The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

First, the good news.  We have Progress:

The pattern is Spiral Galaxy from Socks a la Carte in Froehlich Wolle Maxi Ringel on size 1.5 double pointed needles.  Sweet.  I purchased this yarn quite a while ago, can't remember where or when, but it is working up rather nicely.  I like the colors even more than I thought I would, and the yarn, which is 80% wool, has a nice feel to it.  And I am crazy about the pattern, which is easy, practically a stockinette (which on a circular piece means knit every row) but with an occasional yarn over and knit two together to keep things interesting.

This was practically the only bright spot in what was otherwise a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.  My case plan conference was cancelled (sick defense attorney).  It was 46 degrees this morning.  In Florida.  The flow of paper into my office never stops.  The walls between offices are paper thin.  I had a sinus headache and a stomach ache.  I sat through an hour staffing with three other people in a room the size of a walk in closet and the air quality of a sauna. I received an email I was expecting but it still sent me into the depths of despair.   At some point during the afternoon, I had a panic attack with a few heart palpitations thrown in for good measure.  Shut and locked the door, shut off all the lights, and sat on the floor.  Tried relaxation techniques I'd learned during rational emotive therapy in 1972.  Recited the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear and some deep breathing.  Ran through the names of all the players I could remember on the Orlando Magic.  Did the same thing for the 1961 New York Yankees, but didn't get beyond Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris.  Finally was able to stand up, turn on the light, and resume what I was doing prior to my world crashing down around my ears.

And then God, or Mother Nature, or The Force decides to put things in perspective:

Every bad science fiction disaster movie I've ever watched has scenes like these ... except these are real.  This is Japan the day after the worst earthquake in over 100 years spawns a monster tsunami.

NAKAMINATO, Japan -- Entire villages in parts of Japan’s northern Pacific coast have vanished under a wall of water, many communities are cut off, and a nuclear emergency was unfolding near two stricken reactors as Japanese tried to absorb the scale of the destruction after Friday’s powerful earthquake and devastating tsunami.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/world/asia/13japan.html?hp

And as if this wasn't bad enough, and it was, the nuclear reactor is leaking ...

TOKYO -- An explosion at a nuclear power plant in northern Japan on Saturday blew the roof off one building and destroyed the exterior walls of a crippled reactor, escalating the emergency confronting Japan after a huge earthquake and tsunami destroyed parts of the country’s northeastern coast on Friday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/world/asia/13nuclear.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

That wasn't my world crashing down around my ears ... that was Japan.  My world, despite occasional bumps in the road, is pretty damn fine.

No big cooking this weekend, folks.  Kasha varnishkes are a go, and Rob and I discussed the merits of homemade pizza, starting with the fresh pizza dough available at Publix.

But that's another blog post ...

Cook like there's nobody watching, and eat like it's heaven on earth.

Noodles on the Brain

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about kasha varnishkes.  I've also been considering whether I should add the fruit cocktail from one of my noodle kugel recipes to the dairy ingredients from the other noodle kugel recipe.  And I've been checking out cabbage with an eye towards kraut sveckle, a Hungarian masterpiece I learned from my mother in law, one of the world's greatest cooks.  I have to admit she is a better cook than even my mother was, and a lot nicer too.   My mother in law is so nice, she actually liked my mother.

Grammy (my mother), my son Cory at age 4, and Grandma

I am craving those kasha varnishkes, but I think my friend Terry might enjoy a noodle pudding at our next office potluck, and kraut sveckle would make an awesome and original side dish to accompany corned beef on St. Patrick's Day.  There's the answer, I'll just make everything.

Then there's the chopped herring ... I haven't made chopped herring in years.  When I was living in the dorm at SUNY Stony Brook, I used to love to go to Waldbaum's, buy a quarter pound of chopped herring (I was on a budget) and a package of Lender's frozen pumpernickel bagels, then go back to the room, toast the bagel and schmeer on some chopped herring.  Best dinner, ever.

The truth is, one cannot easily stage a Brooklyn Jewish eating orgy in Central Florida.  It is a lot better than it was when we first moved here almost 20 years ago, but the deli counter in Publix does not carry smoked whitefish, baked salmon, chubs, lox that is sliced in front of you, chopped herring, or fat fillets of schmaltz herring that are sliced up by the counterman, and only then added to that wonderful cream sauce with onions.  Oy!  I'm getting heartburn just thinking of it.  

My Publix makes a pretty good challah, and we can get a really fine bagel at Delish New York Bakery, a recent addition to the Dr. Phillips neighborhood (check out the link-bagels boiled in New York!), but nothing will ever compare to Sunday mornings when my Pop would head out to Brooklyn to pick up a baker's dozen of the hottest, freshest, most intoxicating bagels, along with a half dozen fresh bialys. He would rush them back home for the best breakfast ever, but not before he scarfed down at least one of those hot bagels in the car.  Untoasted, unbuttered, no cream cheese or lox - bagel au naturel - the minimalist bagel - sheer bagel purity.  Then he would come home and eat at least one more bagel, piled high with lox, sliced tomato and onion and a lot of cream cheese, or laden with strips of crisp bacon covered in American cheese and placed in the toaster oven for a good melt.

I wandered off course ... back to noodles.

I'm gonna need a lot of onions.

Morning has broken ...

... and thank goodness it is no longer Monday.

Mornings suck and Monday mornings suck worst of all.  This is a statement of Truth, with a capital "T", and like other statements of Truth brook no argument.  One cannot argue the fact that George W. Bush was the worst president of my lifetime, and that only the even-numbered Star Trek movies were worth watching.  Monday was it's usual awful self, and I slogged through mountains of paperwork, which then miraculously reappeared shortly after I moved them to be copied, or for a motion to be drafted.  Now I know how Bill Murray's character felt in "Groundhog Day."  By Monday evening I was cranky, and in no mood to cook anything.

Tuesday evening I prepared the Louisiana Corn and Crab Bisque.  Feh.  It was just barely alright the first time around, and I can tell you now it does not pass the "reheat" test, whereby a melange of great ingredients marry in the refrigerator to create an even better leftover. 

I do have a recipe for a terrific Cajun bisque, replete with andouille sausage, artichoke hearts, crawfish tails and other stuff which never fails to please my audience.  I promise to share that next time I prepare it, so there will be pictures to go with the recipe.

I started a new sock ...

. . . which is coming along nicely since I took this picture.  I am trying to knit a little bit each day, whether at home or at the office during a break, which I haven't had since I took 5 minutes to cast on, so this has all been taking place at home.  I'm learning to watch the Magic and knit at the same time.  Kind of hard to do when I stand up, wave my arms around and holler at the referees.  But I'm getting there.  And so are the Magic.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em, Part Deux

I have a sneaking suspicion that the managers at the Hunter's Creek Publix are not reading my blog:

Incidentally, while I am poking gentle fun, I am here to tell the world that my Publix is the best, ever.  I've been shopping there since the day it opened and I love it.  It is always immaculate, the shelves are always well stocked, and the people who work there rock.

Despite the fact that the witching hour has come and gone and normal people in this time zone are sleeping, I have some food prep to do for tomorrow.  It won't take long, but it does bear explaining.

The recipe for Emeril's Texas-Style Smoked Brisket can be found at the Food Network site.  I have made it before, having rigged up a smoker in our very old, sadly departed 25 year old gas grill, and it is simply one of the best things you will ever eat.  I hope it works out as well in the smoker compartment that is part of our new gas grill.  I guess we'll find out tomorrow. 

Vintage Tupperware measuring spoon in a 1970's color. Bet I could sell it on eBay!

One of the most important things for successful smoking of any meat or poultry is the dry rub.  You can see the brisket in the picture above, well-trimmed, and the ingredients for the rub.  The recipe makes a lot of rub, and you use the whole thing.  Then you have to let it sit at least 6 hours or overnight, which is why I am up doing this at such a ridiculous hour.

You also want to make sure the brisket is covered with the rub on all sides before you wrap it in plastic.  It is now taking a long nap in the outside refrigerator, nestled next to its cousin, the corned beef brisket.  Pleasant dreams.

And now, from the "so how could it be bad?" department:

I snagged a package of well-priced turkey legs while I was shopping, and decided I wanted them fruity.  They are in the crockpot now, cooking on low until the turkey is tender.  If they taste good, I'll be sharing the recipe.  If not, this conversation never took place. UPDATE:  After 8 hours the turkey legs are meltingly tender and tasty.  They are also fall-off-the-bone messy, so I have to figure out the best way to serve them.  The sauce is delicious and although it starts out looking thin, once I turned off the heat and let everything cool, it started to thicken slightly. 

After considering rice and couscous, I decided to leave it as is, or at least until I can make some mashed potatoes.  Look at that picture ... you know you were thinking mashed potatoes!  Anyway, the recipe can be found at the Inspiration Nation Recipe blog.

Getting ready to smoke the brisket ... the smoker is preheating, the brisket is coming to room temperature, and the wood chips are soaking.

I've got two more dishes going forward today.  One is, of course, the Louisiana crab and corn bisque, a recipe I found on a rather neat travel site for Lafayette, Louisiana.  The other is a Big Chicken Dish, sort of like a cacciatore on steroids.  Chicken thighs were $1.59 a pound.  Zucchini and yellow squash were on display, looking fine.  I would have liked to add chunks of eggplant as well, working a caponata or ratatouille theme, but eggplant wasn't available.  I want it to be served over some sort of pasta, so I'll be working with sauce instead of just tomatoes.  And best of all, I'm making this up as I go along, so buckle your seatbelt. 

Banzai!  Oven roasted vegetables ... herbes de provence ... oh peeps, meet me over at the recipe blog, I've got that old time inspiration ...

Just to review today's cooking:
Emeril's Texas-Style Smoked Brisket
Louisiana Crab and Corn Bisque
Sweet But Messy Turkey Legs
Big Chicken Dish, working title Chicken Ratatouille

Cook like there's nobody watching, and eat like it's heaven on earth.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (but no crab bisque)

Law school education:  $35,000
Florida Bar Review Course:  $2,000
Seeing the look on your opponent's face when you agree with him:  Priceless

Today I had shelter duty, which means that if any of our child protective investigators had to remove a child from their parents within the past 24 hours, I was the attorney who would be covering the shelter hearing in front of the weekend duty judge.  I already knew I had three shelters, so I was on the road to the Juvenile Justice Center in Orlando by 6:30 am, an hour at which I do not normally breathe.  Black coffee, it's what's for breakfast.

Everything went quite well, thanks in part to the weekend duty clerk of the court, who used to work for me when I was in private practice, and who remains a whirling dervish of efficiency.  The defense attorney who showed up on behalf of one of the parents was pleasantly inoffensive, and on the bench was the Honorable Stan Strickland, a Very Nice Judge.  During my private practice days I did take an occasional adult criminal case, and one of those cases caused me to appear before Judge Strickland.  It was a positive experience.

Which brings me to the Casey Anthony trial.  In the "be careful what you wish for" category, the award for dumbest move by a criminal defense attorney goes to Jose Baez, who sometime last year filed a motion demanding that Judge Strickland recuse himself from the case.  Good move, Jose.  Now you've got Chief Judge Belvin Perry, who has already shown he has no patience for your unprofessional antics.

Yesterday, I treated myself to an Attitude Adjustment.  I have been down in the dumps, but let's face it, I can't stay there.  Looking at the balance sheet that is my life, I have a lot more in the positive column than the negative.  I noodled over a lot of stuff, some big issues, some not-so-big, including my last couple of blog posts, and decided to approach those issues in a different way.

1.     One lump or two?  Or none - why I got it stuck in my head that I had to use jumbo lump crab meat in the Louisiana crab and corn bisque is beyond me.  I have always been willing to swap out ingredients to create a more cost efficient dish.  Even my crab cake recipe has been downsized from jumbo lump to "special" crab meat, at a considerable savings, and I do make some awesome crab cakes.  But that's another post.  Anyway, for the bisque, I have decided to use surimi, euphemistically known as "krab."  More about krab later.

2.   The Zen of Scarfing:  Jumbo lump crab meat may be a luxury, but taking a half hour out of my workday to scarf - any way that word is used - is not.  We are encouraged to leave our offices during lunch, and if I have fallen into a bad habit of sitting at my desk, that's my own fault.  Even if it means going no further than the parking lot and sitting in my car, I am going to make the effort to grab my knitting and a bottle of A&W diet root beer and get out of the office for a little while.

So now I'm feeling positively chipper, and decided to celebrate by doing my weekly food shopping.  The only list I had was the ingredient list from the Louisiana bisque.  As usual, I let the supermarket "speak" to me as I walked up and down the aisles, looking for bargains and inspiration . . .

. . . then I went home, unpacked, and passed out on the couch for darn near 7 hours since I started the above post.  Good thing there were still plenty of leftovers in the fridge, or my family would not be eating.  Not only did I not knit one stitch, I did not peel a single onion. 

So now my plans for Sunday include an overly-ambitious cooking menu.  I promise to take pictures.

Cook like there's nobody watching, and eat like it's heaven on earth.

Scoff it down, Scarf it up, Shkoff like a 220 pound man.

scoff - verb: To eat (food) quickly and greedily.
scarf - verb: To eat, especially voraciously (often followed by down or up): to scarf down junk food
shkoff (shh-cough) - verb: To pig out and eat whole-heartedly.

Illustrative Example:
Fun fact: Nadia G can shkoff like a 220-pound man (she can also beat him at sit-ups.)

Well, I used to be a 220 pound woman, and I did my own share of scarfing back in the day.  Especially when I was younger, scarfing was a great joy.  I still dream about the veal and pepper heros at this awesome little place in Bellmore, New York.  I used to go with my parents and younger brother.  First we would eat an entire pizza; then we would each have a hero.  Veal parmigiana, meatball, veal and peppers, sausage and peppers.  The sauce was to die for.  My family may have taken the fun out of dysfunctional, but one thing we did well together, and often, was to scarf food. 

We didn't call it "scarfing" in any of it's variations.  We were Jewish, and therefore what we did was "essen" - in both German and Yiddish, this translates "to eat".  Actually, what we did was "fressen"- enthusiastic overeating - but that was sort of impolite (while essen means "to eat", fressen means "to eat like an animal"), so my mother only used that word to describe other people, like her cousins on her mother's side.

Although, in this post-gastric bypass phase of my life, I no longer scarf food, I do scarf.  With yarn and rosewood knitting needles.  Lately, though, I have not been able to finish the two scarves I have on needles, which is preventing me from moving on to the four pairs of socks in various stages of completion.

My Cat's Paw scarf, a variation of Alison Jeppson Hyde's "Rabbit Tracks"

For me, cooking is a form of relaxation.  I realize for many people it is a terrible chore, or just a ho-hum sort of thing one has to do to get the kids fed, but I see it as an outlet for my creativity.  There are many things I cannot do, like using a sewing machine to make beautiful wedding gowns, or fixing a car, or throwing a ceramic pot.  When I cook, when I chop an onion or stir a risotto, I relax.  If I was in a bad mood, it dissipates, and if I was already in a good mood, I get downright cheerful.  My father used to relax by waxing the cars.  As far as I know, my mother never relaxed.  My husband likes to read science fiction or go to the taekwando school to beat up spar with people half his age. 

Some finished and near-finished projects - colorful striped triangle kerchief 

and the oddly pleasing Kink neckwarmer

There are times that one cannot simply pull out an onion and a santoku knife to relieve stress - like on a train, in a car, during lunch break at work ... that is, as we like to say, a "practical impossibility."  Those times, it is nice to have a portable hobby to engage one's mind, and I have two I always keep on tap:  reading and knitting.  With the invention of electronic books and the Kindle app on my iPhone, I am never without a murder mystery.  Police procedurals, forensic mysteries, culinary mysteries; I got 'em.  And if I don't got 'em, I can get 'em with one touch shopping.

Coming in for a close second is knitting, a hobby that is not just relaxing, but soothing.  I like bamboo or rosewood needles for most things, and they feel so nice in my hands.  Ditto for most yarns, as they slide across my fingers on their final transformation destination.  A humble skein of wool becomes a long, lacy scarf or perhaps an afghan for a new baby.  You can't beat that with a stick, or a knitting needle.

I learned to knit at a fairly young age, and kept knitting all those years when it was looked down upon as an old lady's hobby.  Now that it is considered hip and trendy, my mad skills with double pointed needles are the envy of everyone who longs for a silky neckwarmer or that ultimate luxury, handknit socks.  Which brings me back to my current bout of knitter's block.  I am realizing that the last time I had a really good run of knitting was during my completion of "Twins", a long, fluffy scarf of my own design. I finished it on New Year's Day, which was also the day one of my twin cats, Dora, succumbed to cancer.  Everything about the scarf - the pattern, the name, the color and texture of the yarn - was chosen in honor of my two little girls, Dora and Deety, who had been together every moment of their lives, and who I picked as my own from their litter when they were not quite a day old.  Knowing I was losing Dora spurred the completion of the scarf, but once it was done, not even knitting could improve my mood.  During a road trip to Dallas a few weeks later, I slogged through some of my works in progress (knitters call them "WIPS") without my usual enthusiasm.  I had also lost Emeril, the gray and white cat in the picture above, just 5 weeks before Dora, and his illness and death came without warning.  I was down in the dumps.  I guess I still am.

The "Twins" scarf, my design (click for the pattern)

My twins, Deety and Dora

The other part of the problem is my lack of free time.  I usually work through lunch or run over to Walmart to pick up necessaries, so there's no knitting time there.  When I lived in New York, I commuted on the Long Island Railroad and the New York City Subway, and all I had was time.  It was almost a 2 hour trip, each way, every day, from my home in Ronkonkoma to my office in lower Manhattan, and I made good use of that time to knit or crochet.  Knitting needles make great defensive weapons by the way.  I always felt better when I had sharp metal objects in my hands.  Those were pre-Giuliani days on the subway, and it was a tough crowd.

Speaking of tough, today has been a really crappy day.  It started out crappy and went rapidly downhill from there.  At some point during what should have been my lunch hour,  I promised myself a short break for scarfing knitting.  I closed my door, picked up my newest Kink (pictured below) and started to knit.  Rosewood needles and Noro Silk Garden felt so nice in my hands ... and then someone knocked.  Took care of that, tried again.  More knocking.  More questions.  More problems.  No knitting.

Crappy, what did I tell you?

Mid Week Musings About Meatloaf

I stopped in Publix after work to pick up a few basics - orange juice, bread, pickled herring, Yukon gold potato chips for my very particular son - and also to scope out the price on a half pound tub of jumbo lump crabmeat.  Never mind.  We won't even go there.  We also won't discuss the green tomatoes in the produce section.  Why yes, they are turning red.  Wonder why that is, hmmm?

I always check out the BOGO tables.  Can't miss them anyway, because they are cunningly arranged between the front door and the deli department.  Mueller's pasta on sale, so I picked up two boxes of their corkscrews.  I like this pasta shape best for macaroni salad, and also for macaroni and cheese.  Besides the corkscrew, there are ridges like you find on rigatoni, and that lets the pasta hold the sauce ever so much better.  Hey, I have a wheel of brie just hanging out in my outside fridge ... but alas, no duck sausage. 

I'm getting way off track from the meatloaf, but I really do want to try this recipe in the near future.  Macaroni and cheese from Nadia G over at Bitchin' Kitchen.  Check it out.

No whole fried okra this week.  Unfortunately, they are too big to leave whole.  Tough okra, y'all.  Maybe next time.

Talk about getting off track ... I'm watching the Magic play against the Knicks.  What a game ... Magic won!  Booyah!!

I wasn't planning on buying any meat, but I always check for sales.  Nothing special, although I lingered briefly over a 10 pound bag of chicken leg quarters at 69 cents a pound.  If it had been the weekend, I would have bought it, but I had neither the time nor the energy to clean all that chicken.  I kept walking and saw the market ground beef was there, and that gave me an idea.  Market ground beef is, to my mind, a real treat and a bargain to boot (relatively speaking, of course.  Paying $3.19 a pound for ground beef is hardly a bargain, but you don't want to know what they were charging for the ground sirloin.)  It is priced cheaper than even ground chuck, and tastes better.  Beefier.  Because it is made up of the cuttings from all the different meats back there, including steak trimmings.

So I didn't want chili, or Argentinian beef saute, or shepherd's pie, or even tacos ... I wanted meatloaf.  A nice big, tasty, juicy meatloaf.  But which meatloaf recipe to use?  I'm sure you've faced the very same conundrum, right?  Right?

If you've never strayed from your mother's meatloaf recipe, let me let you in on a little secret:  everybody's mother makes meatloaf just a little bit different.  That's like over 80 million meatloaf recipes in the US alone.  My mother always made her meatloaf on top of the stove, freeform shape.  No loaf pan for her.  Her meatloaf mixture was pretty basic - ground round, grated onion, an egg, some ketchup, a lot of kosher salt, and matzo meal.  Matzo meal is the secret to a great meatloaf, by the way, but what made hers special was the cooking method.  I guess you could call it braising.  Somehow with onions and a little more ketchup and the natural juices from the meat, she created a rich cooking liquid for the bottom of the Dutch oven.  Keeping the pot covered, she "baked" the meatloaf, in this miraculous gravy, on top of the stove.  Remember, when she first started keeping house and cooking for a family, there were no home air conditioners, and she was adamant about not adding to the brutal summer heat by turning on the oven.  Her meatloaf was always juicy, always tasty.  It was the best meatloaf I've ever eaten, and since she never wrote anything down, and I cannot find anything similar in any cookbook, it is one of the few dishes I cannot replicate. 

She was a good grandma and a great cook.  Further deponent sayeth naught.

Still, I must admit I make some really fine meatloafs in my own right, even if I do use a loaf pan and turn on the oven.  Sometimes I follow a recipe like this one from a chef like Emeril; other times I am inspired by the contents of my refrigerator.  Carnie Wilson has a fabulous recipe called "Don't Let Your Meat Loaf" in her cookbook To Serve with Love that includes ingredients I would have never thought of tossing in to my meatloaf mixture - quick oats, grated carrots, horseradish, applesauce, and allspice. 

Most of the time, I play around substituting chili sauce or leftover marinara sauce for the ketchup, panko or Italian bread crumbs for the matzo meal, sauteed onions instead of the raw ... you get the idea.  You can stuff a meatloaf with a cooked sausage like chorizo or kielbasa, or with hardboiled eggs.  You can roll it around a filling of mashed potatoes or a bread stuffing. 

As I shopped for ingredients tonight, I realized I did not want to peel, chop, or grate.  I did want to make it easy on myself, without sacrificing flavor or paying ridiculously high prices for prechopped vegetables.  I had this in the oven in record time with no preparation and minimum mess.  The recipe can be found over on the Inspiration Nation recipe page.  Meatloaf is a natural served with mashed potatoes, but really, any starch will do.  Except grits.  No grits, please.

Cook like there's nobody watching, and eat like it's heaven on earth.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em

Pot au feline.  Just kidding. 

From Sunday's Facebook:
"We went to BJ's for some much-needed stuff. I looked at the price of food and became very grumpy. Now, I not only need to park my car in the driveway and stay home, but I'm going to have to stop eating. Worse than that, I'm going to have to stop cooking. I have never seen prices like this ever."

I thought I was going to get inspiration.  Instead, I got aggravation.

We are pretty good warehouse shoppers.  Gone are the days when we became starry-eyed over 5 pound bags of tortilla chips and a gallon jug of salsa.  I don't even like salsa.  Today, we go in and buy what we need, usually cleaning supplies, cat and dog food, paper goods.  We might stray occasionally and pick up a DVD or a new cookbook, but we're still pretty cautious about what we decide to buy.

When it comes to the food department, I like to walk in with an open mind.  I have ideas floating around in my head, and a nicely priced ingredient will help bring an idea to fruition.  Other things we pick up are standards, like butter, cream cheese, and kielbasa.  Prices are excellent and we know from experience they will be well used.

Since I had done an enormous amount of cooking the previous weekend - paella, pork loin and vegetables, peanut chicken stir fry - I knew this was going to be a light weekend in the kitchen.  (Those teriyaki chicken wings are already gone, by the way.  Now I'm really sorry I just made a small test batch.)  So I knew that this coming weekend, first weekend in March, I was going to need a few good dishes.  I already had one in mind, a Louisiana corn and crab bisque recipe that I had found by happy accident while researching whole fried okra.  I thought the timing was fortuitous, because the recipe calls for a pound of lump crabmeat, and BJ's carries the pound-size containers at a better price than I've seen anywhere else.  Everything else I could get at Publix, including the crab claws.  Dave the Fish Guy carries Jonah crab claws at a fairly decent price.

I sailed by the salmon, the tilapia and the catfish and headed straight to the crabmeat.  They had claw crabmeat at an okay price.  Same for the "special" crabmeat.  But the price for a pound of jumbo lump crabment, in BJ's was - are you sitting down? - almost $23.00 a pound.  And this was one dish where I could not get away by substituting with the "special."  I needed the lumps, damn it. 

Reality bites.  And the truth is, jumbo lump crabmeat is a luxury item that has now slipped out of my grasp.  I can still afford chicken, pork, and some fin fish, which is a lot better than many families during this financial depression (or should that be depression with a big "D"?)  So no corn and crab bisque ... maybe I can think of a way to adapt the recipe to replicate the wonderful clam bisque I used to order at Lundy's in Brooklyn.  Canned clams are still reasonable.

"You bought the brisket?  Smoke 'em if you got 'em."

Sadly, the price of beef is not reasonable, and has not been for a number of months.  I don't know which is worse, sticker shock at the meat counter or at the pump.  I did finally settle on a rather handsome piece of fresh brisket - over $4.00 a pound, even in BJ's! - and a Freirich corned beef brisket.  St. Patrick's Day is coming up, after all.  The fresh brisket is bound for the smoker, and that is really some good eats.  Sliced very thin, served over Texas garlic toast with some barbecue sauce from Sonny's.  Brisket is a quintessential Jewish cut of meat, and I know a lot of ways to cook it.  I always buy the flat cut (some people swear by the point) unless I can get a whole piece which includes both flat and point.  The flat cut has less fat, less waste, less shrinkage.  It also cuts a lot neater than the point.

Brisket is what we call pot roast ... my mother never used any other cut of meat for her pot roast, and when I started reading cookbooks and saw recipes for pot roast that involved rumps and bottom rounds, I was puzzled.  Brisket is pot roast and pot roast is brisket.  Bottom round, on the other hand, makes a fine beef stew. If you can find a well-priced piece of bottom round, or shoulder, cut them into cubes yourself and try them in this recipe. 

I am going to try to smoke that fresh brisket this coming weekend, and I'll take pictures if I do.  So good, you'll want to lick the monitor screen.  Really.

Cook like there's nobody watching, and eat like it's heaven on earth.

Apples, Peaches, Pumpkin ... Strudel?

Today is Sunday, and I am looking forward to a trip to BJ's Warehouse.  Talk about inspiration!

Friday night, I charged into Publix with a list.  I wanted to whip up a small batch of Mark's Teriyaki Chicken Wings for the Birthday Blog Post, so I needed wings ... here's a lesson to you.  Never shop with a list.  Along that road lies serious disappointment.  The wing pickings were sad, and after seeking inspiration in the freezer section and among the organic offerings, I settled on a plain old package of drumettes.  Well, I'm sure they'll look better after I marinate them in that heavenly mixture of soy sauce and other good things, but until then, they are just plain uninspiring. 

But along with the voices in my head singing "Auntie Griselda" over and over and over again - don't you hate earworms? - I heard the whisper of fillo leaves as they embraced a cooked fruit filling composed of apples, pears, peaches, maybe some dried cranberries, sugar and fragrant sweet spices like cinnamon and freshly grated nutmeg.

And Then Along Came Strudel ...

If I was the produce manager at Publix, I would hate having me as a customer.  Watching me pick out fruit would be tantamount to being forced to watch the last half hour of "2001: A Space Odyssey" with my eyelids taped open.  I make faces at the display.  I pick up each and every piece of fruit I am considering buying and examine it carefully.  I sniff it suspiciously, like one of my Yorkies being offered a Girl Scout shortbread cookie for the first time.  I judge the weight by holding it in my hand.  I gently press the exterior to try to gauge ripeness.  I sneer at the sign that proclaims "tree-ripened fruit."  And then I repeat this process for every piece of fruit, rejecting 95% of the examinees.  But I always place everything back ever-so-neatly, except when I am at the tomato table checking out the green tomatoes.  Green tomatoes don't stay green very long if they are placed too close to ripe red tomatoes.  You can't make decent fried green tomatoes if even the slightest tinge of pink is showing!  So I surreptitiously move the greenies as far away from the reds as I can without getting tossed from the store and trespassed by local law enforcement.

During the Thanksgiving season I find myself inexorably drawn to pies.  Somehow pies seem the proper dessert to serve during this holiday. When I came across the original recipe on the Food Network site several years ago, I was intrigued by the combination of apple and pear, and the concept of precooking the fruit.  As you can see, this recipe started out as a double crust pie. Except I don't care for double crust pies, so I switched to a streussel topping.  And then I hadn't bought enough apples and pears.  Delving into my pantry (so large it merits it's own zip code) I grabbed a can of peaches, drained them, added them to the fruit mix, and a star was born.  Except I don't really jump for joy over fruit pies, and neither do my boys.  We love key lime and lemon meringue and coconut custard and pecan and yes, pumpkin, and some other pies involving secret rites with cream cheese, Cool Whip and pudding, but fruit pies?  Not so much.  For some reason, the combination of cooked fruit in a pie shell just doesn't work.  Once it sits for a while, even the flakiest pie crust becomes soggy, heavy, and unappetizing.

Stop, in the Name of Lard!  Don't you know that the annoyingly-named town of Stepford ... pardon me, I mean, Celebration, Florida ... is the site of the annual Great American Pie Festival?  Indeed it is, and like the Superbowl, it is much more enjoyable to watch it on TV from the comfort of your living room.  Celebration, an artificial construct carved out of the western edge of Kissimmee, is just a short drive from my home in a much saner neighborhood, but we have only ventured there for the pie festival on one occasion.  It was too hot and too crowded, with too many people scarfing down their weight in pie while trying to scope out the location of the Food Network cameras.

I suppose the purpose of this pie-poking post is to focus on the filling rather than the crust.  As I said, the cooked fruit filling came out darn near divine.  And I always use a quality frozen pie crust (bet you didn't see that one coming.)  But they did not make beautiful music together, and so I tucked the recipe away until late this past week, while considering that I hadn't done any homemade desserts since my cookie-baking frenzy over the holidays. 

Somehow that translated into a yen for homemade strudel, so now I find myself inspired to combine my fillo-folding technique, perfected in the early eighties in a tiny kitchen in Central Islip, New York, with my Florida-era fruit-filling recipe. 

Enough alliteration for now, let's bake a strudel! 

My Friday night trip to Publix yielded, in addition to those sad wings, 6 lovely Golden Delicious apples, 3 ruddy Red Anjou pears, 2 fragrant fresh peaches, a rather handsome lemon, and a box of frozen fillo (filo, phyllo) dough. FROZEN FILLO DOUGH? Come on, I don't make my own pie crust, you weren't really expecting me to start stretching my own strudel dough! 

Besides, learning how to work with fillo is a valuable technique to accomplish.  Think baklava.  Think spanokopita and triconas.  Think marinated chicken breasts, topped with mushroom duxelles, wrapped in layers of fillo brushed with butter and baked till golden.

"If you learn a recipe, you can cook the recipe. If you learn the technique, you can cook anything." - Michael Symon

The recipe for Apple, Pear and Peach Strudel can be found, as can all my recipes, over at the Inspiration Nation Recipe site which can be reached by clicking this link.  Each recipe there corresponds by posting date to the blog post over here.

Cook like there's nobody watching, and eat like it's heaven on earth.

Happy Birthday, dear Mark - and thanks for the memories, the forty years of friendship, and oh yeah, your recipe for teriyaki chicken wings ...

I had just typed a wonderful ode to the State University of New York at New Paltz, and the beginning of my friendship with the birthday boy, when my computer took an odd path, blacked out for two seconds, and wiped the whole thing out, despite the fact that Blogger saves a draft as you go ... I am really bummed.  I had evoked great images of planes over Kennedy Airport, my chubby little body shlepping up Mount Mohonk, the ax murderer, the first joint I was ever offered ... all gone.  According to my horoscope, my lucky time of day was 7 AM, which came and went and took some of my best writing with it.  Damn, spit, and dirty socks!

So without further ado, let me jump ahead to my first day in Freshman English, known as Lit and Comp I.  My professor was Anthony "Tony" Robinson, a not-so-famous author (think Donald Sutherland's Professor Dave Jennings from "Animal House") whose father, Henry Morton Robinson, was a famous author.  That class was notable for several events, not the least of which was my spilling an entire cup of hot chocolate over my copy of Seven Centuries of Verse, Professor Robinson's rather ribald interpretation of Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan", and the fledgling beginnings of friendships that would last a lifetime.

Kubla Khan - Samuel Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

One of the students I met in that class was Mark Fendrick.  He, like me, was just 17 years old, unable to go to the many bars and taverns lining the streets of our college town (legal drinking age was 18 in those days.)  He had been raised in Brooklyn, more specifically in Flatbush, not all that far from where I had lived before my family emigrated to Long Island just eight years ago.  He loved Star Trek and music and good food.  We were both "LHS" graduates - his was Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, mine was Lawrence High School in Cedarhurst.  We had both participated in Government in Action 1970, held at my high school, during the semester prior to graduation, and may have actually met then ... we certainly passed each other in the halls.  We were both Jewish, and the oldest sibling in our respective families.

A fast friendship was formed, along with others in that class - my hallmate, and later roommate, Kathy Pieplow, Barbara Chlanda, and Sandy Osherofsky, my companion on my trip down off of Mount Mohonk.  We had earned the dubious distinction of being the last two freshman to return from that fateful foray in the Shawangunk Mountains, holding up 998 other tired freshman and a fleet of school buses.

I am certain I cannot reduce the fabric of our lives into one blog post, and I won't even try.  Here is the Reader's Digest version though:  from that very first class, Mark became enamored of Sandy.  She saw him early on as a friend, and dated different students, but as he told me, he was going to wait for her.  And he did, and she did, and they did get married the month after college graduation.  I was their maid of honor.

June 30, 1974

One other thing Mark and I had in common was our love of cooking.  After we got off the food plan at college, we started cooking for ourselves, limited only by a complete lack of cooking equipment.  I had a hot plate with two settings - on and off.  Plus an old teflon frying pan and one small enamel pot that my mother had provided.  But I had discovered the joy of cooking for others, and my college friends didn't seem to mind that I was making do with ground beef, a can of green beans, and ketchup.

Mark and I were self-taught cooks.  We read recipes, tasted new dishes, and experimented freely.  Nothing has changed except our access to more exotic ingredients and much better cooking equipment.  We started out cooking for our respective spouses and friends, and as time went on we cooked for our kids ... and in Mark's case, his grandkids.

This is a recipe I remember Mark preparing, circa 1975, in the one bedroom apartment he and Sandy shared on Avenue S in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn.  It was so good, and so easy, I snagged the recipe and then years later, included it as one of my submissions to a cookbook put together by the Sisterhood of Congregation Shalom Aleichem in Kissimmee.  I am probably going to have to add photos of the finished dish sometime later this weekend, but if you check over here (don't forget to click on this link) you will find the recipe.

Mark and Sandy with daughter Iris; Mark and Sandy with grandson Sean ... or is it Lukas?

Left to right:  my husband Rob; Kathy's husband, Alan; Sandy Osherofsky Fendrick;

Kathy Pieplow Westrich; me; Mark Fendrick. 

Did I mention that Kathy and Alan owned a deli and did catering for about 30 years?  I've got some wonderful recipes from Kathy ... but that's another blog post.

You can't always get what you want, You can't always get what you want, But if you try sometimes you might find, You get what you need: Your Cheatin' Chicken Soup

Breakfast:  What I had was black coffee and a Drake's cherry pie.



But what I wanted was a cafe au lait and a paper bag of hot beignets from Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans.



Check out the prices.  Glorious!  These pictures were taken last month when we were on the road to Dallas.  We were able to spend two nights in New Orleans, one on the trip out, the second on the trip back.  A stop at Cafe Du Monde was obligatory, and I'm glad it was.  Never mind that it was below freezing and the wind blowing off the water was the stuff that nightmares are made of for people who have lived in Florida the past 19 years.  Cafe Du Monde was worth every shiver.



Back to the present: the day sort of went downhill from there.  Nothing tragic, just ... tedious.  I did not have time to knit one stitch and I ate too many crunchy Cheetos.  I did slog through paperwork and prepared for a trial, but the paperwork and the Cheetos left me unbearably tired and perhaps even a little cranky.

So I decided I needed some chicken soup.  That may seem utterly ridiculous considering the amount of cooking I did over the past few days, but ... the truth is, I can't eat much of anything that I cook.  If I am lucky, I can taste a bite or two, but that's it.  If I try to eat more than that, I suffer.  It took me four hours to eat that Drake's cherry pie, and I can't finish more than half of one of the three beignets that Cafe Du Monde puts in that little brown paper bag with all that powdered sugar. 

I have better luck with soup, although I have to be wary of soups that are very thick or contain big delicious honking chunks of meat or vegetables.  Which is why I came up with this quick and dirty recipe for a really delicious, relatively easy to swallow, double comfort bowl of chicken soup.  The recipe and pictures can be found by clicking on this link, and I promise to someday tell the story of how it is a food blogger can't eat what she cooks.

Grits, Greens, and Grumblings about Bagels: Southern Boiled Dinner 2/22/11

The inspiration for this recipe came from my mother’s preparation of corned beef and cabbage, and Paula Deen's recipe for collard greens.  I am calling it Inspiration Nation Southern Boiled Dinner, and rest assured there is neither corned beef nor collards involved.

Corned beef and cabbage was one of those dishes I always thought of as part of Jewish cuisine.  Later on, I learned that different cultures claimed it as their own, notably the Irish and New Englanders.  There is probably some crossover there, but I’m neither a food historian nor a food anthropologist, nor do I play one on TV.  My mother’s preparation was utter simplicity, and always delicious.  She cooked a corned beef brisket in a large pot of water, bringing it to a boil and then lowering the heat for a long simmer.  When the beef was done, she took it out to rest before slicing, and added wedges of crisp green cabbage, and large peeled and halved potatoes to the cooking liquid, boiling them till beyond done.  While my younger brother and father chowed down on thick slices of corned beef, my mother and I based our feast on the cabbage and potatoes and lots of French’s yellow mustard.  The cabbage was wonderfully limp and the potatoes were mealy perfection, and both were thoroughly infused with the flavor imparted to the cooking liquid by the corned beef brisket.  Later on, I was exposed to the heresy of cooking the vegetables in fresh water, thus avoiding the salt and fats from the meat.  Potatoes are pretty good no matter how they are prepared, but plain boiled cabbage is a tasteless mass of unattractive vegetation.  One might just as well chew on algae fresh out of the ocean.  I stuck to my guns and ate the good stuff.  My blood pressure stayed low while my cholesterol made a graceful upward sweep into numbers that caused my doctor to consider early retirement.  Anyway, it wasn’t the corned beef, it was genetics.

Fast forward forty years and I’m living in the undiscovered country, at least as far as food is concerned.  It is true that Florida is the most “northern” of the southern states, but that does not change the fact of regional food differences.  Without going into my eternal harangue about not being able to get a real New York bagel or a decent slice of pizza in the entire state of Florida, I do have a few comments to make regarding southern food and ingredients.  Like what is the big deal about grits?  Why don’t the 7-Elevens in Florida carry buttered rolls?  Are crawfish really miniature lobsters?  Why can’t I find any bluefish?

Incidentally, my favorite description of grits comes from a novel written by Susan Isaacs called “Compromising Positions.”  In one scene, the heroine, Judith Singer, is admonishing her BFF, Nancy Miller, about replacing her wine intake with something substantial.  “Grits,” she tells her southern-born friend, “you could eat grits.”  To which Nancy replies, “grits taste like ground-up horsesh*t.”  Since my move south almost twenty years ago, I have tried grits and can report with a straight face and complete sincerity that Nancy Miller was absolutely correct.

One southern favorite that I have come to love is greens.  Collard greens and turnip greens are both delicious, and I like them prepared the old-fashioned way - boiled within an inch of their lives in the cooking liquid from ham hocks or smoked turkey wings.  My other southern favorite is real barbecue, prepared over wood, low and slow.  Almost makes up for the bagels and pizza. 

It all comes down to technique.  The same technique - cooking the meat in liquid, in effect harnessing the essence of the meat, and sharing that flavor with vegetables and starches to make an extremely tasty dish - is responsible for delectable corned beef and cabbage, Jewish chicken soup, and southern collard greens.  And it works really well in this southern boiled dinner which relies on pork rather than beef as it's main ingredient.

For this dish, rather than start with just water, which would have worked perfectly well, I mostly followed the recipe I use for collard greens, adding a whole lot of flavor to the "pot likker."  The meat is a beautiful smoked pork shoulder, also called a pork butt, more reasonably priced than a corned beef brisket, and with a lot less shrinkage.  Instead of cabbage I use fresh brussel sprouts and the big mealy potatoes of my youth are substituted by tiny new potatoes.  When I can get them, I like to use a bag with mixed colors - white, yellow, purple and red skin.  It all comes together for a beautiful dish.  The recipe can be found here.

Eating Out - Reminiscence and a Restaurant Review

I grew up in a time and place when mothers did not work outside the home.  When I came home from school, "Another World" was on the television and milk and cookies were on the kitchen counter.  Every school night, I was served a three course meal by my mother, who despite her inner demons was a fabulous home cook.  She did not own a cookbook, nor did she write anything down.  Her best dishes were those wonderful Jewish recipes that all started with three or six large chopped onions sauteed in corn oil or margarine, like brisket, kasha varnishkes, and stuffed cabbage.  We also ate a lot of steak, baked or broiled chicken, and soup.  Ah, the soup!  I still do not know how she wrenched all that glorious flavor from supermarket chickens, and I admit I have to cheat to achieve that quintessentially Jewish, golden perfection by using chicken broth instead of water in which to cook the chicken and soup vegetables.  My other favorites were her Italian dishes.  Red sauce ruled, and her meat sauce recipe, which had been given to her by an Italian neighbor in the late forties, was so good, I could eat it with a large spoon and skip the spaghetti.

On the weekends, her kitchen was closed.  There were usually leftovers to pick at, tuna fish salad always made up and kept in a recycled Cool Whip container and eating out at least one big meal.  But "kitchen closed" was a hard and fast rule, because, as I only realized years later, she had put in five days of hard work and a good part of that was in the kitchen.

I cannot remember the names of all the restaurants we ate at.  Some were one-shot deals, a place my father had heard of during the week and was determined to try.  The others, though, were the backbone of our family's social life.  At the top of that list was Lundy's.  Most people remember where they had their first kiss; I remember where I had my first taste of lobster.  Then there was Cooky's, a local chain, Linck's Log Cabin, Al Steiner's on Chestnut Street in Cedarhurst, the Famous, a Ratner's knock-off on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, and any number of Italian restaurants.  Thinking back, Italian food was probably my father's favorite food, but he would happily drive all over Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island to enjoy Greek food in Astoria, a Swedish smorgasbord in Riverhead, and the ethereal popovers at Patricia Murphy's Candlelight Restaurant.

Over the years it became more difficult to find restaurants that serve "real" Italian food, where red sauce rules and meatballs are the size of your head.  That sort of southern Italian cooking got a bad rap as northern Italian chefs made their mark with dishes favoring lighter ingredients.  If someone wanted old-fashioned lasagna, or eggplant parmesan, or sweet Italian sausages and peppers, or an awesome baked ziti, they were going to have to whip it up at home.  Which is what I do, and I have a couple of recipes to share with you that are so good, you may find yourself humming "That's Amore!" as you sop up the last of the red sauce with real garlic bread.

More recently there has been a resurgence of southern Italian themed restaurant chains where everything is served family-style and the tablecloth is inevitably stained with red sauce.  Two that immediately come to mind are Buca di Beppo and Maggiano's Little Italy.  Neither one compares with Tarantino's in its heyday at the Oak Street location, but they are both pretty good, with Maggiano's edging out Buca's on food and service.

It was to Maggiano's Little Italy at Pointe Orlando that my husband, son and I headed to for a birthday celebration.  We were able to make a 6:00 PM reservation on a Sunday evening.  It's in a touristy area, but parking is available for a small fee.

And now, my version of a restaurant review:

Large portions.  Very good service.

Bread, evoo, balsamic.  Bread fantastic!

Calamari – fried, delish, very good tomato sauce.

Lobster Ravioli in a cream sauce with more lobster – pronounced “very good” – ate the whole thing.


Lobster carbonara over pasta – loved it.

Shrimp parmesan – 8 nice big shrimp, but would have liked more sauce and more cheese.  Served with side of orzo pasta with baby spinach.  Tasty, but I would have liked it better with angel hair pasta and more of the tomato sauce.  Come to think of it, that is how Tarantino's does it.

Crème brulee – smooth, rich vanilla, thin crisp brittle crust.

Special dessert – like a s’mores tiramisu – a thin graham crust, a firm chocolate ganache layer, and two inches of light but rich Italian meringue, torched a touch, and served with sweeps of caramel around the edges of the graham cracker crust.  Decadent.


Maggiano's is known for it's family style service, but there needs to be four diners minimum for that, and we are a family of three.  My husband suggested getting Woody dressed in his taekwando uniform so he could be our fourth, but Cory and Woody had had a spat during the day, so the suggestion was vetoed.

Maggiano's Little Italy, Pointe Orlando, 9101 International Drive, Orlando, Florida.