Being [Stuck] There
    Chili and grilled T-bone steaks.
    My dad was a good cook. He only had two notes, but he played them well. From-scratch chili and T-bone steak marinated all afternoon in Worcestershire sauce, black pepper and smashed garlic, “kissed,” as he described it, by the bars of a very hot grill.
    Although he allegedly made other dishes, everything tasted like chili or marinated T-bone steak. Dad had other food favorites, but if he really wanted something besides chili or steak he’d cajole someone else into fixing it.
    My repertoire is more varied than my dad’s but I slip into food ruts that can last awhile. Rice is one of these ruts. One evening, when the refrigerator was stuffed with left over rice dishes and Mom went directly to the freezer for a TV dinner, I ate and enjoyed cold cooked rice with herb dressing and chopped green onions.
    Mom likes rice, she says, “Just not as a steady diet.”
    Sometimes a food rut will be worn by experimenting with an idea for a month or so before springing it on a special gathering. Two summers ago I had a month-long horseradish seizure that got a little tiresome but yielded excellent results.
    I like fish. Some species I even love, like halibut steak marinated in lime juice and cracked pepper. Fish can easily overwhelm me, though. If it is at all fishy my taste buds ache even before I eat it.
    Salmon steaks are one of those always available but not always fresh fish products that I like very much, but only if they’re not fishy. Mom loves salmon and we have it whenever it’s on sale, so I regularly concoct marinades to attempt to counteract fishiness. One day I reasoned that a 24-hour refrigerator marinade of lemon juice (6 lemons), 3 heaping teaspoons of pure, prepared horseradish (not in a base sauce) and two teaspoons of dried tarragon would do the trick, whether the steaks were fishy or not. As it happened, salmon went on sale a month previous to a celebration dinner we were hosting. I decided to preview the marinade, and the dish, several times before the event. At one serving I even made the leftover marinade into a delicious sauce, using the cornstarch milk method.
    The typical hotness of pure, prepared horseradish mellows considerably by the time the fish is grilled and the gravy simmered, imparting a unique flavor to the fish, barely recognizable and very agreeable.
    I used horseradish in a variety of applications that month, including the previously published Meat and Potatoes Salad, substituting it for the curry, leaving out the cinnamon and pistachios and using beef instead of vegetable broth and olive instead of peanut oil. Very successful.
    You’ll notice my marinade was not oil-based. I rarely use oil based marinades, unless I have a particularly lean cut of meat. It hardly seems necessary, unless the meat is tough. I have found oil-based herb dressings successful with beef shanks. A friend of mine also marinated some venison steaks in Italian dressing and grilled them. Good food! These are exceptions, though, not the rule.
    Unfortunately, by the time the dinner event occurred, my mother and I mistrusted the excitement over what had become, to us, an ordinary entrée. One of our guests who had told me he would “eat anything” when I surveyed the invitees to make sure I served something everyone liked, confessed to me that he usually doesn’t like fish, but this fish was “extraordinarily good.”
    I didn’t believe him. That’s the down side of food ruts.
    Food ruts are inevitable if you savor food as well as eat it. Consider yourself lucky if your household contains a co-cook or two who will occasionally push you out of the kitchen in exasperation. I once got into a breakfast bread rut that my whole neighborhood collaborated in stopping...but that’s another column...

- posted by Gail Rae @ 12:18  0 comments   email...this post

 
Better-Than-Bisquit Scones [from my ISP deleted journal Playing with Food]
    Did I elaborate on that scone recipe, the one mentioned in “My Fan Club”? I should have. The Scone Episode is classic “Playing With Food.”
    When I lived in Seattle, I visited Larry’s Market at least once a week, on Sundays, and, if I was working in Bellevue, more often. I fell in love with many of their baked and deli goods. Larry’s Pumpkin Cranberry Muffins, for instance. Larry’s Curried Rice, which was wonderful with a little shredded chicken, warmed in the oven on a bleak February day. Larry’s Cranberry Scones.
    Larry’s Cranberry Scones are the only reason I like scones. I’d never tried scones before, being only a recent and reluctant bisquit fan. I couldn’t see any more sense to sweet bisquits than to bisquit-bisquits. I tried a (rather large) free sample, though, one morning, and went home with four scones for the next four mornings.
    These scones were so peculiarly good that I decided to crack the recipe code. The next Sunday morning I bought a pre-packaged “set” of scones that had been baked the previous day. It had a list of ingredients on it. I wasn’t expecting a recipe, but I was expecting to find out what the secret was to Larry’s scones.
    I found it, toward the end of the list. Grated orange peel. That’s right; and a listing of baking soda and baking powder that put it further down on the list than I would have thought wise (Ingredients on packaged products are typically listed in descending order of their percentage of the whole.).
    Since I’d never dealt with scone recipes at length, I scouted for a base recipe to work from that featured traditional ingredients and richness (cream instead of milk, for example; no substitution of fruit pulp for fat). I found a likely candidate in a Sunset Bread Book someone had given me for Christmas years ago. Then, I started to play. I added grated orange peel, of course, fresh off the rind, and dried cranberries. I cut back on the baking powder/soda but increased the amount of sugar. This is the scone recipe I came up with:

A Tribute to Larry’s Scones

Preheat Oven to 400°

Dry Ingredients: 1 3/4 cups white flour 1/4 cup whole wheat flour 2 tsp baking powder 1/3 cup sugar 1/4 tsp salt

Wet Ingredients: 4 Tbl margarine 2 eggs, beaten 1/3 cup whipping cream 3 Tbl grated orange peel 2 handfuls dried cranberies

Preparation:

• In a large mixing bowl blend flour, baking powder, sugar and salt. Cut in the margarine with a pastry blender or two knives balanced between nervous fingers until the mixture resembles fine crumbs. Stir in eggs, orange peel and cream to make a stiff dough. Dump in the cranberries and mix them, by hand, into the dough.
• Knead the dough on a lightly floured board until it sticks together. Divide the dough in half. Roll each half into a circle 6” wide by 1” thick. Serrate each circle into quarters. Place serrated circles 1” apart on an ungreased baking sheet. Brush tops with egg white, if desired.
• Bake for 15 minutes or until golden brown. Eat fresh. Bisquits don’t keep well.

    I nailed these delicious breakfast bisquits on the first try. I became famous for them in Seattle. My boss expected scones whenever I visited the home office. I even negotiated job terms with scones.
    Several friends of mine tried the recipe. Donna made them with non-fat milk and was pleased with the results. I experimented with adding more wheat flour and discovered that the scones became grainy if I raised the ratio of wheat to white over 25% per batch. I also tried inserting chopped Turkish apricots and finely ground pecans. Those went over well at Rittenhouse, Zeman and Associates.

    What else might you find in the list of ingredients for any particular item?

1. A-1 Steak Sauce includes puréed raisins. Imagine that!
2. I deduced the use of cinnamon and currants in curry from the list of ingredients taped to the bottom of Larry’s Curried Rice.
3. Any Ceasar dressing worth its salt includes anchovy paste. So does Worchestershire Sauce.

    The ideas you can get from the ingredients lists on processed foods for tweaking recipes are endless. Pay attention to what you like. Follow your likes around the side to the list of ingredients. Figure out what (besides the chemicals) it is that you’re tasting. Try it, the next time you prepare the food from scratch.

    What finally happened between Larry’s and me? I continued buying their Curried Rice, until they changed it (they added what was clearly canned chicken and some creamy, disgusting sauce base) and then discontinued it. Although I liked the emotional resonance of buying Cranberry Scones at Larry’s, I eventually supplied all my own scones. Larry’s increased the fat content to where the scones were downright greasy. I couldn’t handle that. Fortunately, due to a life time of playing with food, I don’t have to.
- posted by Gail Rae @ 11:14  0 comments   email...this post

 
Last Word on Potato Salad [from my ISP deleted journal Playing with Food]
    Remember the Berry Inspirational gathering? I didn’t want to do coleslaw or potato salad because I knew someone else would. Well, except for my concoction and a chicken/crouton casserole that I loved because it burned around the edges (yes, I’m one of those), the entire buffet was salads, primarily potato salads. The affair ushered me into a meditative moment on potato salad.
    Each of us has forthright opinions on potato salad. If we make it, we don’t make it like anyone else. We’re particular about “deli” potato salad, too. I’ll bet the number of delis per capita is a 1:1 relationship between delis and potato salad fanatics in any particular neighborhood.
    I’m not a fanatic, but, in my time, I’ve made lots of potato salad and conducted some unusual and sometimes spectacular experiments with the idea. I made a potato salad for a family dinner that starkly catered to my own tastes: tart, briny, bitter; it included radicchio, capers and salad olives, a variety of colorful, fresh chopped onions and peppers, grated parmesan cheese and was dressed with a kind of pesto called Gran’Mere’s Recipe, one of my all time favorite products on the market; I'm sure I'll mention it later. [UPDATE ON Gran’Mere’s Recipe 2020: This product apparently no longer exists. I was introduced to it in Seattle in the early 90's and continued buying it In Phoenix into the first decade of the 2000's, I believe. A good pesto hearty with added garlic, taragon vinegar and loads of basil will suffice beautifully. If you do this to an amount of your favorite pesto, be sure to give the flavors several hours to mingle before using it.] Everyone had “a little” salad, as in “Try a little, dear.” Enough to decide they didn’t want more, although I prefer to think that this instance was one of mind over flavor. It didn't appear like potato salad; it was more a colorful vegetable concoction with lots of potatoes in it (including some purple ones I couldn't resist) and a very strong, very Mediterranean aroma. I could have considered it a failure since I took most of it home. I ate it all week for dinner, though, with gratitude. Sometimes, your knockout recipe isn't going to appeal to anyone else, but don't despair. That leaves more for you.
    One of my socially successful potato salads was a Meat and Potato Salad I devised for a luncheon I held for all the local mothers in my family. It was as mouthwatering as it sounds.
    Making potato salad is one of my occasional obsessional behaviors. It’s usually triggered by eating someone else’s potato salad. At the potluck, I sampled seven potato salads that weren’t quite to my taste. Since then, I’ve had potato salad on the recipe part of my brain. This morning, I realized my compulsion was actually a directive from the Potato God to make my kind of traditional potato salad.

My Take on Traditional Potato Salad

Salad Ingredients:

2 very large baking potatoes, baked dry*, skins on 3 hard boiled eggs, chopped The top of 1 small head of celery w/leaves 3 slices sandwich-sliced bread and butter pickles

1/2 package shredded cabbage with carrots 24 pitted olives stuffed with pimentos 1/2 large, flat Bermuda onion, chopped small

Dressing Ingredients:

a little less than half a 16 oz. jar of mayonnaise A generous splash of olive brine Several shakes of dried herb Italian seasoning About 1/2 tsp onion powder About 1/3 cup of sour cream A few shakes hot pepper flakes

About 1/8 cup prepared spicy brown or stone ground mustard About 1 1/2 tsp celery salt About 1/8 tsp garlic powder Several grinds of black pepper corns Several shakes of caraway seeds

    The secret to this recipe is as much in the preparation as it is in the ingredients:

• The potatoes: I microwaved them for 15 minutes (three sets of 5 minutes each, breaking to turn the potatoes over) in a 650 watt turntable microwave. *Baking dry indicates that I did not oil the potato skins. When the potatoes were done and cool, I chunk-chopped them, skin intact.
• The celery: I sliced it thin, leaves and all, down the head to where the outside leaves stop. Usually, this is where the slender stalks end and the thick main stalks bulge out. On the head I bought, I used one third of its length.
• The pickles: I dried the olives and pickles by patting them with a cheesecloth pad then cutting them on the pad (slicing the former and dicing the latter), for two reasons:
1. I hate it when moisture collects at the bottom of a bowl of dressed salad;
2. drying pickled ingredients allows me control over the amount of brine flavor that leaches into the salad.

    I made the dressing using one of my favorite techniques: opening a partial 16 oz. jar of mayonnaise, dumping all the ingredients into the bottle, screwing the top back on and shaking it. The measurements are approximate because this is a measure-by-feel and use-up-what’s-left recipe. When I finished the dressing, the jar was three quarters full.
    Toss everything together with the salad dressing.
    Let it sit for a few hours so all the flavors infuse through all the ingredients. Mine is in the refrigerator right now, primping for dinner. When I finished assembling it, I tasted a well-dressed chunk of potato to test whether I’d successfully created the flavor I’d imagined. It’s wonderfully zesty; I might not eat anything else for dinner, tonight!

- posted by Gail Rae @ 09:18  0 comments   email...this post