Gramma’s Cooking

Posted on October 21, 2009 by cmf

So the NY Times had a good little piece this weekend by Michelle Slatalla about digging out her grandmothers’ old recipes — they’d each lived through the depression, and were good cooks, and managed to keep everyone alive on beef barley soup for decades. She even punts a little bit at the end as she discovers that short ribs have gotten expensive, so she experiments with shin, because her grandmother was nothing if not thrifty.

I had to laugh a little — not at the article per se — but at the mere thought of learning anything about cooking from my grandmother. She hated to cook. She thought it was a total waste of time and in combination with her lack of kitchen hygiene, well she gave me food poisoning more than once during my childhood. We all learned early to treat visits to her house like trips to a third-world country: if you didn’t peel it or unwrap it yourself, then don’t eat it.

Now I love my grandmother dearly. She’s 97, and has all of her marbles (although she’s kind of bored being very old), and she taught me many important things — chief among them that a girl should always have her own money and a viable career. But cooking? Not so much …

However, I do love that people are looking back a little, getting past some of the pretensions of the past few years when it comes to food, and remembering that feeding ourselves well doesn’t require a pantry full of specialty products. Beef barley soup. Chocolate cake with a little coffee in it. Easy stuff.

Late to the Party: iPod Love

Posted on October 14, 2009 by cmf

So I realize I’m the last person in America to experience this, but I just got a new-to-me used iPod and well, I’m besotted. Many years ago, my Beloved Stepmother gave me an original 10GB iPod as a delightfully extravagent birthday present, and I’d been pretty happy with it, although I was always running out of room. Then when she was here a few weeks ago, she traded me the iPod Touch she’d replaced with an iPhone for an older MacBook — she’d never really used a Mac so I gave her an old one of mine to see whether she liked it before switching from a PC. Anyhow, the iPod Touch was cool, but it didn’t have any memory at all — I couldn’t get it to load podcasts or my new music and I grew increasingly frustrated, especially now that I’m working at home on the kinds of tasks that I really need music to concentrate on.

So I finally took the plunge and upgraded to a 120GB used iPod I found on Amazon. It was about half the price of a new one and the seller was great and sent it to me right away, in the box and everything.

This is where I sound like a geezer because 120 GB!? That’s more memory than I think every computer combined that I owned for the first 20 years of my working life. That’s a LOT of memory.

And so I’ve been loading CDs onto it since it arrived. CDs that I haven’t listened to in a long time. CDs that I missed. I’m a huge fan of Shuffle, and the idea that I can have all my music in one place, and set it going, and it’ll just shuffle around for hours. Love it. Plus, Apple finally fixed the problem with classical music — for a long time the albums didn’t sort right — the movements were all out of order. It was a gigantic pain in the neck.

So here I am, with my shiny new toy, that was kind of extravagant, but sometimes, even when money is tight, it’s worth it for something that will make your everyday life so much more pleasant.

Deadline Week: Potato Soup

Posted on October 13, 2009 by cmf

I’ve got a deadline this week, so blogging will probably be light, and since the temperature hasn’t gone above thirty since Friday, I thought perhaps a recpie for potato soup might be in order. There’s just about nothing cheaper, it’s dead simple, and infinitely variable. The basic recipe is, of course, Julia Child’s:

1 lb. russet potatoes, peeled (you want a mealy potato, not a waxy one)
1 lb. leeks or onions (onions are much cheaper, and my leeks are currently frozen in the garden)
1 tbsp. butter or olive oil
salt to taste
water

Really. That’s it. Peel and cut up the potatoes. Chop the onions or leeks. Melt the butter or oil in a pot and saute the leeks or onions until they’re soft. Add the spuds, salt, and water to cover. Cook until the potatoes are falling apart, and either mash with a potato masher, or pureee with a food mill or immersion blender. Sometimes I add a carrot or two to the soup, I like the sweetness and color. Also, a clove of garlic or some thyme can be nice as well.

Variations, here are a few variations I like. I add these after pureeing the soup, so that there’s some interesting texture:

Cut up cubes of ham
Thinly-sliced kale
Frozen corn
Frozen peas
Dollop of cream or sour cream when serving

This is such a delicious, cheap and easy soup that there’s no end to the experimentation you can do with it. We had some last week with a fresh loaf of No-Knead bread and there were leftovers, so I think tonight we’ll finish it off, with some sort of variation. Warm soup on a cold nigh. Yum.

Storm Windows, Already?

Posted on October 9, 2009 by cmf

It’s supposed to go down into the single digits tonight, so this afternoon, despite the fact that it was only 25 degrees out, and snowy, I got the storm windows out of the shed, and put them up.

Every year I forget what a colossal pain in the ass they are. I replaced all the old windows in my house except for those in the living room. They’re really old double-hung windows, so old that the glass is wavy, and I just fell in love with them. So I kept the clunky old wooden storm windows that go with them, and there I was, on a ladder, cursing and banging at them with a hammer to make them fit. Ugh.

But now they’re up, and the storm-door insert is in my screen door, and the house is feeling all cozy and battened down for winter.

It’s supposed to go back up into the 60s next week, so I buried the garden in straw and covered it in plastic. I’m hoping to keep at least the hardy greens alive. I decided this summer that what I really love are the spring and fall crops, I’m not so much for the mid-summer heat crops, and I’d hate to lose all my greens.

We also got the chickens stet up with a (ridiculously expensive!) heated base for their water unit, and a 100 watt light bulb to heat the coop. They sort of hate the light bulb — it goes against their urge to roost someplace dark in the evening, so I ordered a red heat bulb for reptiles. However, tonight they’re going to have to sleep with the lights on — it was 16 degrees outside this morning when I got up, and 28 degrees inside the coop (I’m a little obsessive about remote-control thermometers). So if it goes down to 0 tonight, it’ll only be about 10 degrees in the coop, and that’s too cold. We’ll have to see how they do … I hope I don’t wake up to chicken-sicles tomorrow (or frozen eggs!) …

Frugal Recipe of the Week: Buffalo Meatballs

Posted on October 8, 2009 by cmf

I made a batch of meatballs the other day which were delicious, but interestingly enough, also stretched just under two pounds of meat into at least four meals if not six. I’m looking at a lot of cookbooks right now for BookSlut, and this recipe is very loosely adapted from the one in the A16 cookbook.

I used buffalo because it’s readily available here, and because this story in the New York Times (and this one about how Costco actually tests for E. Coli) only amped up my deep suspicion of all ground beef, even when I know the butchers at my supermarket have ground it themselves. Buffalo is more local, and even though it was more expensive, I just felt better about it. Plus, I didn’t need very much.

.75 pound buffalo (or a pound, I split a 1.5 pound package in half)
1 pound ground pork
2 ounces pancetta, diced very fine (or chopped in the food processor)
3 eggs
1/2 cup ricotta (I used the end of a container of Greek yogurt instead because that’s what I had on hand)
6 ounces bread (about half a baguette), reduced to crumbs in a food processor
2 ounces shredded parmesan or asiago cheese
1/2 cup milk
1/2 onion, diced finely
1-2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
1 tbsp. fennel seeds
1 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. red pepper flakes
3 tbsp. finely chopped parsley

First, beat the eggs, milk and ricotta until just incorporated. Add all the other ingredients to a big bowl, add the egg mixture, and mix thoroughly with your hands. You don’t want the mixture to become gummy, but you want an even distribution of ingredients.

Using a soup spoon or a small scoop, roll out golf-ball sized meatballs. Put them on sheet pans and bake at 400 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes. After you’ve baked them off, this is where you decide what you’re eating tonight, and what you’re saving for later. I figured 4 meatballs for each of us, which was plenty. The rest I put on one sheet pan and popped into the freezer. The next day they can be put in ziploc bags.

For the meatballs you plan to eat tonight. Put them in a casserole dish, and cover with tomato sauce. Cover the casserole tightly with foil and bake at 300 degrees for 30-40 minutes. Serve over lots of spaghetti with more cheese on top. (Preferably while watching baseball playoffs!)

Although I haven’t experimented with it yet, I imagine you could pop frozen meatballs into the casserole when you come home from work, cover with tomato sauce and cook for probably an hour and you’d have an easy mid-week dinner.

Sandhill Cranes Migrating

Posted on October 7, 2009 by cmf

I didn't have my camera, so these are Sandhill Cranes off the internet to give you an idea what a crows of cranes looks like.

So I was driving down to the cabin last night when I realized that all those grey things in the field next to the East River Road weren’t deer, they were Sandhill Cranes! There were scores of them — I’m notoriously bad at that sort of estimation, but there were well over a hundred birds in a harvested wheat field, grazing. I’d heard that they do this, but I’d never seen it, so of course I came to a screeching halt to watch for a few minutes.

Apparently they gang up before migrating, they’ll fly around, calling to the other birds and gathering everyone up. Then when the time is right, they’ll ride the thermals way up and shoot south over Yellowstone. We were hoping to see it this morning, but it’s snowing again, which is lovely, but hardly the sort of weather to transport hundreds of five-foot-tall birds into the sky. When I drove back up the valley this morning they were still there, not as many, and with a bunch of Canadian geese, and a few mule deer hanging out as well.

It was amazing. The kind of thing that makes me love living here. I got to the cabin so jazzed about the cranes. I mean, I live here — this is the kind of thing I can just see on an ordinary evening’s drive down valley. It makes me feel more grateful than I can even say.

New Column at Bookslut

Posted on October 6, 2009 by cmf

My new Cookbook Slut column is up at Bookslut:

So the recession hit home here at Cookbook Slut in late July when I was relieved of the corporate job I’ve held for the past ten years. While it wasn’t a job I loved, it was a job that came with a very sturdy paycheck, and when the last severance check arrived this month, I went into something of a panic. There it was. All the Money I Am Ever Going To Have.

And so I did what I always do when confronted with financial instability …. (click here to read the rest)

Gourmet Bites the Dust

Posted on October 5, 2009 by cmf

Wow. This was a surprise to me somehow — Gourmet Magazine is closing. My first job out of college was repackaging Gourmet Magazine content into the first few volumes of Best of Gourmet and Gourmet’s Best Desserts (we also did other titles for Conde Nast). I’ll never forget going through the bound volumes of Gourmet Magazines — my task was to xerox every dessert recipe that had ever appeared, cut it out, and tape it onto a sheet of paper. These were the old days, when we did things on paper, and when type came back from teh typesetter and was glued to mechanical boards with wax. That was my other primary task, running big black portfolios of mechanical boards from our office on East 21st Street up to the Conde Nast building, then over to the Gourmet offices so they could be signed off on.

The Gourmet Magazine offices were like another world. This was 1985-87 and there were grown women wearing kilts and knee socks and those weird scarfy things women wore tied around their necks as some sort of business tie substitute. It was like a prep school or sorority gone slightly elderly, and slightly odd.

But I learned a lot, not only about food and cooking, but about how a recipe should look on the page, how it should work, and the importance of testing to make sure it worked.

It just seems a shame. Gourmet has a long history, and if nothing else, it’s a record of the remarkable changes in American attitudes toward food and travel over the past 70 years. And they published some wonderful writers. I’ll never forget bursting into tears over Christmas break one year when I read that before she’d died, Laurie Colwin had finished a year’s worth of columns, and the magazine planned to run them all. I’m so sad I’ll never have the chance to pitch them now …

LivingSmall

Life, Literature, and the Subversive Power of Living Small

Monthly Archives: October 2009