Parker's Food Blog

Simple Smoothie

parker@commonkitchen.com — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:03:00 -0400

I've said before that I like recipes which require no measuring. As a heat wave smothers the Northeast U.S., I've pulled it out again to provide a lunch where three of the five ingredients are chilled–and one comes from the freezer.

One or two bananas
One 8-ounce can of pineapple chunks (or half a 16-ounce can)
One regular yogurt cup (mine are 6 ounces, but this can vary), vanilla or almost any fruit flavor will do
One 10-ounce bag of frozen strawberries (or half a 16- or 20-ounce bag)
One cup (or so) of orange juice (I just pour some in.)

Put all of the above in a blender, preferably one which can handle ice cubes (which is essentially what the strawberries are) and blend until smooth. Makes about two pints; leftovers keep fairly well in the fridge.

Variation: You can use nearly any kind of frozen fruit; I've tried raspberries with some success, but blueberries, while tasting good, left a lot of skins in the mix. A "mixed berry" blend is great. The flavor and quantity of yogurt is very variable; it can reinforce or compliment the other fruit with strawberries, raspberries, blueberry, pineapple, or add a vanilla note. It also helps make the whole thing slightly creamy, along with the bananas. If you have two bananas, use two, but if you just use one, that's fine as well. So, in general, you can fiddle with the quantities for any of these.

The chicken-cooking tip I keep coming back to

parker@commonkitchen.com — Sun, 25 May 2008 18:36:00 -0400

When I'm making a recipe which calls for chicken, it's almost always the same situation: breast tenders cut into small chunks, which are then stir-fried with a very little bit of oil (and sometimes onions, scallions, or garlic) in a wok or skillet. This often produced hard, dry chunks of meat until I discovered a recipe which required the chicken to be drizzled with lemon juice before cooking.

This changed things tremendously. The lemon juice (think of those little plastic squirt-lemons; I'm using a fraction of a teaspoon each time) doesn't add a very strong flavor, but locks in a lot of the moisture of the chicken, making the result much easier to chew (or shred finer for some recipes) and generally pleasant to eat. Now I tend to lemon-coat my chicken before cooking whether the recipe calls for it or not.

Substituting sugars

parker@commonkitchen.com — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 12:45:00 -0400

I have a standby whole wheat bread recipe that calls for molasses. After discovering that my other whole wheat recipe (with honey) could have the honey replaced with maple syrup, and finding that I was out of molasses, I tried the molasses recipe with honey instead. Eureka! Splendid.

So it seems to me that all the sweeteners for bread - honey, molasses, maple syrup, etc. - are interchangeable. What else should I be trying? The idea of going from milled and refined sugar to honey as a sweetener in as many places appeals to me.

Hamburger and Rice

parker@commonkitchen.com — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:53:00 -0400

Rice and meat is a pretty fundamental dish idea around the world. Just look at the Spanish "Arroz con Pollo" (rice and chicken) staple.

My mother made a "hamburger and rice" dish which was closely related to ACS and equally loved in the family. I tried making it myself shortly after I graduated from college and failed miserably; it was only recently that I got around to calling my mother and asking for direct guidance. Since then, I've done it two or three times with greater success.

The ingredients are:

1lb. or so ground beef.
1 can tomato soup concentrate (e.g. Campbell's.)
1 heaping cup of instant rice (Minute Rice or the like)
1/2 an onion.

Chop the onion and put it in a large frying pan. Break the meat into small chunks and mix it with the onion, then brown the lot. I've had great results seasoning the meat with something like Lawry's seasoned salt while it's browning.

Once the meat is browned, add the tomato soup concentrate and water as directed on the can, probably an equal amount of water to the concentrate. (Just re-fill the can with water, then pour that in.) I like to add a big squirt of ketchup at this point as well, but that's optional. Stir to mix the water and concentrate, then bring the whole mess to a boil. When it's reached a boil, stir in the rice and turn off the heat.

Now you need to let the rice sit for fifteen or twenty minutes soaking up the soup. You'll know it's ready when the top of the food in the pan looks dry. This should serve four; I have a pretty big appetite and I get three meals out of it.

Substitution and variation: I imagine this could be done with regular rather than instant rice, but I don't want to be the one performing that experiment; I'm not a rice virtuoso. The ground beef can be replaced with any other ground meat (i.e. turkey, chicken.) I've also substituted chopped scallions for the onion with some success.

Sweet potato chips

parker@commonkitchen.com — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:01:00 -0500

When I learn a new cooking technique, I sometimes see the potential to expand it to other applications. So last week, when Noah showed me how to make tortilla chips, I started planning some frying of my own.

Specifically, last night I sliced up one of my favorite root vegetables and fried some sweet potato chips. Simple process: put about 1/4" of vegetable oil in a high-sided pan. Heat oil. Slice sweet potato as thin as practical. (I imagine a food processor would be helpful here.) Then pop the slices into the hot oil until they start to brown. (If you want to hurry the process, push the slices under the surface a bit; they tend to float in the oil, which slows the frying process.) Remove them with tongs and place them on a paper towel to drain.

This is a lot of work for relatively few chips, of course. The advantage to doing the work yourself instead of just buying a bag of Terra chips is, one, the price, and two, the ability to season them to taste. The sweet potatos don't always require salting, for example, and it's possible to cook up one's own seasoning mixture with, say, paprika, or cumin, or some other appropriate spices. (Suggestions?)

ACS

parker@commonkitchen.com — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:08:00 -0500

Every month or so I make a big casserole that follows a recipe I learned from my mother. When I was growing up, we used to be able to finish a batch off in about a meal and a half (all four of us for dinner, plus leftovers for my father's lunch the next day.) When I was in my first job, I discovered that the leftovers microwaved extremely well, and a batch was about three days of lunches and dinners for me, which for a single apartment-dweller is a pretty good yield.

The puzzle was, what to call it? Growing up, it was "American Chop Suey" (which is one of the names it's known by.) When I left home and started associating with people who might be expected to know what real chop suey was, however, that name started feeling a little silly, and I tried to avoid it; why make this dish, which I liked, into a pale imitation of something authentic? (My paternal grandmother made another version of this dish which was hard to recognize as the same thing and certainly wasn't something I would've tried to imitate.)

Some research found that the dish is also sometimes known as "American Goulash," but having eaten Hungarian goulash, I think I can safely say it's not that, either. I then realized that, in the shift to email and text-based communication, my family had adopted the relatively meaningless abbreviation "ACS." So that's what I call it now: Ay-see-ess.

It's a great single-guy (or single-father) recipe because it requires almost no measurement and very little prep; with one or two exceptions, all the ingredients go in right out of their supermarket packages.

1 box elbows (whole wheat is fine)
1 pound ground meat (ground beef is the original version, but ground chicken or turkey is fine)
1 can tomato soup concentrate (e.g. the iconic Campbell's can)
1 can tomato sauce (a 12-oz. can, I think - slightly larger than the soup can)
a dollop of ketchup (maybe a quarter cup, but whatever)
About half an onion, chopped (this is the extent of the preparation)
(Optional) Paprika and/or chili powder

Boil water and put the pasta in to cook. While it's cooking, brown the ground meat with the chopped onion in a skillet. If it's not non-stick skillet, you'll want to heat some oil in the skillet first, and put the onions in for a minute or so before the meat. The meat should get chopped into relatively small chunks in the course of browning. You can sprinkle some paprika or chili powder on the meat in this process for some extra flavor; I like the kick of the paprika, especially when I'm using turkey.

Meanwhile, mix the tomato sauce, soup concentrate, and ketchup in a casserole dish. (This is why I never measure the ketchup; I just squirt it in on top of the soup and sauce.) When the meat is browned, add to the mixed sauce and stir well. Finally, when the elbows are done, drain them and mix with the sauce and meat. If your casserole dish isn't quite big enough, you may need to be careful about this.

You can serve this immediately at this point, and refrigerate the leftovers for as much as a week, serving out portions to microwave at work as lunch.

World Market

parker@commonkitchen.com — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 09:16:00 -0500

Earlier this week, I found myself chasing down ingredients for a particular stir-fry recipe I am not yet at liberty to share. Three in particular turned out to be difficult: peanut oil (sesame oil is easy to find, peanut oil much less so), "Stir Fry Sauce" (a distressingly non-specific description), and stir fry noodles.

I may have been able to chase down all three at our local Whole Foods, but for some reason I convinced myself, instead, to drive a few miles more to the World Market, a small Asian grocery. This business used to be located in a nondescript cinder-block structure which would be considered a "shack" if it wasn't so concrete, sharing its parking lot with a porn store. Now it has moved to a more solid building with more reputable neighbors, and my own recent Asian experiences persuaded me to take a look.

I found my peanut oil and stir fry sauce without too much trouble, in an aisle which also featured cup noodles which will never be found in a mainstream American grocery store. (Every one, without exception, was labeled "Very spicy" or "hot".) The stir fry noodles were a bit tougher, because I needed "4-6 ounces" and all the packages were much larger than that. Eventually I discovered "yakisoba" which was sold in packs containing three 5-ounce packages, and since the packaging said "stir fry noodles" I assume this is what I wanted.

While there were many foodstuffs on inventory which I may never have call for (many different ways of packaging whole fish, for example, or fowl) I was intrigued by the spices, curries, and noodles available (including one brand from Vermont). I'll be back!

Jean-Luc gets me fed in San Juan

parker@commonkitchen.com — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:32:00 -0500

I often mention time abroad as something which pushed me into a more adventuresome approach to food, but there was one trip when food pushed me into an adventure of sorts.

I was 20 and on a spring break training trip in Puerto Rico with my college track team. We'd been running triple workouts at a back-country training site for three or four days, and this day we rested (some), running only in the morning and taking a bus in to San Juan for the rest of the day.

I had been walking around Old Town with one of the senior captains, a sprinter and jumper named Jean-Luc who hailed from Haiti via the American South. We didn't have the cash to eat fancy, but we wanted to avoid fast food or tourist joints as well.

We were headed down a back street, looking in some of the huge street windows the houses have in the old town, when we went by one where the open windows showed three or four big tables, a tile floor, a stove in the back, and a menu painted on the wall. The men at the tables were spattered with paint or grease; it looked like the sort of crowd you'd see at a truck stop.

"Looks like a local haunt," I said, preparing to move on, but Jean-Luc stopped me and pulled us in.

Within seconds he and the cook were deep in conversation in Haitian creole. Meanwhile, I was experiencing (probably for the first time in my life, but ultimately not the last) the uncomfortable feeling of being the only white person in the room, standing there in my shorts and t-shirt amid a group of men who had plainly worked hard for their dinners.

Jean-Luc, the cook's new favorite, and I were seated in the front corner and Jean-Luc explained that dinner was on its way. The cook, he said, thought we were crew from a visiting cruise ship, and Jean-Luc was high on his list as one of his countrymen.

Dinner was most of a roasted chicken, sticky rice and vegetables. The chicken tasted good, but greasy; the rice was heavy. I remember being barely halfway through the meal and feeling full, wondering if I would offend Jean-Luc's new friend if I didn't clean my plate.

But since then I've remembered Jean-Luc and Old San Juan every time I find myself in a strange place with little clue about feeding myself. I push on in, follow the locals' lead for manners, and hope to be more unobtrusive than I was then. Sometimes, it even works.

Rabbit Rabbit

parker@commonkitchen.com — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 12:38:00 -0500

How many times do you have to do something before it becomes a tradition? This is the second consecutive year we've spent New Year's Eve "in", baking. We made gingerbread men, except that instead of the "men" described in the cookbook, we used more-modern cookie cutters and made gingerbread bunnies.

These photos are from last year's edition:

Overjoyed

parker@commonkitchen.com — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 22:57:00 -0500

My copy of The Joy of Cooking is a little aged. The most recent copyright year inside the cover is in the 1960s.

When I got it from my aunt, upon my departure for my first post-college apartment and job, it was held together with a rubber band, but that failed within a few years, and now it's mostly held together by wishful thinking.

It has a lot of bookmarks. Some of them mark important things (meatloaf is marked with a recipe card from Mrs. T's pierogis) and others, not so much. There's a galley proof of a column from Runner's World about soup, and a page of notes scrawled on a leaf of a day-planner: Tuesday, April 20, 1976. Amid the notes about tomatoes, peas, garlic and ginger, in both pencil and ink, I recognize my parents' phone number.

The problem with this Joy is that sometimes I'm too worried about its structural integrity (it might fall apart) to actually look up a recipe in it.