Pootsie Bread

Pootsie Bread, nee Cheddar-Corn Spoon Bread

On Tuesday, Pootsie, my roommate John's cat, passed away, after 11 years of being huge and awesome. He was pretty badass, all around, and in the four months or so that I got to know him, I liked him. And I'm not blindly pro-cat -- some are cool and some are smelly. Pootsie was cool.

(He was also HUGE. At least part Maine Coon Cat.)

John's grief and sadness, only amplified by Pootsie's rapid decline, needed fixing. On Tuesday night, a group of friends drank to Pootsie's memory; snowed in as we were on Wednesday afternoon, my reaction was to cook for him.

John's from the south, somewhere in bumblefudge (you can't swear on the Internet; it's in the rulebook) Virginia, and seems to me to be very southerny. Or at least his accent says so, which might not even be that heavy, but what the hell do I know -- I'm from Maine. I think I imagine him growing up wearing overalls and chewing straw, for the love of Pete.

Martha's pic, not mine.

Martha Stewart is always emailing me stuff, and one of the recipe's caught my eye as appropriate for the occasion. Cheddar Corn Spoon Bread, a cheesey, almost pudding-like corn bread seemed like the sort of thing they eat in the South, right? Alright, done with spouting preconceived notions about the great state of Virginia (Sic Semper Tyrannis!) et al.

The recipe, found here, involved bringing butter, corn kernels, corn meal, cayenne pepper, and milk to a boil before stirring in cheddar cheese. After the mixture cooled somewhat, I stirred in egg yolks and folded in egg whites I'd beaten to the point where small peaks started to form. The mixture, which already kinda looked at that point like something I would eat, baked 20-odd minutes in a 375 degree oven. In other words, the whole thing was easy.

I liked the dish a great deal, as did, I believe, John, and so, as I copy it into my recipe book, the dish will go by the title "Pootsie Bread."

John, there's more in the fridge.

Potlucky

Potlucky. Adjective. The quality of having inadvertently succeeded in one's duty to a potluck.

I got potlucky. This time.

You see, I consider a potluck to be a form of verbal contract in which individuals entering into a potluck agreement (via RSVP) must bring some food or drink item to fulfill their obligation. I attended a work potluck last week; indeed, I organized it (if sending a confusingly worded Microsoft Outlook calendar invite counts as "organizing"). In doing so, and particularly because I was the "organizer," it was incumbent upon me to bring something.

Except it was a LONG four day week. Prepping for some intense work stuff had gotten the better of me, and I arrived home at 10:30 PM on Thursday night after work and a quick grocery store run, pretty beat, with nary a bit of cooking already done.

Fortunately, I got potlucky.

You see, the dish I was making was nothing more than my own attempt and take on something I saw my French uncle's French mother make the previous weekend. The dish, an onion, cheese, and potato tart, was simple in its essentials, but I had no specifics for quantity, spices, etc. I'd asked her, but I speak minimal French (Bonjour! Alouette!) and she speaks minimal English. Whatever.

Before I started the crust, I preheated my oven to 350 degree, started diced onion sauteeing in butter and set two large red potatoes to a boil in salted water. I began to make a fillo crust as fillo should be prepped, layering it in a 9" pyrex pie dish and brushing melted butter between each layer, trying to tuck the rectangular sheets into something resembling an ovoid. It's cool stuff, fillo; doesn't really look edible when you play with it uncooked. And yes, I consciously chose the spelling "fillo" over phyllo. Deal with it.

I continued to cook my onions until they'd caramelized to light brown and become quite sweet, grated up a bunch of cheddar cheese, and made sure to pull the potatoes out of the boiling water right before they finished cooking. Once I had enough layers of fillo -- again, no rhyme or reason, just a wild guess! -- I filled the bottom of the crust with the caramelized onions and covered them with a layer of cheese. On went a layer of potatoes, thinly sliced, another layer of cheese, and another of potatoes. I reserved a little cheese to be added later in the baking process (no burned cheese, please).

Now, I vaguely recalled my uncle's mother using a bit of ground cloves, and so I followed suit, sprinkling a small amount, less than a 1/4 teaspoon, between layers. Just a sniff of the proceedings informed me the cloves were a good call. Finally, I painted the edges with more melted butter and set the whole thing to bake for about 15-20 minutes. Five minutes before it finished I added the final layer of cheese.

The dish came out nicely. Well, it looked nice. I'd experimented too much to have much of an idea of what it would actually taste like. I went to sleep, finally, ready to try the damn thing just to see if it was any good.

Kinda looks like I have a heavy hand with the cloves. I promise I didn't.

The next day was go time. Now, the crust had gotten a little soggy spending the night in the fridge, as is liable to happen, so a brief reheat in the oven at work was necessary as we approached lunchtime. Good thing, too; the crust ended up as flaky and delicate as only fillo can be, so I imagine that the last minute stint in the oven had been necessary. I think the tart came out was pretty tasty -- the crust was golden brown, the filling was savory, rustic, even earthy, and the folks at work ate it (so it can't have been that bad!). The bottom crust was a bit of a pain to cut through, but other than that, no complaints. It seems, despite no real recipe, too little sleep and barely enough time, I'd gotten potlucky.

If I have a real complaint, it's frustration at myself that I didn't photograph the other dishes my coworkers made. There was Vermont-style baked beans (in a special baked beans crock!!!), a broccoli salad, beets, eggplant punjabi, cookies, chips and guac -- definitely a fun way to liven up lunch.

Here again, the money closeup:

A Few Good Sandwiches

OK, cooking is all well and good, but sometimes, you really just want a sandwich.

Making a sandwich is an art form -- don't try to deny it. Why else would Subway call them "Sandwich Artists"? But I digress.

I don't always keep sandwichy things around my house -- after all, lettuce, tomato and other sandwich accoutrement often go bad faster than I can eat them. But seized as I was by a craving the other night, I constructed a pretty tasty sandwich:

Sandwich dominated.

We're talking about some honey-roasted turkey, thick-sliced on toasted nine grain bread with romaine lettuce, swiss cheese, tomato, red onion, and stone-ground maple mustard. The sandwich is pictured here with my signature chipotle-cinnamon baked sweet potato fries (recipe at the bottom of the post).

I have an identical sandwich for lunch today. I combat the all-too-frequent soggifying of the bread by the tomato by ensuring a protecting layer of turkey AND lettuce rests between the bread and tomato.

If you like looking at pictures of sandwiches I have eaten (and why wouldn't you?) hit up some blasts from the Hungry Sam past discussing sandwiches!

• Potbelly's Breakfast Sandwich
• Chicken Salad, Apple, and Cheddar Panini
• Amazing Turkey Club at Lawson's (z"l)
• PB&B&J Awesomeness

And as promised, a recipe:

Chipotle-Cinnamon Baked Sweet Potato Fries

-One sweet potato per person
-Olive oil
-Ground Chipotle Peppers
-Cinnamon
-Salt and Pepper

1) Preheat oven to 425 degrees
2) Using a sharp knife, cut sweet potatoes into wedges. The goal is to cut them into as similar a size as possible so they cook at the same rate.
3) In a large bowl or plastic bag, toss potatoes with olive oil (about 1 tsp/potato), chipotle (about 1/2 tsp/potato or to taste), cinnamon (1 tsp/person), salt and pepper (just eyeball it).  Make sure wedges are coated thoroughly.
4) Grease a baking sheet and spread the wedges out so they're just one layer deep.
5) Bake 30 minutes or until wedges reach desired doneness (crispy, soft, whatever you like). It helps is at some point you flip them.
6) Enjoy!

Why Marinate? And a Recipe. And News.

UPDATE: Chef friends have added info in the comments section. Check it out!

Before I launch into the purpose and science of marinades, two quick pieces of cool, Hungry Sam-oriented news. One, that only I and perhaps my blogger friends might consider interesting -- I'm getting up to 100 views on a couple of my semi-recent posts. Sweet.

Much more interesting: Someone sent a screenshot of my recent post RE: Candy Cane Tootsie Pops to the good people at Tootsie. Said people emailed me AND ARE SENDING ME SEVERAL BAGS OF THEM. WHAT NOW?!?!?!

This is awesome, wonderful news. (Also SUPER public relations. All my readers should go out and spend money on Tootsie products.)

Anyways, to the point: Marinades.

I'll admit, I have gone back and forth on marinades, particularly for meats. Often, I find it easier, faster, and nearly as good to use a good dry rub or some such. However, having decided the other night that I deserved a steak, I opted to whip up a quick marinade since I had tome on my hands anyways.

First, the recipe: For .6 lbs New York strip, I mixed 1/4 cup olive oil, 1/4 cup soy sauce, and pinches each of dried rosemary, garlic, and fresh ground ginger. I seasoned my beef in salt and pepper, threw it in a plastic bag with my marinade, and left it in the fridge for 4 hours, flipping whenever I thought to (maybe 3 times all told).

I grilled my steaks to rare on my Foreman grill, and boy, did they come out beautifully. Savory and well-flavored throughout, they had a perfect caramelized crusting on the exterior. Interior was that just-cooked texture, just-pink coloring that marks (in my opinion) a perfect rare steak.

Now, these particular New York strips had very little marbling of fat, which is often what makes an expensive steak tender, as fat breaks down quickly while cooking. Yet the steaks I cooked had that melt-on-your-tongue-like-a-pat-of-butter tenderness. Why?

The marinade. Chef's know this from experience, but from a chemical perspective, why do marinades tenderize as well as flavor...ize?

Basically, not all connective tissue in meat is created equal -- some breaks down during the cooking process at a faster rate or to a different degree than others. This is why cheap meats are best when cooked for a long time, such as in braising, and more expensive meats tend to have more fat marbled throughout, since fat breaks down VERY quickly when heat is applied. The goal of marinating is to help all the meat break down a little faster, leaving less tough meat remaining when it's cooked fast (as in grilling). Marinades do this by imbuing the meat with enzymes that themselves break down the connective tissue in meat, enzymes such as papain, found in ginger, garlic, papaya, pineapple, etc.

Things to remember when marinating:

• Contact is key -- the smaller the pieces of meat that are marinating, the better able the marinade is at getting in and tenderizing the interior of your meat.


• Marinating breaks down meat -- so don't marinate too long. The more fat (i.e. higher quality) the meat, particularly beef and lamb, the less time, generally speaking, you should marinate.


• Marinating can dry meat out -- so either cook quickly or in liquid after marinating.

Also, as a bonus, I'll tell you that while I'm writing this I'm watching the Patriots crush the Bears while beer-and-mustard braising a beef stew and making fig and walnut biscotti. Yeah Sunday night!

Frying Potatoes, Sustainably

Latke's sizzling away...

Latkes. Delicious, greasy, fried potatoes smothered in sour cream and/or (definitely and) apple sauce. Runs contrary to the Hungry Sam healthy mentality, no? Well, yes, insofar as that mentality is absolute. It's not; treats are an important part of living a healthy lifestyle -- as long as they're infrequent indulgences and not an everyday thing.

But this post isn't about treats, it's about diving, spoons and graters first, into latke making with my ninth grade religious school class last night.

But wait, you ask. What sort of awesome curriculum has room for latke cooking?

The sustainability sort! See, my fellow teachers and I have been teaching our students all about sustainability this semester, how choices can be made to promote a future and a world that can sustain our children and children's children. 

The idea in doing a sustainable cooking program was this: Making the sustainable choice for all of our meals all of the time is hard. But making it SOMETIMES is easy, and doesn't necessarily impact flavor or price of the dish you're making.

Furthermore, cooking is a basic skill that facilitates making sustainable choices. When you're doing the cooking (as opposed to eating out or buying pre-made), you can control the ingredients, you know where they come from, how they've been prepared, what sort of carbon footprint they have, or at least you're more able to determine that information. (There are other good reasons to cook, outlined in Hungry Sam's new "Why Cook? A Guide" page.)

When you don't have a Cuisinart...

So, in order to inject some competition into all of this (of course), I picked up three sets of ingredients: a regular, non-organic set, an organic set, and a farm stand set. My challenge was to buy approximately the same quantities of each set of ingredients for about the same price. I did so -- at least in this case, buying ingredients from a variety of sources didn't need to impact the budget. For their part, three teams of students were to cook the best latkes possible, and our judges (the rabbis and high school program director) were to both select the best-tasting latke and try to guess the ingredients' source.

I have to hand it to them, my guys threw themselves into this, grating, peeling, and frying their way to crispy goodness. Some of our students had solid cooking experience, others had little or none, but the energy was absolutely there -- which of course, as a food enthusiast, I appreciated. These young adults wanted those latkes, and the victory.

In the judging process, our three judges each tried the latkes with their toppings of choice. Only one judge correctly determined the source of the winning batch, the organic latkes, but the judge's decision underscored our very unscientific conclusion: if organic is at all a more sustainable choice, it doesn't need to mean a more expensive or less tasty latke.

A photograph of the winning latkes, one which CERTAINLY fails to do them justice:

The "recipe" we used:
-Some amount of potatoes, like 2 lbs.-ish
-Half an onion
-An eggs worth of egg whites
-Two pinches of flour

Mix, make little latke patties, squish 'em flat and dry, then fry.

Delicious.

Spatchcocked Chicken (Hehehe)

It's official -- I WILL be roasting a chicken a week from now on. Why? you might ask. Don't interrupt me and I'll tell you.

Because it's AWESOME. And fun. And cheap, and delicious.

Tonight, BEE and I roasted a chicken, spatchcock-style, with lemon, thyme, and rosemary and young potatoes and fennel on the side. We snagged a 7.5 lb. chicken (a big sucker) for about $10 and now I have awesome food for at least 4 more meals (and a ton of high quality chicken stock).

Spatchcocking is a good choice for roasting a chicken quickly, particularly a larger one, because you're essentially spreading out the meat by eliminating the cavity. To spatchcock, flip your bird so the breasts are facing down onto your work surface. Using cooking shears or a heavy duty set of scissors, cut along the spine on either side, and remove it and the giblets. Turn the chicken back over and press down between the breasts so the bird is folded out.

We placed the bird on a foil-covered cooking sheet, then rubbed the skin with olive oil, salt, and pepper before covering it in dried thyme, fresh rosemary sprigs and thin slices of lemon. We surrounded it with quartered potatoes and diced fennel bulbs, drizzled them with olive oil, and sprinkled with salt, pepper, and some of the fresh fennel fronds. Prep took maybe 15 minutes, tops. So easy. Here's how she looked before she went in:

The chicken cooked at 400 degrees for about 50 minutes. Meanwhile, I threw the spine, meat attached, along with the giblets into a pot of boiling water, which I spiced with thyme, salt and pepper -- cooked for about two hours and I now have homemade, excellent chicken stock for the freezer. Win.

The chicken was incredible; I've paid plenty for worse at nice restaurants. The skin was perfectly crispy and spiced, not too fatty, while the aroma and flavor of the fennel filled the moist and completely tender meat. The potatoes were even better, buttery-flavored from the sheen of chicken fat on the bottom of the pan with just the right bite from the fennel fronds. Friends, the final effect:

I will do this weekly -- the whole meal was under $15 and even excluding the stock I have four meals-worth of leftovers. Plus it's fun, and reasonably fast if you spatchcock. Which is also a fun word to say.

Forays Into Thai

I am an equal opportunity eater; in my cook book, open immigration is a plus. I have never met a cuisine I have not liked and as my cooking has developed, there has been no one vein to my adventures. I have, at different times, experimented with Moroccan, Lebanese, Ethiopian, Greek, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Latin American, most European styles, and Southern food (which feels foreign to me).

I have never, until now, tried making Thai. Though I love Thai food dearly, it felt, somehow, as though there were some invisible barrier to cooking it. I thought there were perhaps too many exotic spices (false) or sauces (not really) or ingredients (maybe for SOME dishes). In short, I felt about making Thai food the way many people feel about making any food at all.

I decided to reject that notion. I believe in brotherhood through brunch, sisterhood through supper. Without experimenting with Thai food, how could I welcome Thailand into the family of nations the fusion of which informs my cooking?

Now, I would LOVE to make phat kee mao (drunken noodles) or phat see ew (or however you transliterate those sweet, stir fried noodles) but I can't find the wide rice noodles (help, D.C. friends!). I did discover thin rice noodles -- perfect for phat thai.

Phat thai is an extremely simple dish in terms of ingredients. Other than the noodles, which apparently are found in many grocery stores, the only exotic is the fish sauce (if you've made certain Japanese or any Thai you probably already have some on hand). I had some boneless chicken breasts already, and in an effort to make the whole thing more colorful and more wholesome, I decided I would throw in some broccoli and a red bell pepper. I wanted to use chopped peanuts, but Giant was out (I know!!!) and I forgot I had some. Whoops.

Vamping off the noodle package directions, this is how I went about fashioning my first attempt at Thai:

Pad Thai

3/4 of a package of thin rice noodles (about 8 oz.)
4 T. fish sauce
1 T. brown sugar
1 t. paprika
3 eggs
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (VEGGIES -- use tofu instead)
2 scallions, sliced finely
2 heads of broccoli cut into small pieces
1/2 red bell pepper, sliced thinly

Small handful of chopped peanuts

half a can of bean sprouts (just throw away the other half, unless you make a lot of asian dishes. Blech)
garlic
salt and pepper

1) Place the noodles in warm water, spreading them out as much as possible, and allow them to soak for 30-40 minutes. Meanwhile, whisk together the brown sugar, fish sauce, and paprika.

2) Meanwhile, split the breasts lengthwise into cutlets using a sharp knife (a process called "butterflying") and slice thinly. Saute on medium in oil (I always just use olive oil; I'm sure it would be more authentic with something else) and garlic and season with salt and pepper. Cook through until no pink remains, but no further, then remove from pan.

3) Scramble the eggs in the bottom of the pan until done. Then, add pepper, broccoli, chicken and the (well-drained) noodles and stir fry over medium. After a minute or two add the fish sauce mixture and about a half cup of water. Continue stir frying, adding more water if need be. This is the tricky part, because underdone, rice noodles are inedible and overdone they're a sticky mass of noodles -- there's a window of perfection that I hit, but totally on accident.

4) When noodles are cooked through (lots of taste-testing required) but before they get too sticky, remove everything from the heat to a serving bowl and toss well. Top with chopped peanuts, scallions, and bean sprouts (which, despite their tinged look, actually have some health benefits -- Vitamin C most notably).

Enjoy!