All you happy children, we wish the same to you - Butter Chicken

Ear worms are running my life.  They are my Muse.  If that's not the definition of crazy, I don't know what is.  My younger brother has been on my mind lately, and I associate this children's rhyme with him.  One day he came home from elementary school singing this (I can only guess the class was learning the days of the week) and it's been in my head ever since.  Since my brother is a 60-year old pediatrician with two grown daughters, that's a hell of a long time to have an ear worm.

Do any of you remember this one?
Today is Monday, today is Monday

Monday -- string beans

All you hungry children, come and eat it up!

Today is Tuesday, today is Tuesday

Tuesday -- spaghetti
Monday -- string beans

All you hungry children, come and eat it up! 

From there it just continued, adding all the fabulous foods coming down the pike as the week progressed:

Wednesday -- soup

Thursday -- roast beef

Friday -- fresh fish

Saturday -- chicken

Sunday -- ice cream

Apparently there are a number of different versions; my memories change the line "all you hungry children, come and eat it up" to "all you happy children, we wish the same to you."  Also, I don't remember a single word about spaghetti, and fish wasn't necessarily fresh in the version my brother was singing. (Still. fish on Friday was de rigueur in those pre-Vatican II days, so at least that was consistent.)  And I distinctly remember on one of the days, all the happy children were getting bread and butter, and to be honest, I'd rather have that instead of string beans.  Which is yet another upcoming blog post.

Today is Saturday and I would like to talk to you about chicken.  Incredible, edible, affordable chicken.

Chicken is God's gift to the human race.  Like the rainbow in Noah's Ark story, it represents a promise to the people of the Earth.  By giving us chicken, God has promised that humans will never be forced to eat fish eyeballs or lamb fries (or any other sort of gonad), or pig brains, or any offal, or insects, or beating snake hearts, nay, any bizarre food unless they choose to do so (and hopefully get paid for such insanity, like Andrew Zimmern).   And especially for God's Chosen People, the chicken is a promise that we will never run short of Jewish penicillin.

I am an unabashed carnivore, and I love all the standard cuts of beef, pork, lamb and veal, as well as most forms of fin fish and shellfish, but if for some reason I had to choose a single source of protein for the rest of my life, it would be chicken.

Chicken can be prepared for eating in every way known to humans, except raw.  Boil, bake, roast, pan fry, deep fry, grill, sauté, poach, simmer, braise, stir fry.  You can smoke it, buffalo it, throw it in a crockpot, pressure cook it, seal it in a plastic bag and sous vide it, or even shove a beer can up its rear.   And chicken can be breaded, barbecued, tempura'ed, and stuffed.  There are almost as many recipes for stuffing for chicken as there are for chicken itself. 

Contrary to general belief, chicken is not bland in taste, although it is mild, and therefore plays well with all kinds of seasoning.  I would hazard a guess that there are so many recipes for chicken that they constitute a statistical universe.  And then there are chicken eggs, schmaltz, chicken liver, gizzard, and hearts, but that's definitely another couple of blog posts.

I grew up eating chicken that had been simply prepared.  Boiled soup chicken, broiled chicken quarters, chicken quarters dipped in butter, pressed into cornflake crumbs and then baked, chicken quarters drizzled with maple barbecue sauce and baked, whole chicken rubbed with a paste made of spices and a little corn oil, roasted and then cut into quarters.  Except for the skin on the boiled chicken, I loved it all.

I am a self-taught cook, but that doesn't mean I haven't learned a lot of good cooking stuff from others.  While I may have read The Joy of Cooking cover to cover when I was a newly married bride in 1974 (theoretically, I can skin a squirrel), my knowledge of the best recipes and cooking techniques came from watching my friends and relatives cook.  And so on chicken days, I thank my college (and lifelong) friend, Vicki Schumacher Granek, for introducing me to another way of preparing the ubiquitous quartered chicken.  Once I tasted her Hawaiian chicken, and watched her prepare it, there was NOTHING I could not do with quartered chicken.  Complex flavors, ease of preparation, all this from only 4 ingredients.  From that day forward, my chicken world expanded exponentially.  Once you see the recipe, you will understand exactly what I mean.

But not today.  Today I am going to give you the recipe for another super-easy chicken recipe which requires very few ingredients.  This relies on a really good bottled simmer sauce from Patak's Taste of India product line, Butter Chicken. Butter is not the overriding ingredient, so I have no idea where the recipe got its name, but it does have smoked paprika and other lovely spices in a tomato base.  Reading the ingredients reminded me of a very non-Indian dish, csirke paprikas (Hungarian chicken paprikash, which I do prepare from scratch) so I just had to try it.  I've also used Patak's Tikaa Masala sauce in the past, with great success.   

1 -15 oz. jar Patak's Butter Chicken simmer sauce

1/2 of a small onion

1/2 of a small green bell pepper

2 tablespoons butter

8 skinless chicken thighs

On medium heat, melt butter in a large deep skillet.  Add the onion and green pepper, and cook until the vegetables are nice and soft.  Push the vegetables aside to make room for the chicken, and then four at a time, place the chicken into the pan and brown it in the butter on both sides.  Take your time with this, as it will take longer to develop color without the skin.  Remove to a baking dish, and repeat with the last four pieces of chicken.  Return all of the chicken to the skillet and pour in the butter chicken sauce.  Add about a half cup of water to the sauce jar, cover and shake to get all of the sauce off the sides of the jar, and pour that into the skillet as well.  Bring the sauce to a boil, then immediately cover the skillet and reduce the heat to simmer.  Cook the chicken for an hour, stirring occasionally.  Cool, and transfer to a 9 x 13 baking dish.

Refrigerate overnight.  About an hour before serving, remove the fat from the sauce.  Add a little water to the pan, cover it with aluminum foil, and place it in a 275 degree oven for 45 minutes or until the chicken is as soft as butter.  Serve with rice or couscous.  Really tasty.

Food glorious food - No saveloys, please

Gack!  Another earworm.  And this one goes back to sixth grade at Number Six School in Woodmere, New York.  The Lawrence-Cedarhurst Union Free School District movers and shakers were extraordinarily imaginative when it came to naming the elementary schools.

Yes, that's my elementary school for sale

Sixth grade plays, very important.  We did H.M.S. Pinafore, while Miss Kass's class put on Oliver, which at that time was a fairly new musical.

Food glorious food
Hot sausage and mustard
While we're in the mood cold jelly and custard
Pease pudding and saveloys
What next is the question?
Rich gentlemen have it boys
In-Di-Gestion

Okay, a couple of things come to mind - this is America and kids are still hungry, and that's not necessarily parentless kids living in an orphanage. Our government supplies food stamps and other financial assistance to low-income families with children.  There are free breakfasts and lunches available from public schools.  If a family comes to the attention of DCF - my world and welcome to it - unless there is present danger, the family is wrapped with services to help keep the children safe in an intact family.  That includes financial assistance when warranted.  I realize that the victims of homelessness and human trafficking are likely to go hungry, but I don't think those numbers alone account for the percentage of American children who do not eat on a regular basis.  

So I must be missing some other social or societal factor, and I don't claim to know all the answers.  But I will throw one idea out there.  Too many parents don't know how to food shop effectively and economically, and they also don't know how to cook.  I know I went through a semi-rant on this subject last month, October 20th to be exact, but it still irritates me that there are parents who are screamingly resistant to cooking for their children.  (It also irritates me that there are parents that blow their food budget on drugs, alcohol, and designer potato chips, but that's a whole other can of rutabaga.)

Cooking for a family can be easy and relatively cheap, but it takes time, it takes planning, and most of all, it takes sacrifice.  Oh, and at least one good all-around cookbook.  Mine have been well-loved and very well-used.

Food shopping is one of my favorite things to do in the world.  I hate the mall and I hate shopping for anything I can't buy online, but I'll spend hours wandering around any grocery from Publix to Pathmark, Walmart to Waldbaum's.  I never use coupons, but I am a very careful shopper.  BOGOs are my friend.

There are different ways of stretching a food budget, buying on sale being the most obvious.  Ground beef instead of steak, whole or quartered chicken instead of boneless and skinless chicken breasts, tilapia instead of ahi tuna; slipping an extra can of beans into the pot of chili or an extra cup of cut white turnips into a stew; serving an array of inexpensive side dishes, based on potato, rice, pasta, kasha, couscous, or one of the superfoods like quinoa, and vegetables; using prepared and processed foods as an ingredient rather than as the main event.  All obvious stuff to most of us, but if someone wasn't raised in a home where the parents cooked and shopped, not so obvious.  

If you've ever eaten in the home of a family with strong ethnic identity, you have probably seen some of this stretching.  Italian pasta, Hispanic rice and beans, Pennsylvania Dutch seven sweets and seven sours, Asian rice, Eastern European dumplings, and I know there are so many more but my brain is beginning to sputter.  Bread or biscuits. Soup.  You get it, I know you do.  The question is, all those parents of hungry kids - do they get it?  If not, why not?  And how can that be changed?

To say I am a crazy food obsessed cat lady would be a slight understatement, and I know that every parent is not going to embrace cooking as I have, but nothing feels as good as nurturing your kid.  I should know, I've been feeding a vacuum-cleaner-with-teeth for 27 wonderful years.

What a difference a day makes - Aunt Ceil's Apple Cake with Cinnamon Crumb Topping

What a difference a day makes

Twenty-four little hours

Brought the sun and the flowers
Where there used to be rain

My yesterday was blue, dear

Today I'm a part of you, dear

My lonely nights are through, dear
Since you said you were mine

How about 3,652.421 days, hmmm?  What do you think that much time can do to a person?

I think I mentioned in a recent blog post that I was pulling stuff together to renew our passports.  Part of that stuff was a recent photo.  Another part of that stuff was to submit our expired passports.

Put the two together, and you get Shock and Aw-ful.  Incidentally the only reason I don't look even more like a candidate for the local mortuary in the picture on the right is because Brenda, my friend and paralegal, made me promise I would put on a little lipstick and comb my hair.

At least now the customs officials won't give me a funny look when I try to get back into the United States after a trip to somewhere.  Anywhere.  Any ship, as long as its first name is Carnival and it is sailing out of Port Canaveral.  I really have a one-track mind.  

The headaches are back, if in fact they ever left.  I had trouble falling asleep because of a headache, which outstayed its welcome, because then I woke up practically blinded by the light.  I could not open one of my eyes.  It hurt to lift my head, it hurt to breathe.  Other than that, it was a pretty good start to the day.  I like to look at the positive side of things.  For example, we were going to head up to Vienna ("Vy-Anna") Georgia this past weekend for the glorious barbecue blowout known as the Big Pig Jig.  But the week kept slogging along without either of us making a reservation or any kind of plans and then we realized there was no way we were going to make it, and that was okay.  Better than okay, because about 2 hours after that discussion, I found out I was on weekend shelter duty, and that if I had made reservations, we would have had to cancel and possibly face some kind of penalty fee.  

As Rob's Grandma used to say, "everything happens for a reason."  Sometimes I think my whole life is based on that belief, and that's also okay.

As it turned out, I had three shelter hearings to handle on Saturday.  Could have been a bad thing, but I had good CPIs and case management there, plus a judge I knew from the bad old days as a divorce attorney, and the whole thing was done and over by 9 AM.  Never mind that I had awoken at 5:45 that morning to get ready and drive up to Orlando; I will pay for that later, I know I will.  But for now, I'm still standing, and if I can stand, I can cook.  I can also food-shop, which is what I did on my way home, stopping at one of the Spanish groceries in my continuing search for pork belly.  I just happened to find a few other things ...

That's salt pork, two lovely pieces, and I am going to try some more Harry Potter magic to draw the excess salt out before braising it in the crockpot.  So into some cold water for a while, with the water being changed every 4 to 6 hours.  Wouldn't even consider cooking it for consumption until sometime tomorrow.  And two green tomatoes, rescued from a pile of red, ripe relatives and a pretty purple eggplant.  Maybe I'll fire up the old electric frying pan.  Maybe tomorrow.

First, though, I am finally going to make good use of those lovely apples I picked up in Georgia.  The apple cake recipe came from my great-Aunt Ceil, and the crumb topping came from another cake recipe I happened upon during a random internet search.  Of course, I've made some changes to both of them, but bringing them together on this blind date is going to be positively revolutionary.  

First, prepare the cinnamon crumb topping:

1 cup flour

1/4 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1 1/2 tablespoons ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon cardamom

1/4 teaspoon allspice

1 stick cold butter, cut into pieces

Mix the flour. sugars, and spices in a large bowl.  Cut in the cold butter with a pastry blender or two knives, until the mixture resembles very coarse crumbs.  Put the bowl in the refrigerator while you prepare the apples and cake batter.

Next, the apples:

5-6 apples, peeled and sliced fairly thin (use a combination of cooking apples)
2 rounded tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Combine the apples, sugar, and cinnamon in a covered container.  Toss together, and set aside.

Now the batter:

1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup canola oil
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 cup V-8 Splash Tropical Blend

Combine the flour, baking powder, salt and 3/4 cup sugar in a large bowl.  Make a well and add the oil, eggs, vanilla and V-8 Splash. Use a wooden spoon to combine wet and dry ingredients, and then beat with an electric mixer for about 2 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Spray an 8 inch square baking dish with baking nonstick spray.  I used an aluminum pan, and placed it on a cookie sheet before sliding into the oven.  Spoon half the batter into the pan, then place half the apples over it.  Repeat with the remaining batter and apple slices.  Cover the entire top of the cake with the crumbs.  Put the baking pan in the oven and bake for 45 minutes.  Check the cake for doneness.  If needed, bake another 10 minutes.  Place the cake on a rack to cool.  Let the cake cool completely before cutting.

This cake is so freaking delicious, I surprised myself!!

An Inconvenient Truth - Quick Corn Chowder

The inconvenient truth is that I am waking up every morning with a headache.  I can't be sure if this is because my eyes need to be checked, or because one of my Yorkies sleeps on my head.

Another inconvenient truth is that there is nothing wrong with using convenience foods.  There, I said it and I'm glad.

I've never understood food snobbery, or any other kind of snobbery, for that matter.  My grandmother's favorite convenience food was Campbell's tomato soup.  It shows up in her fabulous cabbage soup and stuffed cabbage, and in a pinch, she could make a "Jewish" spaghetti sauce out of it as well.

She never made green bean casserole with Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, or California dip with Lipton's onion soup mix, but I sure did, and so did most of my cooking friends.  The vast majority of my recipes are "from scratch" but if a convenience food is good, why not use it?  Look at the ingredient list on the back of the box or jar and if you can pronounce everything on it, chances are it's pretty good.

Not every convenience food comes in a red and white can.  Prepared sauces for pasta and proteins, puff pastry, phyllo (filo), tartar and seafood sauces, salad dressings, bread crumbs, stuffing mixes, broths and stocks, cake mixes, pudding mixes, Jell-o, frozen vegetables, canned vegetables (you can't make Ratner's vegetable cutlet without canned vegetables), and on and on.  Hellman's mayonnaise is a convenience food.  So is barbecue sauce and dry pasta.   It's a good time to be a home cook.  And even Martha Stewart uses frozen puff pastry to make her pigs in blanket.

I have no idea where my mother got this recipe.  It's ridiculously good.

1 - 10 ½ ounce can Campbell’s Cream of Potato Soup

1 - 15 ounce can creamed corn

1 soup can half-and-half

1-2 tablespoons butter

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Stir all the ingredients together in a saucepan over medium heat, then top with a lump of butter.  Salt and pepper to taste. 

A Mom's Prayer for Veteran's Day: Put Down Your Guns and Pick Up Your Forks - Southern Boiled Dinner and Wings in Cola Sauce

I am a Mom, and Moms don't like war.  We don't like war for the obvious reason:  those are our sons, and now our daughters, who are sent by our government to Who-Knows-Where to fight Who-Knows-Who.  Sometimes to die.  Sometimes to lose limbs, eyes, brain function, sanity.  So it is now, and so it has always been, and so we have always prayed for peace, back to Biblical times and beyond:

And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. - Isaiah  2:4                   

Prayers for peace notwithstanding, I cannot remember a time in my own life without the dark cloud  of war.  I was born during the Korean War, just 7 years after the end of World War II and the end of the Holocaust.  I came of age during the Vietnam War.   When I woke up this morning, we were at war in the Middle East, just as we have been since 2002.  And so it goes.

War is evil, perhaps the greatest Evil of all, but it is a necessary Evil because there have always been   depraved, greedy, power-hungry people in charge of certain governments, and to keep their rule intact, they must wage war.  To stop them, we must go to war as well.  Then, there have always been religious fanatics whose misguided Moms raise them to believe that to die in the service of their cause is a glorious and honorable thing, especially if they can take a few hundred of their enemy with them.

Sane Moms know that War is Hell, and the effect it has on our military sons and daughters can be life-changing in the worst possible ways.  Their sacrifice is immeasurable and today, this Veteran's Day, belongs to them.

And now, some hearty chow.

Southern Boiled Dinner

About 6 quarts of water in a large, deep pot
3 large cloves peeled garlic
1 bay leaf
2 tablespoons Paula Deen's House Seasoning
2 tablespoons Lawry's seasoned salt
2 tablespoons Tabasco brand chipotle pepper hot sauce
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter

1 - 2 1/2 pound smoked pork shoulder butt
1 pound fresh Brussel sprouts, stem end trimmed
1 1/2 pounds tiny new potatoes
1 or 2 small rutabagas (yellow turnips), peeled and cubed
1 pound Melissa brand boiler onions, peeled; leave the root end intact

Remove the plastic from around the pork, but leave the netting intact.  Place the pork in your pot, and cover with water.  Do not overfill, as you will be adding the vegetables a little later.  Turn heat on high, and add the House Seasoning, seasoned salt, and Tabasco to the water.  Bring to a boil, then reduce to medium.  Tilt the lid onto the pot so some of the steam can escape, then cook for 1 hour.  Add the rutabaga and cook 15 minutes.  Add the butter and the remaining vegetables and cook another 20 minutes or until they are done.

Remove the pork to a cutting board, and while still hot, carefully pull off the netting and discard.  Cover with a little foil and let sit about 15 minutes.  With a slotted spoon, remove all of the vegetable from the liquid and place in a 9x13 aluminum tray or baking dish.  Discard the bay leaf. Turn the heat under the pot on high and bring to a boil.  Now reduce the liquid in the pot by at least half.  It will still be thin, but it will look richer and buttery.  Ladle some of the buttery liquid over the vegetables in the dish.

Slice the pork thinly and arrange over the vegetables.  Ladle more of the buttery pot likker over the meat.  Serve immediately or cover and refrigerate for the next day's meal.  Reserve as much of the remaining pot likker as you like.  You can use it to moisten the dish before reheating, or put out as a gravy, or offer to real southerners with some corn bread for dipping.

Chicken Wings in Cola Sauce

This must be a southern thing, as I also came across a recipe where turkey legs are cooked in lemon-lime soda before being grilled ... anyway, I happened across this recipe for Wings in Cola while doing a random search, and the rest is history.  Delicious history.  Of course I tweaked it.  So it is a little sweet with a little heat. 

5 pounds frozen chicken wingettes (Cooking Good brand at $2.39 a pound.  Buy fresh if you like, but do the math first.)
Garlic salt
Onion powder
"Slap Ya Mama" brand white pepper Cajun blend, or cayenne pepper, totally at your own discretion
1.25 liter bottle Coca-Cola (use the real stuff, please)
1 3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
3 1/2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
Tabasco sauce, to taste (I used 2 glugs, which made it just a trifle spicy, which I liked)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Place the frozen wings in a single layer in an aluminum baking tray deep enough for the liquid.  Sprinkle liberally with the garlic salt and onion powder, and use a somewhat lighter hand in sprinkling over the Slap Ya Mama spice blend, or use a pinch of cayenne.  Combine the remaining ingredients, whisk together so that the sugar dissolves, and pour over the wings.  Cover the pan tightly with aluminum foil and place in the oven for two hours, turning the wings every thirty minutes.  Uncover the wings, and return to the oven for 3-4 additional hours, until the sauce is well reduced but not dried out and the wings are very tender and glazed.  During that time, continue turning the wings every thirty minutes.

Then eat them right away.  You can reheat them the next day and they are delicious, but these taste best right out of the oven.  Serve them to your favorite veteran.

Fish Fingers and Custard

In recognition of the recent season finale of Doctor Who, I prepared a fish dish.

Fish fingers and custard: what we are NOT preparing with those lovely frozen flounder filets I picked up for $4.48 a pound at the Walmart grocery, TARDIS sauce notwithstanding:  http://altonbrown.com/a-meal-fit-for-a-doctor/

And here is what we are preparing: pecan and cornmeal crusted flounder filets.

This is extraordinarily easy, and can be served for dinner during the work week.  You don't even have to set up a breading station.  The only pre-planning necessary is to place the bag of fish fillets in the refrigerator the evening before, so they will be completely defrosted when you are ready to cook them.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Put 2 tablespoons of butter and 2 tablespoons of olive oil into a 9 x 13 (or larger) baking dish and place in the preheating oven while you bread the fish.  Repeat with a second baking dish.  Check to make sure the butter doesn't burn.

Combine a cup of coarse cornmeal and a cup of pecan meal.  Season with a tablespoon of Old Bay Seasoning and use a fork to disperse it throughout.  Remove the fillets from their individual wrappers, but do not pat dry.  Bread the fillets on both sides in the cornmeal mixture, patting the crumbs onto the fish to help it adhere.  Remove the baking pan from the oven and place half the breaded fillets carefully into the melted butter/oil mixture.  Place in the oven and repeat with the second pan and remaining breaded fillets.  Bake until the breading is toasty, then with a spatula carefully turn each fillet.  Bake until the second side is also toasty and the fish flakes easily.  Don't  let the fish dry out.  Serve immediately with TARDIS tartar sauce.

And here's a variation I prepared and posted a couple of years ago:

Catfish nuggets are odd shaped pieces of catfish, ends and such, that are delicious but esthetically displeasing.  No neat fillets there.  At $3.99 a pound, I had to come up with something tasty.  And I did, using some of the pecan meal I picked up on our last trip to Atlanta.

Pecan meal is just finely chopped pecans, so you can certainly chop 'em yourself, but I like buying the meal because it is just the right consistency for breading fish and chicken.  For a pound of fish, all I do is  take some of the pecan meal and season it with garlic salt, pepper, dried thyme and paprika.  I then melt a stick of butter, and dip each piece of catfish in the butter, then the seasoned pecan meal.  Lightly butter a baking pan or dish, and place the prepared fish on it, single layer.  Bake in a 350 degree oven until the pecans are toasty, then carefully turn each piece over and return to the oven until that side has toasty nuts as well.  Yes, I really wrote that.

Quash the Squash - Fall Harvest Manicotti with Sage Cream Sauce

I blame Starbucks.

While it may be true that I consider the Cadbury Egg to represent the first sign of spring (instead of the crocus, which is what my second grade teacher taught me back at P.S. 119), I've never thought of the Starbuck's Pumpkin Spice Latte as the first sign of fall.  Apparently I am out of step with the rest of the world.  If Facebook postings were any indication, people have been eagerly anticipating the availability of the pumpkin spice latte with far more enthusiasm than I show at the reissue of my annual Wawa favorite, the turkey bowl (slices of turkey in gravy over half mashed potatoes and half stuffing, topped with cranberry sauce.  Now that's a great lunch!)

This year, the pumpkin craze has slopped over into all aspects of human nutrition, and I say it is time to quash the squash.  Okay, I admit that I did taste a little of the pumpkin spice coffee at Wawa, and it was just okay (better when I followed an employee's suggestion and mixed it half and half with the French vanilla), and that Paula Deen's recipe for gooey butter bars is even better with pumpkin added,   but it seems to me that enough is enough, and it is time to move on to some other type of vegetable worship.  I would suggest the rutabaga, but I don't see Starbucks picking up on that at all.

All kidding aside, for someone who never even tasted pumpkin until I was a freshman in college, I do love it, in both its sweet and savory permutations.

Fall Harvest Manicotti with Sage Cream Sauce

2 packages (8 ounces each) manicotti shells (you will use 20 of the shells)

1/2 pound mild pan sausage

1 large or 2 average green onions, white and green parts sliced

5 - 6 fresh sage leaves, halved lengthwise and cut crosswise (about 2 tablespoons)

granulated garlic

crushed red pepper (optional)

• 1 container (15 ounces) whole milk ricotta cheese
• 1 can (15 ounces) pure pumpkin puree
• 1 1/2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
• 1/3 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese
• black pepper
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten

4 cups thin sage cream sauce for cooking the shells (recipe follows)

4 cups medium sage cream sauce for serving
2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese

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In a large skillet break up the sausage as it browns.  After some of the fat has been rendered, add the green onion, the sage, garlic, and crushed red pepper.  Continue cooking a few more minutes, then remove from the heat and let cool while you prepare the cheese and pumpkin filling.

• In a large bowl, mix ricotta cheese, pumpkin, 1 1/2 cup mozzarella cheese, the Pecorino Romano, pepper, parsley, nutmeg and eggs.  With a slotted spoon, move the cooled sausage to the bowl, and stir it into the cheese and pumpkin mixture.  Taste and season.  You will probably not need any salt, as both the Romano cheese and the sausage bring a lot of salt to the recipe.  Cover the bowl and place in the refrigerator for a few hours, or overnight.  Don't skip this step, it really does make a difference in the intensity of the flavors.

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees, and now comes the really neat part of the recipe.  You will not be cooking the manicotti shells before filling them.  If you are like me, you hated have to boil manicotti and jumbo pasta shells, because whenever I boil them first, they break apart, plus those floppy, slippery shells are difficult to fill.
• 
  

• 
  
• Fill 20 uncooked manicotti shells with the cheese-pumpkin-sausage mixture. The easiest way to do this is to put about a third of the mixture in a one-gallon plastic storage bag, press the mixture toward one corner and snip that corner with scissors. Use this to pipe the mixture into each end of the manicotti tube so that the filling meets in the middle.  Do not overfill.  Repeat with the remaining mixture.  If you have leftover filling, set it aside.
• 
  

• Spread a little of the sauce on the bottom of  two  9 x 13 baking dishes, then place the filled manicotti in the dishes.  Pour the remaining sauce over all, cover tightly with aluminum foil, and bake in the preheated oven for 45 minutes.  Remove the foil, and with two spoons, carefully turn each manicotti over.  Put the foil back on and place back in the oven for another 15 minutes, until the manicotti is tender. 

                     

• Now you can see that the manicotti shells actually cooked in the sauce, so there is very little sauce left.  All the delicious flavor from the sauce has permeated the pasta.   When the shells are almost done, prepare the medium sage cream sauce and keep warm.  Remove the cooked manicotti from the oven and pour half the medium cream sauce over each dish.  Sprinkle a cup of mozzarella cheese on top of each dish, and return to the oven to bake just a few minutes until the cheese is melted.  This will feed a lot of people.

Thin Sage Cream Sauce

4 tablespoons butter 1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme 1 teaspoon rubbed sage 4 tablespoons all-purpose flour

4 cups half-and-half

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 teaspoons brown sugar

salt and ground black pepper to taste

Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Mix the rosemary, thyme, sage and flour into the butter mixture; cook and stir until smooth, and bubbling, and there is no lingering "raw" flour smell, maybe 2-3 minutes.

Stir the half-and-half into the flour mixture a little at a time, allowing each addition to incorporate fully before adding more. Stir in the nutmeg, cinnamon, brown sugar, salt, and pepper and cook and stir until smooth. This is going to give you a thin sauce, based on the proportion of 1 tablespoon each butter and flour to 1 cup of half-and-half, just right for cooking the stuffed shells without having to boil the pasta first. Medium Sage Cream Sauce:  prepare exactly the same as for the thin sauce, except increase the butter and the flour to 8 tablespoons each, or in simpler terms, 1 stick of butter and 1/2 cup flour.  What to do with the leftover filling?  Use it to fill as many of the remaining 8 shells as you can, and use a jar of Barilla marinara sauce.  Add a little water, which will help to cook the shells while baking.  Cover tightly with aluminum foil, and bake till shells are tender. Do the cheese thing, and put back into the oven another 10 minutes or until the cheese is melted.  I have to tell you, these manicotti are delicious with either sauce.

An Ordinary Woman - Seafood Stuffing Casserole

Today's inspirational ear worm comes from that grumpy old misogynist, Henry Higgins, who is, as he tells his friend Pickering, just an ordinary man.  Yeah, right.  With that house, and live-in staff constantly dusting the furniture, and the money to pursue his esoteric specialty?  I wouldn't mind being that ordinary, not at all.

I am, I suppose, an ordinary woman, although I have none of Professor Higgins' worldly goods.  I cook, I knit, I raise cats and dogs, I enjoy my family and friends.  A full pantry makes me smile.  So does a well-stocked freezer, and some of that Thanksgiving stuffing bread I baked last week.

I like my job.  The pay is lousy, but the emotional rewards are indescribable.  The benefits are pretty good, but the emotional toll can be beyond heart-wrenching.  It's a mixed bag.  After a couple of stressful days, I really need some sort of release that does not necessarily result in a naive young woman belting out "the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain."  I could knit a tea cozy, or I could start to drink heavily or I could chop an onion and see where it takes me.  So I grabbed a very sharp knife ...

Seafood Stuffing Casserole

1 onion, chopped (or half of a Vidalia)
1 small celery stalk, chopped
1/2 carrot, chopped
6 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
2 oz. mild pan sausage
2 cups crumbled Thanksgiving stuffing bread, divided (see November 4 recipes)
1 flat can chopped clams, undrained
Mixed raw seafood (I used about 6 frozen shrimp and 8 frozen Patagonian scallops)
1/2 cup frozen mixed vegetables (corn, peas, cut green beans)
2 tablespoons chopped pimentos, drained
1 can cream of mushroom soup
2 tablespoons white wine

shredded Swiss cheese
French's French fried onions

In a stove-top-to-oven pan, heat the oil and butter over medium heat, and add the onion, celery and onion.  After a few minutes add the garlic.  Lower the heat and sauté the vegetables for a good while so they slowly caramelize. Do not season the vegetables at this point.  Add the sausage and break up with a wooden spoon as it browns.  Stir in some rubbed sage, black pepper, pinch of kosher salt, and remove the pan from the heat.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Spread out 1-1/2 cups of the bread on a small ovenproof pan and place into the oven to dry it out.   Add the bread to the pan along with the undrained clams and stir to combine well.  Place the seafood and vegetables in a colander and run some cold water over for about 2 minutes, then let drain well.  Add the seafood and vegetables to the pan along with the pimentos.  Finally, stir in the mushroom soup and wine.  Taste and add whatever seasoning is needed.  I used a pinch of sage and of thyme, and a sprinkle of granulated garlic.

Combine the remaining crumbled bread with an equal amount of Swiss cheese, and sprinkle across the top of the casserole.  Bake for 15 minutes, remove from oven.  Sprinkle some French fried onions across the top, return to the oven and bake another 10-15 minutes, until the casserole bubbles and the onions darken slightly.

This is a very nice side dish.  With a bit more seafood and mixed vegetables, it could work as a main dish entree.

Election Day PTSD - A Pasta Salad with Balls

I think the title of this post says it all.

When I was a kid back in Brooklyn and North Woodmere, my Pop, who read 3 newspapers a day and watched the evening news with the devotion of a true Cronkite acolyte, told me something so crystal-clear brilliant, so profound, so prophetic, that it still holds true today.  In one concise sentence, he summed up everything I would ever need to know about the election process:

"Politics is the dirtiest game around."

I was interested in the Presidential election of 1960, which makes me seven years old.  There was a big media hoopla about the possibility of the first Roman Catholic President, and I was trying to reconcile that with the fact that I just knew that George Washington hadn't been Jewish.  My grandparents were supporting Richard Nixon, so I was supporting Richard Nixon.  Mr. Nixon might not have had reason to appreciate the support of a 7-year old non-voter,  but I bet he did appreciate it in 1972 when I cast my first vote ever for his re-election to the Presidency.

Although my husband and I discuss politics habitually, I have never gotten past my Pop's words.  I dislike the two-party system immensely; when I was a registered Democrat, I voted Republican, and when I finally got around to changing it to Republican, I voted for Bill Clinton.  Twice.  I don't like the second-tier parties either; the Libertarians talk a good game but are just plain weird;  the Green Party bears the name of my second least favorite color, orange being the first, and the association with Ralph Nader remains off-putting; I am neither a Communist, Socialist, American Nazi (seriously?), or American Pirate (double seriously??)  I joke around that I am a Rational Anarchist, like Professor Bernardo de la Paz, a character in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but I'm not sure what that really means, and anything with "anarchist" in the title is bound to attract the interest of whomever the White House has set to the task of spying on the internet.

So this year I dropped all party affiliation and became an independent.  I actually feel a little cleaner for having done so.  I don't really care that the Republicans now control the two houses of Congress, other than as an intellectual exercise, because I am not a Republican.  I don't care that the Democrats got kicked in the gut last night because I am not a Democrat.  I did not vote for the guy in the White House, not because I'm a racist (seriously???) but because he was and still is a lightweight.  During the entire Republican administration of Bush the Younger, I would leave the room when he appeared to speak on the TV, because I could not tolerate his obvious ineptitude and blatant mischaracterization of the war on terror.  I really liked former Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  My favorite President of all time happens to be a Democrat, and he is my favorite not because he is a Democrat but because he is Bill Clinton.

Yesterday's election results, and the campaign season that preceded it, did nothing to change my mind about politics.  For instance, no matter who you may have voted for in the Florida Governor's race, you got screwed.  Two bad choices are no choice at all.  It was either Lord Voldemort or the Second Runner- up in the George Hamilton Tanning Invitational.  The campaign was so dirty I wanted to run and take a shower each time the ads showed up on TV.  My Pop was right.  Politics is a sad commentary on the current state of human nature, possibly the saddest and definitely the dirtiest.

Let's talk about food.

The idea for this pasta salad goes back a few years, and arose from one of my weekend trips to BJs.  There was an office potluck coming up, and I was always given free reign as to what I would be bringing.  The refrigerated cases full of little mozzarella balls inspired me to snag them plus some marinated artichoke hearts and Mother Nature's gift to salad-lovers, sweet little grape tomatoes. The next day, I brought the unopened jars and the box of tomatoes to the office with a big Tupperware bowl, and literally threw together an antipasto salad in just under 3 minutes.  I think I was amazed that my coworkers were amazed, because I felt I had cheated them by not cooking from scratch, while they were singing my culinary praises.  I love those guys.

This is a more carefully planned version, transformed into a pasta salad full of umami (also described as the fifth taste), so easy to prepare you will pinch yourself.  Take your time in between the few steps - sit down, put your feet up, watch the Magic lose yet again - and then serve it to all the happy campers in your life.

A Pasta Salad with Balls

1 pound container marinated ciliegine (small mozzarella balls)
2 cups grape tomatoes, uncut
1 cup marinated mushrooms
1-12 oz. jar quartered and marinated artichoke hearts
1 cup mild pepper rings
1/2 cup manzanilla green olives stuffed with pimento
1/2 cup pitted kalamata olives
1-4 oz. jar sliced pimentos
1/4 cup sun-dried julienne cut tomatoes in olive oil with herbs

1 T. dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

1-3.75 oz. Sargento Parmentino cheese, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1-5 oz. package Hormel pepperoni minis

1 medium green bell pepper, cut into 1/2-inch squares
1 bunch of green onions, white part only, sliced thin

2/3 of a 1 pound box of Barilla's TriColor Rotini, cooked according to package direction, rinsed with cold water and well-drained
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

Remove each of the first 9 ingredients from their respective jars with a slotted spoon or a fork.  You want each element to retain a coating of the marinade and spices they were packed in.  Reserve all of the marinade from the mozzarella.  Place all of these 9 ingredients in a very large bowl.  Add the oregano, Italian seasoning and pepper, and carefully mix everything together so that the spices are well-distributed.  Add the parmentino cubes and the pepperoni minis, then moisten with about half of the reserved marinates.  Mix again, cover, and refrigerate for at least a couple of hours, longer if you like.  Now add the green peppers and green onions, a little more of the marinade, and a bit more of the oregano, Italian seasoning and black pepper.  Carefully mix to combine, cover and back in the fridge.  Place the well-drained, cooled pasta in a medium bowl, pour over the remaining marinade, season with oregano, Italian seasoning, black pepper and the salt, and stir to combine.  Cover and place in the fridge as well.  After an hour, add the pasta to the rest of the salad, and serve.  Or cover and hold it for the next day.  The recipe makes a lot, feeds a crowd, and will make your reputation as a pasta salad maven.  There is almost no chopping and no waste, but lots of accolades.  Enjoy!