Don't Ever Give Up...
...on my intentions, even if I lapse for more than a year. Truth is, every time we eat, which is, of course, every day, I think, You know, I should mention something about this in the food portion of my journals. Not necessarily recipes, although those, too; more often, odd facts and observations about my mother's food preferences and persnicketiness as she ages. The actual caring, though, trumps the writing of it and I usually have more than I can handle trying to report as much as possible in the two main journals: Mom & Me Too and The Dailies. If I manage anything more in the way of writing, it's usually the occasional sally over to The Essays.
    Yesterday, though, I devised something so spectacular I had to make an effort to record it here. One of Mom's favorite foods is shrimp. One of her favorite ways of eating shrimp is cocktail style, slathered with sauce. She so loves it that I've often wondered if the shrimp is merely an excuse for the cocktail sauce.
    Almost all cocktail sauces are loaded with sugar in several forms. This, of course, is probably one of the reasons Mom loves cocktail sauce. While they usually don't taste sweet to her (although they do to me), the sugar renders them hearty and flavorful. When she was younger and not diabetic it was not unusual for her to switch back and forth indescriminately between ketchup (probably her favorite food/condiment of all time) and cocktail sauce. Now-a-days we don't eat shrimp very much in any form because, well, from Mom's point of view, shrimp isn't shrimp unless it's drowning in sauce.
    I like shrimp cocktail, too. My preference is to have it as a meal. So is Mom's. I happened to notice some gorgeous shrimp at the grocery last Saturday. Since I was shopping well between meals I couldn't help but salivate. I didn't automatically add the shrimp to my cart, though...I could just imagine what sort of a sugar fest my mother's blood would have if I decided to serve shrimp cocktail for dinner. I steered away toward the location of the items on my list.
    My taste buds, though, wouldn't let up. They continued to remind me of those beautiful fresh shrimp on ice. Okay, I decided, if, while roaming the market, I could come up with an idea for a cocktail sauce I thought my mother would like without all that sugar, I'd buy the ingredients and the shrimp and we'd have a shrimp cocktail dinner on Sunday.
    I was successful. It took some innovation but I'm at my best when trying to figure out how to fix food according to a strict set of taste and nutritional values. The following sauce was so good my mother asked for more, after she finished her shrimp, to use as a dressing for the bed of greens upon which the shrimp had sat:*  *  *  *  *Spectacular Seafood Sauce

Ingredients:
4 4oz cans diced, fire roasted mild green chilies
1 Tbl Huy Fong's Chili Garlic Sauce
1 tsp regular powdered mustard
3 Tbl basil, garlic & oregano tomato paste
2 tsp pure prepared horseradish (NOT horseradish sauce; Morehouse is a reliable brand)
juice of one medium lemon
2 tsp kosher salt
Preparation:
Dump everything in a blender (or food processor) and run the appliance until everything is well blended. At this point it's consistency will be that of bottled cocktail sauce and the color will be that of bean dip.
Let the flavors peak for a couple of hours and serve it at room temperature.*  *  *  *  *    Caution. Although my mother and I consider this sauce mildly spicy, it's got a good bite. The normal tongue might consider it in the lower register of "hot". If I'd made it for myself I'd've added maybe two more tablespoons of the Chili Garlic Sauce (which I eat as salsa with chips), which most people would consider quite hot.
    Most people would probably want to add another teaspoon, maybe even two, of salt. My mother and I aren't salt snobs, we've been known to indulge in all kinds of salty snacks and foods. As well, there's no medical reason for me to restrict my mother's salt. For the most part, though, in food preparation, salt tends to get in our way. Most restaurant food and prepared food, for instance, is too salty for either Mom, or me or both of us. Thus, this sauce is not terribly salty in the above incarnation.
    The main flavor is a strong undercurrent of chilies, so if you don't like chilies you won't like this sauce. The tomato paste is undetectable, except for the bean dip color and a bottom sweet note that compliments all the other flavors. The horseradish, mustard, chilies and chili sauce combine to the place where you can't definitely detect any of them but what comes through is a smoky, spicy sauce that draws seafood into a robust dance on your tongue. While I was making it, refining the amount of ingredients, my mother and I taste-tested it by dipping plain tortilla chips into the mixture. It makes a fine salsa, as well.
    My previous experiments with turning prepared salsa into seafood sauce inform me that the above sauce would work equally well by using your favorite prepared salsa in place of the diced chilies and tomato paste. Most salsas have a lot of salt so, if you decide to do this you might want to eliminate added salt. If your favorite salsa doesn't contain sugar (most of them don't; the main sugar offending salsa company is La Victoria), this substitution would still make for a splendid diabetic friendly seafood sauce. If you're using salsa, you might want to substitute the juice of a lime for that of a lemon.
    Dinner, being delicious but a bit on the light side, was immediately followed by dessert, which I mention because, although it's not my recipe, being unable to ever follow a recipe exactly, I engineered a few substitutions and additions that rendered this dessert even more luscious:*  *  *  *  *Quick and Easy Spice Cake

Changes:
I discovered I was out of brown sugar, so I substituted white sugar
I didn't have pumpkin pie spice so I read the back of an empty pumpkin pie spice bottle and substituted (mind you, these measurements are approximate; in all cases, the amounts were "rounded"):
   1 tsp Cassia cinnamon
   1/4 tsp mace
   1/4 tsp freshly ground nutmeg
   1/4 tsp allspice
   1/4 tsp ground cloves
   1/4 tsp freshly ground ginger
   A couple handfuls of dried sweet cherries
    The cake turned out a bit dry, which is typical of high altitude baking, even though I'd splashed maybe an 8th of a cup more of buttermilk into the batter. I decided to sprinkle it, right out of the oven, with a dark, dark Cruzan rum we've got just for cooking, double wrap it in foil and let it smolder and moisten until dessert time. The ready, willing and able cake was delicious; it tasted like a "quick and easy" incarnation of my version of my mother's famous fruitcake.
    The only mistake I made with the cake is that I got the "bright" idea of flavoring the whipped cream (after sweetening it with powdered sugar) with a teaspoon of the rum instead of the vanilla. My mother liked it, but the alcohol overture was a little too strong for me.*  *  *  *  *    So, as it turned out, my mother got her beloved sugar, anyway, despite the seafood sauce. Which is fine. If I'm going to feed my mother sugar, I'd rather have it standing right out there naked, in the open, than hiding away in something that avoids the dessert category.

    Although I'm making no promises, I'm going to try to get over here more often. There are lots of recipes I've promised over at the main journal that have never been entered here. As well, I'm always thinking about food in connection with my mother's age and am convinced this is an important aspect of living with and caring for An Ancient One, just as it is for everyone else. So, readers, my intentions remain intact. Let's see if I can jump start the action with this particular entry.

Labels: cocktail sauce without sugar, mom and salt, mom's food preferences, my cooking techniques, my food preferences, rum soak, salsa

- posted by Gail Rae @ 19:06  0 comments   email...this post