What's Cooking (Take Four)

[Jenise]

Wouldn't you miss the fried leaves? Forget the recipe, do what tastes good!

I don't bother with the fried basil leaf garnish anyway when I've made the Imperial Hotel version. I think I like this other version better.

-Paul W.

On Sunday I braised six lamb shanks. They all fit in my Staub cocotte, along with a lot of tomato products and red wine and port wine (and, of course, various vegetables that sweeten up with time). Rosemary, thyme and bay leaf to season. Cheesey polenta underneath and seedy oven-roasted delicata squash on the side. Autumn in full!

Made curried shrimp with orange rice, essentially a roux with curry powder and sherry, etc. and shrimp over rice cooked with some orange peel and juice. I used sliced scallions, chopped peanuts, and diced apples for condiments over. I think it should also be good over toast. Next time perhaps.

Big boo-boo: I bake bread all the time, so the procedure is habitual. Sunday, I made the dough, let it rise, punched it down, and shaped the dough into boules. In the meantime, I put in a little cast iron skillet with water to make steam in the oven and waited for the loaves to rise.

When the boules had risen to a point just before overproofing, I opened the oven door ready to insert them. No heat greeted me. AHHHH! I had forgotten to turn the oven on. That was a first for me. What to do? If the loaves over proofed while the oven was heating, they would collapse.

So I put the loaves in a cold oven and turned on the heat. After five or ten minutes, the heat had reached the point where it had hardened the outside just enough to prevent collapse. I then removed the bread. When the temp. reached 425 on a convection setting. I put them back in and baked them a bit longer than usual until the internal temp. reached 205F.

The end result was some of the best bread I've made. I call all those error-correcting moves I made the "food weave." I do this and that and, at the end, everything comes together. People ask me, "That's genius. How do you do that?" No, it's pure genius. FWIW, I aced a cognitive test a year or so ago on Google.

Made curried shrimp with orange rice, essentially a roux with curry powder and sherry, etc. and shrimp over rice cooked with some orange peel and juice. I used sliced scallions, chopped peanuts, and diced apples for condiments over. I think it should also be good over toast. Next time perhaps.

I love that dish! And you remind me that I haven't made it in ages.

[Jenise]

Funny I was just thinking about a chicken curry today, same idea: over rice with toppings. Used to do that all the time and probably haven't made one in 20 years now.

I occasionally make curry creamed eggs on toast as a quick meal. It's essentially a bechamel sauce with curry over sliced hard-boiled eggs on toast. Sometimes, I add peas. Quick and tasty.

[Jenise]

When I was a 15 year old responsible for cooking for a household, I once made a chicken soup with dumplings from a recipe I stumbled over. It called for a significant quantity of tarragon which I had to buy for the dish as there wasn't any in our home. I'd never had dumplings nor tarragon before. I liked it. Ate two big bowls. Little did I know that I had already caught the flu and would within hours be very, very sick. The flavor of tarragon lingered well after I'd lost it all in a toilet bowl. I never touched tarragon again.

Until in my mid-30's, that is, when I went to a new hot spot in Santa Monica called the Broadway Diner and ordered the chicken pot pie. To my surprise, tarragon. Lots of it. And even more surprising: I loved it.

There's a pot of chicken on the stove right now destined to become that dish. We'll see!

Tarragon goes well with chicken. I sometimes roast chicken with tarragon. Love the aroma and taste.

My mother once got sick on red wine in the '40s and never touched red wine again. Interesting how one bad experience can forever color your taste for something.

Tonight, I just made grilled cheese sandwiches with Progresso's spicy tomato soup. The chile craze must be catching on. Mfrs are now making foods that are seriously spicy hot. Unlike the experience I had in Minnesota in the late '80s. Heinz had come out with a spicy ketchup, so I tried one. Even with my eyes closed and focusing with all my might, I couldn't discern one iota of heat.

I'm making pork lo mein tonight.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

Paul, set an extra place, I'm coming to dinner.

Tarragon goes well with chicken.

Tarragon goes well with lots of things! Try it on salmon instead of dill. It's great on tomatoes (though the season for really good tomatoes is gone for a while now).

My mother once got sick on red wine in the '40s and never touched red wine again. Interesting how one bad experience can forever color your taste for something.

And I got sick on... Pepto-Bismol. The nostrum was applied too late to help whatever was the real cause but, um, er, once you've thrown up bright pink everywhere, you never touch the stuff again.

I have an aversion to wines with a tannic of oranges. It always brings back memories of the faux-orange flavor of St. Joseph's Aspirin for Children.

-Paul W.

Today looks rainy, and I am craving more of the big white lima beans from Rancho Gordo. So into the pot they will go after breakfast
and will later go into the Andouille, lime, and white lima bean soup. I am stocking my freezer for winter. I like to keep a good supply of yummy soups for lunches or dinners when cooking is not going to happen.

[Jenise]

We did a Costco run yesterday. Had been quite awhile and I needed a few things ($532 worth!), like a new computer printer, my current one suddenly zig-zagging the 18th thru 24th lines of a 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper. It was late in the day so I'd also planned to pick up something for dinner. The only thing we could agree on was steak with chimichurri sauce and a plain salad, and even then it took some time to agree on exactly which steak to buy: rib eyes (favorite), flank steak (love it too) and top sirloin (healthiest option). Went back and forth--picking up one thing, then putting it back and picking up another, then doing it all again--and only went final on top sirloin when I spied a pkg of prime grade. Brought it home, sprinkled both sides with th Quebec seasoning, let stand for an hour then grilled. It was fantastic--I should buy top sirloin more often.

I like steak with chimichurri sauce.

I have a friend who always thought sirloin was one of the low-end cuts of beef so he wouldn't buy it. I've had to educate him.

I am oven roasting thick lamb chops, simply seasoned with S&P, garlic, onion powder
and lots of fresh rasemary. Toasted Israeli Couscous cooked with onions, garlic, saffron white wine and beef stock.
I also need to use up baby broccoli, baby bok choy, and green cabbage in a stir fry.

So asking Paul and others what can I season with. I have a nice selection of Asian condiments, plus black vinegar, dark soy, rice vinegar?

[Jenise]

Karen, I love black vinegar but don't like the stain on fresh green produce. In stir fries, I often settle for sesame oil/garlic or just ginger/garlic (cook lightly in oil, release the aromas, add the veggies, then a few dollops of chicken stock at high heat which steam up and cook the veggies without pouring in tons of oil and help distribute the flavors of your aromatics. Green onions a plus.

Jenise, thanks. It turned out fine. I used a bit of sesame oil in the pan, fresh ginger, and red pepper flakes, and I finished with a bit of vinegar, just because I like vinegar. I'm not too fond of stir-frying and discovered that using stock works great.

Karen, I'm very fond of baby bok choy and Shanghai tips stir-fried with oyster sauce and garlic. I'd stir-fry broccoli with ginger, a bit of light soy sauce, and a dash of rice wine.

Yesterday I made a batch of harissa. Today that will go into merguez sausage. For tonight's dinner I will stir-fry the snow peas that didn't go into the lo mein with beef--a variant of Joyce Chen's beef with green bell peppers.

-Paul W.

Oh, stood around the kitchen all Sunday afternoon. Made up this year's double batch of eggnog (...that's a lot of separating eggs, then beating everything separately and folding it all together anyway), three dozen lamb and beef meatballs (...had a lot of sauce leftover from last week's lamb shanks), four delicata squash cleaned and cut into rings for the oven (...just about every seed in the spice cupboard goes in this one).

[Jenise]

I'll bet your house smells GREAT!

Life's complications have robbed me of motivation to cook the way I used to these days, but today I'm having one of those rare days of ambition. My French cooking group on Facebook is having a challenge this week to use apples in a savory way. You know the drill--cook it, post a picture, etc. This morning shortly after shrugging off my own desire to be involved, something reminded me that a one-off thing I did once involving apples and sourdough in a savory bread pudding, and that when I met Bob his favorite dessert in the world was bread pudding with a whiskey sauce. He's ordered it a number of times in various restaurants since we've been together and I'm not sure he's ever had one he totally loved, but he still thinks of it as his #1.

While out and about today taking care of six product returns that required a bit of driving to various portals, this occured to me: pork chops with savory apple bread pudding and whiskey-laced gravy. No recipe but I know what to do, and I love the flavors I can taste in my head. So that's going to be dinner.

Cold oatmeal and a banana/whey smoothie tonight. Have to eat soft, cold stuff until tomorrow. Had step #2 in my tooth implant procedure--a stud screwed into my jaw. Really odd to feel the surgeon using a ratchet drive to screw in the stud. Nothing hurt, and it was quick. In three months, I spend a load more money and finally have a tooth attached and my bite corrected.