals, circuit training, spin classes, zumba, body sculpting, 3 lap lanes, and a juice bar.  It's open 24/7, 365 days a year.  It's close to home, and it's relatively cheap.  I can get a massage, a pedicure, and exercise outfits right on site.  In short, they've taken away just about every excuse I can come up with not to exercise.  And there's probably less than 50% chance that I'll last a month.  I'm amazed at those people who thrive on exercise.  They bop around "feeling the burn."  They like to sweat.  They seek their endorphin rush like I seek a cosmo at Happy Hour.  I don't get it.  

 I've always thought of exercise as a really nice idea.  I suppose that's the problem.  I love thinking about being active.  In the last four years, I've thought about, and actually tried: ice skating, running, tennis, kayaking, bikram yoga,  PX90 (think Jack Lalane with a serious ADHD issue) and rock climbing.  (Rock climbing was inspired by a woman rock-climber I once met with arms to rival Michelle Obama's. I lasted about as long as it took me to get up 15 feet on a rock-climbing wall, at which point I panicked from the height--not proud here--and had to get back to tierra firma via the rappel of shame while 50 teen-aged Girl Scouts snickered and laughed.)  Did I mention that I'm not a jock?  Truth told, I'm a complete abject woosie.

But in 6 short months I'm headed to a sunny Caribbean resort on an equally sunny Caribbean island.  I may be middle-aged and have 3 kids, but I'm damn well wearing a bikini.  It's important to have goals, you know.  Given my lack of athletic prowess, there's really only one way to make this happen, and it isn't in a gym.  You don't lose weight at the gym.  You lose weight at the grocery store, the restaurant, and in the kitchen.  It's what you put in your mouth, stupid.  And if I'm going to get into that bikini, what goes in my mouth better well be a whole helluva a lot of vegetables. I'll start with Brussels sprouts. This is hard core.

Roasted Brussels Sprouts (serves 4)


1.  Buy about 16 Brussels sprouts.   That's the hardest step.

2.  Cut them in half.

3.  Place them in a roasting pan and generously season them with salt, and olive oil.  Don't be stingy on the olive oil.  For God's sake, you're preparing BRUSSELS SPROUTS.  Make sure they taste good.  Put on some more olive oil.

4.   Roast at 375 degrees for about 30 minutes.  They should be all nice and toasty brown--naturally caramelized, but to just make sure that they taste appropriately sweet, toss them with about 1 Tbs of sugar and 1 Tbs of maple syrup right before you pull them out of the oven.

5.  Unfortunately, these actually turn out so well that when you pair them with roasted potatoes, tarragon carrots, roasted pork tenderloin, and a lovely pinot noir, well, you need to get yourself to a gym.  Damn.

Silence of the Lamb

I love dinner parties.  What can say?  I'm Roman Catholic.  We built an entire religion around a dinner party.  Jesus knew that sitting around a table sharing food creates something special.  Good wine paired with good food creates good conversation  and that leads to good friends.  That is, of course, unless you cook the wrong thing.  Then all bets are off.  In fact, maybe that's what was up with Judas.

I've had my share of mistakes.  I once made salmon cakes for a group of people that hated fish.  Instead of raucous laughter and banter all I got was awkward looks as people pushed the food around their plate and asked politely for more bread.  Fortunately, I was allowed to redeem myself.  The next time I got this crew over I had sufficiently interrogated them ahead of time to know everything about their food preferences.  Then there was the lamb debacle.  I had made a couple of gorgeous racks of lamb, and I invited a couple over to share them with us.  Maybe they thought we said "racks of spam," but either way they were so fearful  of the menu that they passed on the invite altogether.  From their perspective, I suppose they figured that if I willing to serve up lamb--or spam, then dog and cat couldn't be far behind.  I never realized that some people think of lamb as some kind of weird ethnic delicacy.  Just for the record, it tastes nothing like chicken.  In any event, we never could bridge the culinary gap, and I never got them back over.  Suffice it to say that dinner that night was very very quiet.

Despite it's history, I love this recipe for roasted rack of lamb.  I still make it for guests--albeit with plenty of advance notice and express approval.  Make this recipe at your own risk.  It cost me a couple of friends, or at least a really good dinner party.


Roasted Rack of Lamb


1.  Gently saute a fine dice of about 6 large shallots until they are nicely caramelized.  Shallots are a weird little onion about the size of a small head of garlic.  They have a mild onion-garlic flavor, but pack the same punch as a regular onion when you are cutting them; prepare to cry.

2.  Add 6 Tbsp of balsamic vinegar and boil until all of the vinegar evaporates or is absorbed by the shallots.

3.   Add 1 cup of fresh bread crumbs and 3 Tbsp of fresh thyme.   Salt and pepper to taste.

4.  Trim all the visible fat from two racks of lamb.  They are fatty little devils, but fortunately most of the fat rests right on the top of the rack.  It's a time consuming step, and when you're done you'll look like a surgeon at a M*A*S*H unit, but you'll be amazed at how much fat you'll pull off.  Your heart will thank you.

5.  After trimming the lamb, spread about 1 tsp of Dijon mustard on each rack.

6.  Generously coat each rack of lamb with the shallot-bread crumb mixture.  Actually, you'll have a lot of this stuff and you sort of wind up packing it on top of, and all around, the lamb.

7.  Roast in an oven pre-heated to 400 degrees for about 25-30 minutes for medium rare.

8.  Serve with roasted fingerling potatoes and a seasonal green vegetable.  Pair with a nice Syrah or Shiraz.  Marvel that someone would pass on this meal.  Their loss.

Saving Salad

Ho-hum.  

Let's face it.  Salads are boring.  You take a ubiquitous head of lettuce and toss it with chopped vegetables and pour some bottled dressing all over it.  If you are like me, the inside door of your refrigerator is littered with half-used bottles of prepared dressing like tombstones in some forgotten graveyard.  Each one marks a failed  attempt to add some mojo to what is essentially a flavorless pile of produce.   No one in my family but me eats salad, and I do it so that I can justify eating something good.  My teen-age daughter refuses to eat salad "until there's a free and united Ireland."  She's in this boycott for the long haul.  No more.

I've found the solution to ho-hum salad.  Bacon. Notice I didn't say "bacon bits."  "Bacon bits'" are freeze-dried artificially flavored pellets of I don't know what, but never ever put anything on your food that looks like rabbit droppings.   To really transform something as boring as the typical salad, you need bring out the cast iron fry pan, put down a slab of fatty meat, and sizzle it crisp.   Add some caramelized onion and place it hot on a bed of arugula or spinach.   Nod in silent recognition that if you add bacon to Brussels sprouts,your family might even eat those too.

 

Warm Arugula Salad

1.  Fry one pound of sliced bacon.  Fry it long enough so that's its crisp enough to crumble.

2.  Peel, half, quarter, and and quarter again 4 medium sized red onions.

3.  Saute the onions in about 2 Tbs of the bacon fat until they are slightly brown and caramelized.  Add about 1 tsp of fresh thyme, and salt and pepper to taste.  Add the crumbled bacon and set aside until ready to serve.

4.  In a separate bowl, lightly toss baby arugula or spinach in a dressing of 2 parts olive oil and one part balsamic vinegar.  Realize that this simple dressing is the only salad dressing that you will really ever need, and start throwing away everything in the refrigerator featuring the words "Hidden Valley" or sporting Paul Newman's face.

5.  Place the greens on individual serving plates.

6.  Add about a large handful of pine nuts to the bacon/onion mixture and re-fry on medium heat until the pine nuts start to turn golden brown.

7.  Place a large dollop of the bacon/onion/pine nut mixture on each bed of greens.  Serve immediately.

-- 

Auld Lang Syne

New Year's Eve always make me feel a bit melancholy.  Forced fun and mandatory kissing have never been my idea of a good time.  And let's face it, trotting out Dick Clark every year is just sad.  Once the hoopla of Christmas is over, it's like one long funeral dirge to bury the old year.  This year is no different, although instead of thinking about lost opportunities and lost friends, I've been thinking a lot about lost traditions. 

My mom is Italian and my dad is Southern.  Growing up, New Year's Eve was marked with an age-old dish from the Adriatic Coast: fried fish smothered in anchovy sauce.  In the old country it was likely the Church's way of supporting the local fish industry, and it stuck.

Then, on New Year's Day we'd be greeted by the smell of black-eyed peas simmering over a ham hock.  Your luck in the New Year was measured by how many of the slimy spotted beans you'd be willing to eat.  Not eating any was a pact with Bad Luck, and thus, not an option.  I could usually coax one down my throat.

When I married, my husband--normally more than happy to snarf down anything I put in front of him-- could never get his palate around the anchovy sauce, and I pretty much quit eating back-eyed peas the year I turned 18.  My children don't have these traditions, and for some reason--that saddens me.   Call it middle age or just misplaced nostalgia, but this year I'm ringing in the New Year with fried fish, anchovy sauce and black-eyed peas.  Auld Lang Syne, my friends, auld lang syne.

Fried Fish

1.  Purchase about 2 lbs of a mild, but firm white fish, like haddock or flounder, scaled and filleted.  Avoid tilapia, it's too fragile for this recipe.

2.  In a small bowl mix about 2 cups of Italian bread crumbs and 2 Tbs dried parsley.

3.  In a small pie plate or fluted dish, vigorously beat 2 eggs until the whites and yolks are fully blended.

4.  Heat about 1/4 inch of olive oil in a large frying pan until just smoking.

5.  Dredge a fish fillet with the egg wash, then dredge it through the breadcrumbs so that it is fully coated on both sides, and then dredge it through the egg wash one more time.  Fry it until golden brown.  Repeat with every piece of fish until you're done.  You may need to mix up more egg wash and breadcrumbs.

Anchovy Sauce

1.  On low heat in a large sauce pan, mix together the following:  Two 27-ounce cans of tomato puree or crushed whole tomatoes, 2 large cloves of garlic--mashed, 1 Tbs dried parsley, 1 can of flat anchovies, with the oil, 1/4 tsp dried red pepper flakes, 1/2 Tbs capers--chopped, 1/2 cup chopped kalamata olives (optional), salt and pepper to taste.    Simmer for about 2 hours until thick.  Add a can of tomato paste about half-way through if necessary.

2.  Serve over the fried fish and a generous helping of rotini pasta.

Black-eyed Peas

1.  Rinse and clean one pound of dried black-eyed peas.  Drain.

2.  Chop and saute over medium heat one small onion until soft and translucent--about 10 minutes.

3.  Add the now-cleaned beans to a large sauce pan, and cover with water--about 4 cups.  Add the cooked onion and one ham hock.

4.  Simmer over medium-low heat until tender.  Drain any excess water.  Remove the hammock and add any bits of meat to the beans.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Remark on how much better these taste since when you were a kid.

5.  Have a very Happy New Year.

Bloody Borscht

I've figured out why the Russians lost the Cold War. It wasn't the influence of Western culture or military spending during the Reagan administration. The Russians lost the Cold War because of borscht. The national soup of the Motherland is one mother to make. A country can only do so well economically when a disproportionate share of its labor force is spent making soup. Historians may ultimately disagree, but I'm sticking to my theory.   There's a reason that there's a McDonald's on Red Square and it isn't because Big Macs taste so good. The Bolsheviks were done in by borscht.


Borscht 
An adaptation of a recipe by Ann Simon.

1.  Cover a one and a half pot roast, bone in, with water.  Believe it or not, it's tough to find a pot roast these days with the bone in.  I wound up paying 67cents a pound for two beef bones.  It was more than a little annoying to pay $2.50 for a couple of bones that the butcher was going to throw in the trash, but hey, it's the capitalist way.

2.  Add about 1 Tbsp each of the finely chopped stems of cilantro and dill.  This step takes FOREVER because you have pull off the leaves and THEN chop the stems.  Those stems are tiny.  It takes A LOT of stems to get to a Tablespoon.  Save the leaves to garnish when serving--assuming you get that far.

3.  Let the beef and stems simmer on medium heat for about one and half hours, and every 10 minutes or so, skim off the fatty foam. 

4.  Saute in a separate pan about 1/2 cup each of a small dice of carrots, celery, and onion.   Set aside.

5.  Slice really thin one small cabbage or half of a big cabbage.  I recognize that "big" and "small" are relative terms.  "Big" would be the size of Boris Yeltzin's head;  "small" would be about the size of Vladimer Putin's.  

Big Head of Cabbage

Small Head of Cabbage

6.  Meanwhile, boil about 2 pounds of beets in yet another pot.  Boil for 20 minutes until tender.  If, like me, you are running out of space on your stove top, you can also roast the beets for about 45 minutes at 375 degrees, or until tender.    Let them cool.

7.  You forgot to keep skimming the broth, didn't you?  





Bloody, bloody borscht

 8.  When the beets have cooled, peel them.  This is a messy job.  Wear rubber gloves or you'll wander around with more beet blood on your hands than Joseph Stalin had human blood on his.

9.  Grate the beets.  Actually, go buy or borrow or steal a food processor and use that instead.

10.   Check the pot roast and the broth.  Taste the broth to ensure that it is sufficiently "beefy."  If not, add a bouillon cube.  This is also known as cheating.

11. Remove the pot roast from the broth and add the sauteed onions, carrots, and celery.

12.  Simmer for 10 minutes and add the sliced cabbage.

13.  Simmer for 5 minutes more and add the grated beets. 

14.  Peel and dice one potato;  add to the mix.  Are you starting to feel like this recipe is the culinary equivalent of War and Peace?

15.  Add one red or green pepper, thinly sliced.  Simmer some more.

16.  By this time, the beef has likely cooled so that you can cut it into small pieces; add the cut-up beef.

17.  Add 3 sliced tomatoes and the juice of one lemon to preserve that better dead-than-red color.  Cook another 15 minutes.

18.  Add two cloves of minced garlic and 2 tsp of horseradish..

19.  Serve--finally--with a dollop of sour cream and the dill and cilantro leaves for garnish.

20.  If you are Russian, look up from the task and realize that the Cold War is over.

Braised Bambi

My father and my oldest brother like to hunt.  Every year they trek out into the Great Beyond together and manage to take out a dear, elk, or some hapless wild hog.  I'm really not the least bit jealous.  I tried the whole hunting thing back in my teens in an attempt for some father-daughter bonding.  All I really got out of it was a bruise from my elbow to my shoulder when I mistakenly grabbed my dad's 12-gauge shotgun instead of my 20-gauge.   Damn thing blasted me 20 feet out of the duck blind and onto to my rear-end in the middle of a Texan swamp.  My father still busts out laughing at the memory.  No thank you.   At heart I'm a city girl.   The closest I get to the great outdoors is living on a fairly wooded lot in the middle of suburbia.

Which is why it is a total surprise to me that I like wild game.   I may turn my nose up at getting out in the brush to hunt, but I'm the first one looking for hand-outs when there's a 12-point buck to be divvied up.  And even though I am a miserable hunter, my father dotes on me, so I'm usually the first beneficiary of his largess.  After each of his expeditions, there's usually a cooler of the kill waiting for me--conveniently already skinned, trimmed, and shrink-wrapped in plastic as though I picked it up at the Wegman's butcher shop.  My dad knows his girl.  This year I scored elk and a hind quarter roast of deer.   The elk was easy--rubbed it with garlic and threw it on the grill; deer is always more of a challenge.   If it isn't properly prepared, it can be tough, chewy, and, well,  taste like deer.  It's sort of an irony, but the fun part of wild game is getting it to taste like beef--unless you happen to be making squirrel, and then the challenge is getting squirrel to taste like chicken.  It will if you bake it slowly in cream of mushroom soup.  I recognize, of course, that no one will read ever read this blog again if I feature a recipe on squirrel, so instead, let me serve up some venison. 

Braised Venison
Adapted from a recipe by Bruce Reeder

1.  Get yourself a 4-5 pound venison roast.  I'm not sure how you do this if you don't hunt yourself or have a friend or family member that does.  You could start hanging out at shooting ranges or get yourself a job behind the gun counter at Walmart.  Join the NRA?  Become a Republican?  There are ways.

2.  Generously rub the roast with olive oil, and salt and pepper.  Lightly coat with flour.

3.  Generously coat the bottom of a large saute pan with olive oil, about 2 Tbs, and a similar amount of butter--one large pat. 

4.  When the butter begins to foam, pan sear the roast on all sides--about 3-4 minutes per side until lightly brown.

5.  In a crock pot, add the following:  one envelop dried onion soup mix, 1 can cream of mushroom soup, 1 can beef consomme.  Stop and think for a second how much sodium is in each of these items.  Put your salt shaker back in the cupboard.

6.  Add: 2 large onions, coarsely chopped; 4 carrots, peeled and diced; 2 stalks of celery, chopped; 1 cup burgundy wine; 1 Tbsp rosemary.

7.  Stir and mix well.  Add the seared roast.

8.  Turn the crock pot on to "low" and go do something else for about 8-10 hours.   You can hike, rake leaves, stack wood, go to the mall, or do a ton of laundry.  When you are done you can come home and find that Bambi literally falls off the bone and is floating in a thick hearty broth, that yeah, pretty much tastes like beef.  Thanks, Dad.