What's for dinner?

Can't stop for long to chat. There's a pan of lasagna in the kitchen as big as me and as soon as the Italian bread is toasted, I've got to dive into it. Husband has perfected the art of making homemade lasagna. It's excellent.

What am I doing Christmas Eve?

1. Baked cornbread to use tomorrow in the dressing (I use my mother-in-law's cornbread dressing recipe).
2. Baked loaf of crusty bread to use in the dressing.
3. Baked pecan pie.
4. Baked pumpkin pie.
4. Cleaned and readied turkey for roasting.
5. Made turkey broth from neck and giblets.
6. Sauteed celery, carrots and onions for dressing.
7. Cooked sweet potatoes for glazing tomorrow.
8. Passed out cookies to garbage truck guys (schmoozing the public works guys is always a good idea - mailman got his cookies yesterday).
9. Cleaned up kitchen, cleaned up kitchen, cleaned up kitchen......

All this cooking is strictly from scratch, mind you. I still have to make the brine solution for the turkey and brine it this afternoon, and make Christmas Eve dinner. Then there's Christmas morning breakfast and fancy turkey dinner tomorrow. Whew. If anyone needs me, I'll be in the kitchen...

A south-of-the-border YUM

Anyone who has access to the America's Test Kitchen website needs to look up their recipe for Enchiladas Verde. I had never eaten a tomatillo or a poblano chile before dinner today. My husband wasn't sold on the taste of the tomatillos, but I loved this dish. If you're a Mexican food fan, make this soon. I don't know about other recipes for this dish that you can find online, because it's the first time I have eaten it. I trusted America's Test Kitchen and they never steer me wrong (well, maybe not that scalloped potato recipe with the garlic - but almost never). I would recommend seeing if you can find canned tomatillos and poblanos because roasting them and peeling the peppers is a pain!

I am wrestling with the ethics of including the recipe here. It's on the PBS TV show for free, but you have to be a member to get it online at their website. It's in the cookbook, but I bought that. ARRRGH! I hate copyright issues!

A kitchen day

As the days creep toward fall, I get the cooking bug. So this morning, after I watered the flowers on the patio and picked a few tomatoes, I headed to the kitchen. First up: I have been craving potato soup. I have a recipe called The Best Potato Soup in the World. Grandiose claim, but they might be right. I whipped up a pot for my lunch and to stock the freezer: While the soup was simmering, I baked a couple of dozen devil's food cupcakes - portion control. After they were frosted (not heavily, I like cake but don't care for frosting), I packed them for the freezer.

And, during all of this, the bread maker was churning out dinner roll dough, which were baked after the cupcakes were done.

Then I got inspired to make corn chowder for supper. I know it looks a lot like the potato soup but trust me it's different.And tonight, after the kitchen is cleaned up (again!) I will make some tomato sauce with these beauties:The bad thing is, with all this cooking happening, my husband has a stomach bug and can't eat!

What's so hard about cooking?

I admit to being a little perplexed about the mere existence of the Food Network on cable. In an age where almost no one seems to actually cook dinner and sit down together as a family to eat, why a whole network about food? When did cooking become a spectator sport?

Perplexed, and then completely exasperated, about the way cooking has become a hobby. It's not a hobby, for pity's sake, it's a survival skill. The same way as sewing on a button, washing and ironing a shirt, taking care of your own house and car are survival skills - not that anyone much does any of those things anymore.

(Oh, a little sideline rant - have you seen the commercial for a cleaning firm called "The Maids", where the smug lady of the house says of cleaning her kitchen "Better them than me". Yeah, because you're, like, so important that scouring a cooktop is such a waste of your talents. I don't think so.)

Anyway. . .I was thinking about the dearth of home cooking while making dinner this evening. As I do almost every single evening. Unless we're having a roast chicken or pot roast or something where I had to start the main course earlier, I usually wander into the kitchen about 5 or 5:15 p.m., start making stuff, we eat around 6 p.m. and by 7 the kitchen is washed up and I turn off the light for the night (well, not tonight because there's brownies in the oven. That recipe from the newspaper was so terrible that we had to perform a do-over with a recipe that works.) I could probably get the meal on the table faster (my mom could make any weekday dinner in 30 minutes flat - everything from scratch - but she knew, trusted and used a pressure cooker, and they scare me silly) but I don't like to rush. Is that such a terrible investment of your time to get a fresh home-cooked scratch meal?

Take tonight for instance: mushroom stuffed chicken breasts, sauteed carrots and mashed potatoes. Add iced tea and it was pretty good. The only other thing my husband could have wanted (besides the brownies he requested for dessert) was a good piece of Italian bread and we were out of it.

It doesn't take a genius to make this kind of dinner, and I think it's pretty representative of the sort of weekday cooking that anyone could do. Get out the cutting board and peel a few potatoes, cut them in half and put them in a pan of water to boil. (Oh, and what about the commercial for the bagged peeled and diced potatoes you microwave and mash? I HATE that commercial. The idiocy of it. Implying peeling a few potatoes is such a Herculean effort.) Peel and slice 2 or 3 good size carrots. Throw the sliced carrots into a skillet with a dab of butter and some water. Cover and start them cooking.

I've written about the mushroom stuffed chicken before.

Keep an eye on the carrots and when they're almost done toss in some dill. When the potatoes are cooked, fish them out and put them through a ricer, add salt, pepper, butter and milk and make mashed potatoes. Use a pyrex bowl. When they're ready, put the pan back on the burner and perch the bowl on the top, covered with the saucepan lid. The potatoes will wait for a while, kept warm by the steam from the boiling pan of water.

Your chicken should be just about ready. You could also make a salad while the potatoes and chicken are cooking, if you have the notion and the ingredients.

Now, that wasn't so hard, was it?

This is by no means "gourmet" food. But it's all fresh, home-made and easy. No MSG, no preservatives, and pretty cheap, too. I would much rather have this than a Lean Cuisine or something from the drive-through. Am I weird?

Heat, humidity, gnats - and brownies

I spend about 2 1/2 hours outside this morning, weeding and watering, and came in so tired my knees were shaking. It's in the mid-eighties with the humidity pegging the meter (ah, summer in the southeast - and it isn't even summer yet) and it's hard to describe how a temperature in the mid-eighties can be so oppressive.

By the time I finished I looked like someone dipped me in a bucket of water. No wind and high humidity so nothing ever evaporates and you get hotter and hotter. By next month it will be really ugly, and will stay that way until September.

Oh, and let's not forget the gnats. My lawn guy calls them the East Brainerd gnats, because he swears where he lives north of the city he doesn't have them. Don't stand around with your mouth open in my yard, or something will fly in. So you're walking around in sodden clothes, scratched up by the roses from trying to weed around them, lugging a heavy garden hose, surrounded by a flying cloud of devil-bugs. Oh, yeah, gardening's fun.

My husband asks why I do it. Well, I like to see flowers growing and I don't want the yard to look like an abandoned lot. Since the lawn guy mows, I get out of the worst of it, so I try to keep everything else in shape. And my latest landscaping additions look pretty heartening so far. The new bushes are putting out lots of growth, the new azaleas are blooming, and my tomato plants are setting fruit. I may be a little miserable out there while I'm working but once I come in and shower, everything looks a lot better.

Now to the brownies. My husband tore a recipe out of the newspaper yesterday: "Best-ever Brownies". With a name like that, they must know they're setting themselves up for a fall. Wait - it gets better - with: Nancy Reagan's Frosting. First off, nothing against the lady but Nancy Reagan is about a size minus 2 and probably never weighed more than 80 pounds in her life. You KNOW she doesn't eat frosting, much less cook it.

So, how were they? The brownies were appropriately fudge-y and rich, but a little thin. The recipe specified a 9 inch pan, but I think using an 8 inch pan would be better. The frosting is a cooked type and was very rich but a little grainy, and really more like a glaze. The recipe made twice as much as needed, so I put the rest in a Tupperware bowl in the refrigerator. I just checked, and I now have a chocolate brick. I have no idea how to make it smooth enough to use. I just checked the newspaper's website and the recipes aren't available. If they are added to the archives, I will post a link so you can try them too.

You bought what??!!

Occasionally you find yourself shelling out perfectly good money for something so embarrassing that you wish you could block it from showing up on your credit card.

No, not THAT.

It's an electric pepper grinder. And it's not like we didn't have a pepper grinder already. We did. That was the problem.

Fresh ground pepper is a wonderful thing, something I never had when I was growing up. Pepper came in a Durkee tin which lasted probably 5 years, so the pepper certainly wasn't fresh. We never noticed. But, unfortunately, when y0u cook a lot and read cookbooks and watch America's Test Kitchen on PBS, you become aware of things you didn't know you needed until then. A pepper mill was one of them.

To try out fresh ground pepper, I bought one of the prefilled McCormick pepper grinder dispensers you can find in the supermarket. What a revelation! The freshness and pungency sold the idea. I used these a while but the grind was inconsistent and occasionally you would bite down on a hunk of pepper. I had to buy a real grinder.

But which one? My husband searched for equipment reviews and discovered it was the consensus that Peugeot made the best ones. Yup, Peugeot, just like the cars. You'd be surprised what some of the European car manufacturers also produce. Peugeot didn't just make a pepper grinder, they made a slew of them. Stainless steel, copper, wood, clear acrylic, acrylic and wood, acrylic and chrome......take your pick.

We finally settled on a set of clear acrylic salt and pepper grinders with black walnut bases and caps. Beautiful things. We waited with baited breath until they arrived, and then filled them and tried them out. Fantastic! They produced a nice even grind, and worked like a finely tuned machine.

But they were small, maybe only 4 inches tall, and didn't hold many peppercorns. And since the grinding area was small too, it didn't produce pepper very quickly. This was fine for the table, but a problem to use when cooking, where you ground and ground and ground and ground to season one pot. We decided that these would be good in the dining room but by the stove we needed another model. And they do look wonderful on the table. Guests never fail to notice the Peugeot emblazoned on the base. I had already had bought a salt pig to keep salt by the stove for seasoning while cooking, which was much easier to use on the fly - just reach in and grab a pinch of sea salt when needed. (And that opens up the whole issue of gourmet salts, in which I simply refuse to get embroiled.)

While browsing through Amazon.com, I came upon a lever action grinder. You could hold it in one hand and pump the lever to dispense pepper. It looked like a good design, was much larger to hold more pepper, and could be used one-handed, which was a plus. So I ordered it.

When it arrived, it was also filled and tested with much anticipation. And while I can say that it does produce a prodigious amount of pepper at a time, the grinder wasn't consistent and the hunk-of-pepper-in-your-food problem re-emerged. Plus, while the one-handed operation was a good idea in theory, you had a seriously tired hand after seasoning a pot of mashed potatoes.

There had to be a better way. I went back to reading equipment reviews.

That was when I came across the Trudeau Gravati, a battery operated pepper grinder with a gravity (get it? Gravati?) switch. Fill it, put in the batteries, and when you invert the grinder it goes to town, producing pepper at a rate hand grinders can only dream about. There's an adjustment on the top for the grind, coarse to very fine, which doesn't seem to impede its production in the least. It's consistent, handy and appeals to all my retired engineer geek genes. It's a winner.

I am acutely aware of the reaction most readers are having right about now. ELECTRIC PEPPER GRINDER? Isn't that a little, I don't know, extreme? Overkill? Ridiculous, in fact? Well, maybe it is, but it works so well I can overlook the obvious reactions that to be honest occurred to me too, even as I was ordering it. But, I have to tell you, if you have any members of the household with dexterity and hand strength issues, it's the berries.Here's the whole lineup, including the salt pig, which really does have pig ears and a tail. I couldn't resist.

If you want something seasoned, you've come to the right house.

A roast chicken to make the angels weep

First off, a disclaimer: I did not invent this. Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa did. But boy, did she do good. First, you need to get a good chicken, and that's getting harder and harder, since they have NO fat on them and roast up dry and stringy as shoelaces. The local Food Lion had an all-natural whole chicken, no growth hormones, no chemical supplements, no additives, no antibiotics, vegetable and grain fed. It was the best chicken I've bought in a long time and it deserved to be treated well.

And it's easy-peasy. Get a couple of lemons and a head of garlic. Slice the lemons in half. Slice the garlic head in half along the circumference, so you can see the halves of all the cloves. Wait, you say, that's a LOT of garlic. Yes, it is, but don't worry.

Stuff the lemon halves and the garlic head in the chicken, as much of it as will fit. Leave out a half a lemon if it's tight. You can also stuff in some fresh sage if you have it, but I never do and I don't miss it. Rub the softened butter on the skin of the chicken. Truss the bird, place in a v-rack in a roasting pan and roast at 425 degrees until 185 degrees in the thigh meat. I have experimented with starting the roasting upside down, and flipping it halfway through to crisp the breast skin. That way, you get browned, crisp skin all over and the thigh meat is exposed to the heat and cooks faster, lessening the danger of drying out the white meat.

That's it. Really. No salt, no pepper, no fancy seasonings. It's great.

And if you cook a pot of green beans with ham for seasoning, like I did, and make some mashed potatoes, what oh what more would you need?

Cooking with Campbell's soup - really

All I knew was it was chicken for dinner. Two boneless, skinless breasts were thawing in the refrigerator. And I was completely out of ideas. Then, I remembered that I used to stuff the butterflied breasts with a mushroom stuffing and bake in a cream sauce. Well, cream was out - literally, didn't have any - and figured that my bod didn't need any more cream sauce. What was in the pantry? Ah, cream of mushroom soup (not the condensed kind, the ready to eat variety). Not bad on the calories. Let's see.

I sauteed a few sliced up mushrooms, added some bread crumbs, seasoning and nutmeg, with a bit of butter for moisture. Then, I butterflied the chicken breasts and stuffed them. Wiped out the skillet where the mushrooms were cooked and added a bit of oil, then sauteed the breast bundles on both sides. After that, poured the soup over the top and simmered covered until the chicken was done. After removing the chicken, stirred in a slurry of cornstarch and water to thicken the sauce.

Sliced thinly and fanned out artfully on a platter with the sauce drizzled over the top, this didn't look like a Campbell's recipe. It looked pretty fancy, actually. And it was good. And quick. I should bite my tongue before I mock a Campbell's soup recipe again.

I don't have dinner parties, I feed people

If you come to my house for a meal, don't expect fancy. Which is not to say that you'll ever be presented with a paper dinner napkin at my table. I just don't believe in it. You'll have proper table linen, and you'll be eating off the Spode plates with a nice glass for your iced tea or whatever. I just don't get all formal about it. If it's only one guest, we'll probably be eating in the kitchen.

Our good friend came by the house for dinner last night. This guest proved problematical when it came time to plan the menu. He's limiting the carbs for medical reason. But he's a real meat and pasta person. Not big on the vegetables. Never met a bean. A hunk of meat and a baked potato suited him just fine, or anything with tomato sauce.

So what could I make last night? I had some lovely steaks, so the "hunk of meat" portion of the menu was set, but what for a side dish? All my America's Test Kitchen cookbooks called to me from the shelf, but I was stymied at every turn. Potato galettes? Nope. Glazed carrots? The honey nixed them. Something peas or corn? High carb vegetables, can't do that. Zucchini? I can't do that, too much zucchini this summer. Ditto tomatoes. Not sure if he eats squash, not sure I can eat beets. The friend won't eat beans. The greens were looking a little sad at the grocery. My husband is not a fan of cauliflower. Rice is out, although the arborio has been whispering "Risotto, risotto" to me from the pantry for weeks.

This was all so much easier when I could make the friend a big pot of pasta and we'd all go into a carb stupor after dinner.

Finally I settled on broccoli. Steamed, with balsamic-basil vinagrette sounded temping, but I wasn't sure. Certainly steamed but how to dress them for a picky eater? Of course, cheddar. A wonderful, silky cheese sauce. For my money, you could put cheese sauce on a brick and make it palatable. I rounded it out with a garden salad with lots of peppers and mushrooms and carrots and tomato. The guys drenched it with blue cheese dressing (evidently, fats aren't a problem) and I wrinkled my nose and reached for the lite ranch.

But, I couldn't help wondering, why does the idea of cooking for someone, even a friend we've know for 30 years, send me into a paroxysm of worry? Preparing food for someone is so personal, so intimate, that it feels easy to screw it up. You are preparing nourishment for their physical bodies, and hopefully giving them pleasure and warmth and welcoming. If all goes well, they leave your home feeling cared for, catered to and coddled. It's a big undertaking. But it feels so nice when it works.

I especially like to make dinner for our male friends who are single or employed away from home and travel a lot. I honestly don't know how these guys don't come down with beri beri or something, the way they eat. They seldom or never cook. One single guy met with the realtor in her office when he sold his last house, and when she asked if it had a gas or electric range, he didn't know! I'm not kidding here. The only food I've ever seen in his kitchen is a bag of Pecan Sandies. Another one eats every meal in a restaurant - breakfast, lunch, dinner. His range was broken for a year and it didn't impact him at all.

The friend that was here last night is working 100 miles from home and living in a rented apartment during the week. He usually gets home on the weekends, but recently, work has been 10-12 hours a day/7 days a week. It made me feel good when he said that was the best meal he'd had in a month.

Musings, culinary and otherwise

Just cleaned up the kitchen, again, after dinner (Sisyphus and that rock have nothing on me - nothing more inevitable and repetitive than washing dishes) and am contemplating the success of the last meal. Win some, lose some.

First off, although you can get some great recipes from America's Test Kitchen (ATK) on PBS, don't be seduced by that public television imprimatur into thinking that all their recipes are going to be healthy. We're talking butter and cream in serious rotation here. I don't know if they're worried about their cholesterol levels, but brother, they should be.

The recipes looked promising. Scalloped potatoes, how can you mess that up? Four pounds of russets, heavy cream, onions, garlic, cheese. What's not to love? Well, the onions and the garlic were NOT GOOD IDEAS. They hijacked the dish and carried it to a place were the potatoes didn't have a chance. And all that cream? Not enough Tums in the western hemisphere tonight for the way I feel.

I got seduced by a new recipe's charms again. Nothing wrong with the way I make scalloped potatoes. Been making them that way for 40 years. They're good. But I read cookbooks like other people read novels, and sometimes I fall for their siren's song. Christopher Kimball sure looked like he enjoyed them on the ATK video. But, it's like my Mom says, every time they take a bite on these cooking shows it's like they never had food before. I'm still not convinced that ATK isn't getting a kickback from the garlic grower's association. They put the darned stuff in everything.

Now for the success: They have a mean recipe for pie crust and I just had a piece of absolutely grand apple pie. The crust has, believe me, sour cream in it. It also has 16 tablespoons of butter, cold, cut into cubes. That's TWO STICKS, people! Good grief, why wouldn't it be good? I hope Vermont has adequate ambulance service; Kimball is going to need it if he keeps cooking this way. Anyway, with half Granny Smith apples for texture and half Gala for sweetness (didn't have Golden Delicious in the house) precooked to soften them and immerse them in cinnamon and sugar, that was some good eats.

Then, back to the kitchen to clean up..................

I have to tell you, that smooth-top electric range irritates the crap out of me sometimes. Cleaning that thing is half my after-supper work. You can't just wash the darned thing, oh no, you have to buy special ceramic range top cleaner, and you'd better buy it, because for some reason almost nothing else (except maybe a sharp paring knife, scraping gently -- but I didn't say that) is going to get boiled-over pasta or splattered and burned-on tomato sauce off the ceramic surface. And the paper towels -- I go to Sam's Club and buy the nine roll packages now because I run through them like water. I didn't buy three rolls of paper towels a year before this range came into my kitchen. The only way to use that ceramic cleaner is to dump a glob of it on the range top and start scrubbing with the paper towels, changing them frequently. You don't need to buy the expensive ones, the cheaper and more abrasive the better. Burned on potato starch does not give up easily.

Of course, the only other option here would have been to buy the old-fashioned coil eye ranges. This benighted place doesn't have natural gas service. I would give something critical to get a gas stove. I learned to cook on them and electric ranges make me crazy. You can't just set the burner to a temperature. You sort of choose a temperature continuum. Suppose you adjust the knob to about 350 degrees. The heating coil is going to cycle, don't you know, so it's actually more like 350-370-360-340-320-310-330-350-370-340 and so on. On/off/on/off/on/off/on. This gets especially critical when you want to get a pot of soup barely simmering. The temperature fluctuates so much it becomes almost impossible.

My idea of internet porn is the Thermador website. If you cook any at all, tell me you haven't just stared slack-jawed at those gorgeous appliances. Pity that their ranges cost as much as my entire kitchen remodel did. So I'm stuck with Whirlpool. But I have lusted in my heart for those stainless steel beauties.