Pumpkin Soup

First, the backstory for why this pumpkin--er, I mean, recipe-- had to be done today. I mean, why I had to blog about it today.

A few years ago, I moved in to a house that my Dad had just moved out of, and to my continually increasing gratitude, I inherited the garden he had planted. Besides discovering that I LOVED Juliet tomatoes (the kind he had planted), I also discovered the joys of fresh-baked home-grown pumpkin. That fall was when I came up with this recipe, which is darn quick and easy, and eminently edible.

Which is just the kind of recipe one needs when one's mother gets a 60-lb supposed-to-be-decorative (and it was, in its past life) pumpkin from freecycle with the intent of processing and, over the course of time, consuming said pumpkin.


"I'm going to get a very big pumpkin from freecycle," she says. "I'm bringing your dad along to help carry it."

I deeply regret to tell you that I didn't get a shot of this thing when it was whole. In fact, I was thinking of calling this posting "The Slaughter of the Great Pumpkin: A Photo Essay," but that seemed to be over-promising without the "before" pictures; I hope that the ones I have here will give at least some sense of the scale of the thing.

When I came downstairs this morning, these four pieces were all that was left of the once-great pumpkin; three similarly sized pieces had already been chopped even smaller and then distributed in such a way as to take advantage of every large cooking apparatus available in our teensy kitchen: two baking trays in the oven, both two-quart cooking pots simmering on the stove, and the one-and-a-half quart crockpot on "hi" on the counter. Needless to say, the house was suffused with the smell of baking-and-boiling hard winter squash. Which, I am very thankful to report, is a very happy smell for me.


You aren't getting tired of this yet, are you?

We had discussed whether or not Dad might have to use a chainsaw or, since he doesn't personally own one (a chain saw), perhaps he might use an axe (which he does own). In the end, a trusty kitchen knife worked out just fine. The pumpkin was surprisingly soft, which isn't necessarily a good sign-- Mom ended up cutting out bits which she felt were too dodgy for non-starving humans to eat.

This last shot is for the sheer pleasure of showing off my mother's beautiful, strong, capable hand(s-- not much of the second one showing). When I was growing up, she was always the one who opened stuck jars. She had been a pianist and a clarinetist before she married, and hadn't given either of them up yet when I was small; even now, the fact that she types so much in her job means that she hasn't lost much strength. I also love the fact that her palms are slightly plump, like Yo-Yo Ma's. Being a cellist-- specifically, going to many concerts and paying close attention to where the action was-- has made me a bit of a hand conniseur. Aren't hers beautiful?

And now for the recipe section:

Pumpkin Soup (makes approximately 1/2 gallon?)

Ingredients and instructions:

1 T or so fresh slivered ginger (if you hate the recipe because you used powdered, don't blame me)
1 T or so fresh chopped OR bottled garlic
1 T or so olive oil or other preferred cooking oil

Get the oil spitting hot in a skillet, then fry the garlic and ginger until the garlic is getting brown. Remove these from the skillet and put them in the big pot you're planning to cook the soup in.

1 c (more or less, depending on taste) sliced onion
2 T or so oil

Fry the onion until it is both soft and brown; when these have been achieved, put it in the soup pot, too.

5-6 cups cooked pumpkin
1 can coconut milk
1 1/2 t nutmeg, if desired (adjust according to taste)
2 t salt (yes, you can definitely add more-- I tend to cook low sodium)
2 T sugar, according to taste
garnish of cashews or peanut butter, if desired

Dump these in the pot; heat everything through. If you have an immersion blender, you can use it, but if I were you I definitely wouldn't put it, in batches, through a regular blender. Maybe use a potato masher if you have one handy. I just used a spatula tonight. The goal of blending/mashing/sorta-chopping-with-a-spatula is to get the pumpkin in to small enough chunks that the other ingredients/flavorings have a chance to do their jobs.

Dang!

I really do try to have quality control. Really. Truly. Even though no one's going to believe me after this post.

Did anyone who tried that oatmeal pancake recipe find the batter to be a bit... dry?

Yes?

Please, for the love of yumminess, do not give up on oatmeal pancakes because of the flakiness of she who introduced you to them. Just add an extra half-cup of water (or milk) to the batter. Or more, as needed, to make it the proper consistency (which is what I had to do tonight, and I'm in ever-humid Summertime Maryland).

I've now fixed the original recipe.

So sorry. I'll try really hard not to do that again. Stay tuned for Samosas. Oh, wait, but we have to talk about fried onions first. We'll get there.

SAC

I LOVE lentilburgers!

Truth be told, I'm not really sure why. I used to hate lentils, and I think I kept that one up a lot longer than I kept up the hatred of onions.

So. Normally I try to only blog about recipes that I have tried on multiple people, on multiple occasions, which said people on said occasions liked well enough that I had confidence that my culinary offering would be at least palatable to the general public. Lentilburgers, however, I just made up (my version of) last week-- but I love them so much that I just had to share. I'll try to blog something better soon, but meanwhile you can just shake your head and chuckle at my craziness, and, if you've lost your job recently and are living on food storage, TRY them. Or even if you haven't and aren't, you could do it so that you can call me up and tell me you loved me so much that you tried this recipe, despite the fact that its main ingredient is lentils.

Ingredients:
1/4 cup of dehydrated onions, covered with
1/4 cup of water (let it soak while you measure the other stuff)
1/2 cup of cooked lentils (I forgot to mention their "cooked-ness" to my sister the first time I gave her the recipe, and about the time I said to put the burgers in the skillet, she asked, "Uh, is there a point at which we soften these lentils up with some water? And I said, "Oh, yes. Before you begin.")
1/4 cup of bread crumbs or cracker crumbs
1 squirt (about a tablespoon?) of ketchup
a few drops of Worstchestershire sauce (not sure how much of a difference for taste this makes, but it makes me feel fancy and we have it on hand, so I do it)
1 egg

Put everything in a bowl. Mix it up. It will sort of be like super gloppy pancake mixture, or like Haroset with egg in it, if you've ever made Haroset. (I'll get around to blogging that recipe some time). Heat up your skillet, put a little bit of oil or butter or nonstick spray in it-- whatever you fancy-- and cook up some LENTILBURGERS! Yum!

For whatever weird reason, lentilburger on a toasted sandwich with a thin slice of tomato and some dijon mustard fills the spot in my cravings which used to be reserved for McDonald's Hamburgers. Of course, you may be thinking, the very fact that I even HAD a spot reserved for McDonald's Hamburgers might explain why I would like something as weird as lentilburgers, and I may agree with you. However, I will be that much richer, or at least less poor, because while McDonald's Hamburgers cost 89 cents a pop, lentils, UNcooked, are about $2.00 a pound (I just looked it up online and saw some that were organic for $2.51), and the rest of the ingredients aren't exactly expensive either.

Stir Fried Broccoli: A More Than Completely Edible Vegetable

Note: I got this technique from one of my favorite cookbooks of all time, called The Complete Illustrated Step-by-Step Cookbook, by Judith Ferguson. My copy came from a thrift store, years ago; I bought it because it has full-color, full-page pictures EVERY OTHER PAGE (which I was impressed with because I had long since given in to the Alice-in-wonderland philosophy: '...what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'), but I soon began to appreciate it for its other qualities. These include extremely clear directions, not too expensive ingredients (er, at least, not for the recipes I choose to cook), and of course consistently yummy end results. The sort of book, in short, that I would like to write some day.

The recipe is part of a larger recipe for Broccoli-Beef stir fry, but several years ago I realized that it could be fixed, with satisfyingly delicious results, on its own. It is not a knock-you-socks-off, people-beg-you-for-the-recipe, fix-for-Thanksgiving-for-sure kind of food, which in my personal rating system would count as "quite good;" it is, however, the sort of recipe that makes people say, "Gosh, I didn't know that I liked stir-fried broccoli this much," and that counts as "More than Completely Edible." In fact, I myself do not normally fix broccoli in any other way, and when I am fixing dinner and think to myself: crud! I forgot to plan a vegetable! this recipe often comes to my rescue. Try it. You'll like it. Really.

One head of broccoli
Some vegetable oil (a tablespoon or so)

Wash the broccoli and cut it in to "even sized pieces." They should be the size of pieces that you would normally see in stir-fry.

Heat the oil in the skillet. For various reasons, I normally use a nine-or-ten-inch cast iron skillet, so I put the skillet on to heat (medium high heat) approximately ten minutes before I put the broccoli in to it. I think it's ten minutes. I'll check this week and get back to you, because even though I am sure our stoves will be different, it is good to know this sort of thing. Five minutes definitely works when you have a gas stove, but I'm working with an electric these days, which heats more slowly. The reason why I am going on and on about this, besides the fact that I have difficulty ceasing speech in general, is that the hotness of the skillet when the broccoli hits it so happens to be the only thing which is fiddly about this recipe, and if you get it wrong, you may incorrectly believe that there was something wrong with the recipe itself. (Just below, I'll tell you how I use the oil in the skillet to tell how hot it is.)

So. Put a tablespoon or two of oil in to the skillet. I always use olive oil, but corn oil or canola oil or whatever it is you like to use are also perfectly acceptable. Now, for judging hotness: if, when you pour it in, it sort of spreads out slowly, then the skillet isn't hot enough; if this is the case, then do something else for a minute or so, then come back and tilt the skillet to see how things are coming along. If it spreads out quickly/ runs quickly, it is probably just right. A very little smoke is OK (but throw in the broccoli IMMEDIATELY), but a lot of smoke means that the skillet is too hot, and you should let it cool down a bit and clean it out so that you don't get the carcinogenic (=cancer causing) effect of burnt oil in your diet. This on top of the fact that it doesn't taste great. N.B.: different oils spread in different ways, but I'm not familiar with all of the variations (nor did you really want to read about them this very moment, did you?), so I'll just have to say get to know your skillet, your stove, and your preferred oil well enough to gauge this accurately. The basic principles remain the same.

Once the skillet is hot enough but not too hot, throw in your broccoli and start stirring. Especially if the broccoli hasn't drained all the way from when you washed it, the oil has the potential to spatter, so be careful. I either use a wooden spoon or a spatula to push the broccoli around. You can leave the skillet for long enough to go set a timer for two minutes, but you probably shouldn't be gone much longer; you should keep stirring pretty much constantly until it is done. Once it is bright green, which may take as long as two and a half minutes, it is ready. Sometimes you will get a little bit of browning on the edges, which is PERFECT. Serve hot, if you can.

Cream Cheese Won Tons

They used to serve these at a restauraunt in Provo called The Red Lantern (which is now defunct, but this was one of the best parts of eating there anyway). My entire family loves them, as did the Arabic house when I decided to try to figure out the recipe and served them for dessert one day when I was living there. I have always winged this recipe, and it has always turned out well, and that is the kind of recipe I like, so I'm sharing.

I am completely sure that you will want to make a larger batch of these at some point, but I’m giving the recipe as I made it yesterday, and that means a super-tiny batch.

1 scallion (green onion)

2-3 oz. cream cheese (between a quarter of a package and 3/8 of a package) OR Neufchatel cheese

1 t sugar

9 wonton skins

oil for frying

Chop the scallion into little teeny slices (about 1/4 inch thick). Mix the scallion, the cream cheese, and the sugar together with a fork in a small bowl (like, the size you would eat breakfast cereal out of).

Pour some water in to a saucer. Dip one edge of the first won ton skin in to the water, as though you were dunking a piece of paper in a pool of ink so that one edge of the paper would be black. Now dip the other edges, the same way. Holding the won ton wrapper in one hand, use a spoon to put somewhere between a half tablespoon and a whole tablespoon of filling in to the wrapper. Now, fold it in half kitty-corner so that it makes a 45 degree right triangle. Finish all of the rest of the won tons the same way.

Heat your oil in your skillet. I do not deep-fat-fry mine, but if you are up for it, go for it. Fry the won tons until they are golden-brown on each side.

Do not, I repeat not, become so excited to eat your won tons that you burn your mouth on the hot filling. Not that I have personally experienced a burnt tongue recently. About five minutes seems to be long enough to wait.

How I make Bread (French, 2/3 whole wheat; my standard recipe)

I am not explaining why, mostly. It would take too long. But this is my basic bread recipe at the moment.

For one batch (but I always make a double, even if it's only for one person):

1 t yeast (For most beginners, I recommend starting with 1 T; I explain this below)
1 c. water
1 T sugar
3/4 t salt
1-2 T olive oil

Combine the above ingredients. I usually use cold water. Let them sit for anywhere from ten minutes to a couple of hours (but you might want to make closer to ten minutes if you're using a whole tablespoon of yeast).

Add:

2 c. whole wheat flour
1 c. white flour

and knead it in. You don't have to knead it for any longer than it takes to get the flour in. Pour a little (one tablespoon or less) oil in the bottom of the bowl, roll the whole lump around in it, and then cover it with plastic wrap so that it doesn't get nasty-crusty while it rises. Let it sit for oh, about five or six or eight hours, maybe overnight. Punch it down. Let it rise again (covered, again, though oiling isn't usually necessary the second time), and punch it down again (or, you can skip this if you only want to take two days instead of three to make bread). At this point, form it into either one loaf or two, depending on your fancy.

Oil a cookie sheet or pan, or else use parchment paper (my preferred method) as your bottom layer instead of oil. Sprinkle it with a grainy product which in the U.S. is known by the brand name of Cream of Wheat, but in Australia is known as Farina or Semolina. Put the loaf on the prepared surface. Cover it with plastic wrap again and let it rise one last time.

When it is time to cook it: put one rack on the bottom position in the oven, and another in the middle. Put an empty Pyrex or other casserole-type pan on the bottom rack as the oven is preheating to 350 Celsius and then put a pot of water on to boil on top of the stove (today when I did this, the water boiled just as the oven finished preheating, so it worked out perfect). Pour the boiling water into the pan by pouring it through the higher rack (easier and safer than sliding the rack out and then back in again), and then immediately put the bread on the upper rack and close the oven. The steam gives the bread an AMAZING crusty French-bread texture. Cook it for approximately forty minutes, or until the crust looks the right shade of golden-brown.


NOTES:

In Utah, I keep all of the proportions the same except the flour, which I put less in of because the climate there is much drier, and therefore the flour there is much drier, and as it absorbs the water the bread itself becomes more dry and not as tasty.

I always eyeball the salt amount. As long as there is less than a whole teaspoon and more than half a teaspoon, it works out fine. Please, do not let me ever find you fiddling with a half teaspoon measure and a quarter-teaspoon measure on this, when there are better ways you could be using your time, such as doing practically anything else.

The yeast amount kind of doesn't matter so much. The original recipe called for a whole tablespoon, and if you choose to do that, your bread will be completely edible and even tasty, and will also probably take less than three days to be done. On the other hand, slower rising bread does taste better, to me, and that is why I do it the way I do it. I just wait for as many hours as it takes for the bread to be risen as much as it needs to be.

Another way to speed up the rising of your bread, if you want it to be ready to bake in, say, six hours from the time you started it: turn the oven on warm. Get the steam ready as directed for when you are actually going to bake it. When all is preheated and steamy, turn the oven off, put the bread dough in, and leave the oven door slightly ajar. Check it after a couple of hours, and then, say, every half hour after that (depending on how fast it seems to be rising).

This steaming method is 100% taken from the back of the Rhodes Rolls frozen bread dough package, except that they don't specify to use a pyrex pan and to preheat it with the oven. I like the pyrex because it is much less likely to tip than, say, a cake pan or a pie pan, and it is also much easier to clean hard water spots off of with some vinegar and/or scrubbie. In the past I tried other methods, but after discovering this one I have not gone back.

Julia Child's husband, Paul, used to put a red-hot brick in to a pan of water in her oven for her, and I once had a bishop who was teaching himself to make fancy French bread who tried using a regular rock, heated up on the stovetop; when one of his daughter's friends walked by and saw it, he shouted, "Emily, you dad's cookin' granite!" They also have extra-fancy steam injection ovens made specifically for this very purpose, but I don't even daydream about those. I'd like my own oven, first.

Also, you can pop loaves of not-quite-risen bread into the oven as it is preheating for baking, and let that heat finish rising (raising?) the bread at the same time it gets hot enough to bake it. I don't do this unless I have to, though, because the results are somewhat unreliable.


There are lots of random factors which influence how fast bread rises, so I have learned to just enjoy the time it takes. Bread, like washing machines and dishwashers, should be started and then left to work its magic on its own (if at all possible).


Fastest way to form loaves (if you even care, since you already waited two days to get to this point):

set the lump on the table. Use a sharp knife to slash it lengthwise, top to bottom, with two parallel slashes, but only have the knife penetrate to about half of the thickness of the lump. Roll it out until the slashes are just interesting lines, rather than forming dramatic peaks and valleys. Leave it at least an inch thick, maybe more. Make sure that at least one measurement (I try to make it the top-to-bottom, but side-to-side or diagonal is fine) is as long as you want the finished loaf to be. Now, roll it up, starting with a side which is parallel to your desired-measurement side. For instance, if I've met my goal and made the top-to-bottom measurement the one which is the ideal length, I start rolling from one of the sides, so that my top-to-bottom measurement comes out as the longest one after I have finished rolling. Gosh, but this is complicated to explain. Let me know if you have any trouble or if (I hope) you come up with a better way to explain it.

At any rate, do not take too much trouble with the whole process, since the point in the first place is to save yourself trouble. When you are done rolling, you can turn the loaf right side up, meaning the seam is down, and you can tuck the ends under, and, if you are like me, it is one of the evenest-looking loaves you have formed in your entire life, AND it took less than 45 seconds to do (that is, if you didn't have to walk to the knife block and back to fetch the aforementioned sharp knife).

YUMMINESS ALERT: butter, applied as though the butter were sidewalk chalk and the bread were sidewalk and you were coloring the whole thing solid, is most delicious. Wait-- less pressure should be applied than if the butter were sidewalk chalk, but I think you'll be able to figure it out. Oil isn't bad either (use a pastry brush for this). I would do this after it finishes baking, because that is when it melts in nicely.

Health: This kind of bread is, as far as I can tell, one of the healthiest things possible to make, even if you do add the oil on top at the end, and this is because it is made with two-thirds whole wheat. By the way, I have experimented with 3/4 whole wheat, and while this is only a 1/12 proportion of difference, that much more whole wheat totally changes the texture of the bread; at that point, you need to start adding gluten back in (which you can buy at a grocery store or natural food store, but I have never bothered). Also, as no doubt most of my readers are aware, if you go from a mostly refined-starch diet to a more whole-grain-based diet, and especially if the change is sudden, the digestive system can rebel. These are my personal reasons for sticking to this particular proportion set (and besides which, it is pretty easy, since the original recipe measures the flour in exactly three cups).

There is only one problem with this. If anyone remembers my "food snob" posting, they will remember that I hate any but the freshest-ground whole wheat flour. Store bought pre-ground flour is often old enough that the oil is off-- or, that is my diagnosis; at any rate, it is awful-tasting, and it gives whole wheat in general an undeserved name for disgustingness. Therefore, when I am living in a household without a wheat grinder, I usually make my bread with two and a half cups of white flour, but put in a cup of overcooked brown basmati rice (organic, of course), and it adds a nice texture as well as being a whole grain. (Overcooked, because when it isn't then the grains that end up on the outside get hard enough that you worry your teeth are going to crack on them when you bite down). I reduce the water by half a cup as well, because the rice already has water in it. I think that's what I do. I am feeling unsure of my proportions. Sheesh! I will seek to clarify. Sometime. That's why I blogged this recipe today, with the whole wheat, because I made it (baked it) today and it was fresh in my memory, and I knew I wouldn't mess this version up. But at least you have this much for now, which is not inconsiderable.


Bon Appetit! Or, as they would say in Germany (where this recipe would not work, as far as I know, because their flour is different) Guten Appetit! If anyone makes this, please give me feedback so that may I know what I left out or garbled in the instructions. It is one thing to make bread that is darn good; it is another to describe what you have done in such a way that others can actually repeat what you do.

Sarah Soup

Approximately at the time I turned ten, I announced to my family that I wanted to learn how to cook. Accordingly, I got for my birthday an apron, a couple of hot pads, and a Betty Crocker cookbook. Looking back, I see that they were probably all bought with the help of Betty Crocker coupons which my grandmother had been saving since the dawn of time (approximately). Now that I think about it, ten is just about the perfect age to learn how to cook (my mother started learning when she was ten, too) because you are old enough to be left alone in the kitchen, but not so old that anyone expects you to cook for yourself OR them.

I tried some of the recipes. Few of them had less than ten ingredients, and many required complicated processes for less-than-fantabulous results. At this point in time, I am willing to do complicated, long recipes, but only if I know that the end result is going to be more than worth the effort; then, however, time was not so precious to me that I refused to whip egg whites for tuna-lemon puff casserole.

One of the recipes that I tried, repeatedly, was a soup recipe. I'm not quite sure what was in the recipe-- the ingredients took up two whole columns-- nor do I remember when I started leaving things out. (My mother's support for my cooking habit did not normally include buying ingredients which she would not have anyway.) By the time I was fifteen and cooking for the whole family on a very regular basis, it had slimmed down to what is now known, to sibling and neefling alike, as Sarah Soup. No, it's not. My sister calls it Sarah Stew. Sheesh. Doesn't matter.

I have been truly shocked, over the years, at how many people REALLY like this soup. It's so simple that I was embarrassed to tell people the recipe. I do play with it now and agian (I added the flour within the last couple of months), but when a girl needs something cheap, nourishing, not uber-time-consuming, and delicious, this hits the spot.

It is also, incidentally, the basis for two other soups that I make (borscht and minestrone) but I will save those for another day.

Sarah Soup

This is how much I made on Monday night, for two women, one man, and two almost-three-year-olds. Also, we ended up with leftovers. I'm so sorry; I have no idea how much this makes. Or how much you want to make. I am not the best person for exactness in recipes (except for salt in bread. That really matters.). It doesn't matter, tons, what the exact proportions are for this soup; I believe that if you put in more of what you know you like and less of what you don't, it will come out well.

So.

• 3 onions, chopped into relatively thin slices
• enough oil, or melted butter, or margarine (careful not to burn it if it's butter) to cover the bottom of your pan (I think that any oil except maybe something strong tasting like sesame oil or engine oil would be good-- in fact, I never recommend cooking with engine oil, but that is another story for another day)
• 1/2 lb chopped-up stew meat (Many people like more meat than this, but I don't, and I'm writing this, so there)
• 2 T or so flour
• Enough water to fill the stew pot (I think that I used at least 6 cups)
• 4 peeled and chopped potatoes (1/2 inch?)
• 5 peeled and chopped carrots (1/4 inch or smaller, coins).
• Do not forget the salt. 1 1/2 T should start you off well, but many people like more. Ramen noodle seasoning packets taste great, but they have MSG in them, so I personally have stopped using them.

Fry the onions in the butter, oil, or whatever, until they are goldenish yellow. More oil means that they are less likely to burn, and if it is olive oil, then it acutally lowers the bad cholesterol in your system. Your choice, though. I take at least ten minutes for this, half an hour if I have time. Also, if you kind of burn the onions on the bottom, that's OK; people like the taste, and some people (not me) even do that on purpose. If you really burn the onions, though, you had better start over.

Add the stew meat and the flour. The flour browns and tastes nice and makes the soup a little more filling. If you use enough flour, it turns from soup into stew. Once the meat is starting to get brown, you can add the water. Since you are not adding the carrots or potatoes yet, leave some room for them in the pot-- maybe a couple of inches. Or three.

For various reasons, I always add cold water, so it takes a while for it to boil. I turn it up to high and then try to remember to stay in the kitchen so that I don't let it boil over (which it did this time). Someday-- maybe someday soon-- my exactness-in-cooking-loving younger sister will email me a chart that she found on the internet of how long it takes various amounts of tap-cold water to boil, but for now, I just try to remember to stay in the kitchen.

After it has boiled, I add the carrots and the potatoes. With the carrots smaller than the potatoes, they will cook at the same speed. If, by chance, you want to just use baby carrots or your dear one has chopped the carrots and the potatoes to the same size, then put the carrots in earlier than the potatoes so that the potatoes do not completely dissolve by the time the carrots have become soft. After adding the last of the vegetables, add enough water to top the soup off (try to stay away from the top 1/2 inch of the pan; life is much less messy that way) and let it boil again. Once it has come to a boil, you can turn the heat down to medium low, and then go make bread or something simple like that while you wait for it to finish cooking.

Oh, and do not forget the salt. Not that I have ever personally done anything like this. Taste the soup once things are soft to see how much more you may need.

Cook it until the carrots and the potatoes are soft enough to eat.

Fertig!

I love this recipe now. Despite how long it took for me to write it out, it really is outrageously simple to execute. I would even let a ten-year-old do it.

German Apple Pancakes

I've promised this to numerous and sundry people at various times. I pray that my memory (especially of ingredient amounts) is up to the task of making this a decent replication of the way I actually cook this dish.

This recipe is different from the one in my cookbook, so I'm not sure whether I should change the name to show that it's not really authentic, or if I should keep it, because it is substantially the same recipe and I want to show influences. I've settled on the latter strategy, because I think that it rests on the more relevant fact. Besides which, it's really difficult for me to come up with (good) recipe names.

Ingredients:

• an apple. If you want to make a small pancake or you are short on time, use half an apple. My personal most recent favorite is to use Galas (which the grocery store says are bad for cooking with, and I don't know how to respond to that), but I think that anything you want to use will be fine. Red delicious will probably mush up on you, but if you are fine with that, I'm certainly fine with that.
  
• allspice (or other sweet spices, if you don't have allspice): 1/2 teaspoon? It has been a really long time since I measured this for this recipe.
  
• a couple of tablespoons of brown sugar (I never measure this-- it's just a guess, based on what I think I remember from the recipe and what I usually do)
  
• butter and/or oil (a couple of tablespoons, between the two of them)
  
• one egg
• a pinch of salt
• about a tablespoon of flour. Maybe less. I've forgotten the flour before and it has been OK, but it really doesn't taste the same.

Chop and core the apple. I sometimes peel them but usually don't. The peel adds a texture that I like. Start frying the apple in preheated cast-iron skillet. You can use butter at this stage if you want, but I like oil because it is healthier, it is cheaper, and it doesn't burn as easily-- meaning that you get a bigger chance of turning out a pretty good pancake. (This, by the way, is the step where I somehow deviated from the cookbook. In the cookbook that I got this recipe from, you add the apples after you have added the batter. Having made them in the adulterated way, I will never go back, but in the interest of full disclosure, I thought I'd let you know where I deviate from authenticity.)

Add the allspice at some point. It really isn't so picky about the allspice, since the allspice doesn't have to brown or anything.

The apples do need to brown, for maximum yumminess. As an interruption to your sitting on your hands to make yourself be patient while they do so, crack the egg in to a reasonably sized bowl (like a cereal bowl), add a tablespoon of water, beat it with a wire whisk if you have one, with a fork if you don't, and then add the salt and flour and beat them until you've gotten as many lumps out as you figure you're going to get. I sometimes remember to start this process before I chop up the apple, but if I take long enough on browning the apple, it turns out OK anyway. Even when the egg has flour lumps it turns out pretty yummy, so don't fret.

Once the apples have browned as much as you have the patience to let them (my record was something like twenty minutes, but usually I'm in more of a hurry than that), add the butter and brown sugar. I do like butter better than oil at this point, because it interacts in a totally delicious way with the brown sugar in a way that oil does not.

The recipe gets kind of finicky at this point. What you want is for the brown sugar to melt in with the butter and start to turn to something like caramel, but you have to factor in the cooking time for the egg, which gets added in for the final bit of caramelization. You also have to not burn the sugar. Some people like the taste of burned sugar, but I do not. If you are nervous about this, then just dump the egg mixture in about a minute after you have added the brown sugar and butter, and you will come out with a totally delicious pancake, even though it is not at the extreme edges of deliciousness to which this recipe can be pushed. If you are not nervous, then trust your gut, make the recipe a few times (keeping careful notes), and email me the results so that I can tell people with precision how to do this part.

Add the egg mixture to the skillet. Turn on the broiler at the same time so that it can preheat, and make sure that the oven rack is on the top shelf. Moving it after the broiler has preheated involves putting your delicate hand very close to a 500 degree element, which is not my favorite thing to do, especially since I don't usually have the glove kind of hot pad available.

Once the egg is mostly not runny any more, take it off the heat and put it in the broiler for one minute. Or maybe two. You want the egg to be done and the top to be brown. (Darn it, I'm going to have to go home and make up a batch to check the time on this, among other things.) When you take it out, salt it (if you want-- I always need to), and enjoy. I usually take mine out of the skillet in quarters or halves.

You can double this recipe in an eight-inch skillet with relative impunity (the cooking time will of course be longer), but for more than that I'd definitely do batches.

If for whatever reason you don't have a working broiler, then put a lid on the pan as soon as you add the egg, and be sure that your heat is low enough that you won't burn the sugar (which is all on the bottom of the pan, right next to the heat source) while the egg is cooking. It will take longer to cook, but it will be-- almost-- as yummy.

If you have a tilty stove-top, such that most of your egg slides to one side of the pan and sits there, refusing to cook, in a salmonella-inviting mass, as the film on the other side becomes crispy and starts curling, then swirl the egg around now and again while it is cooking. This probably seems obvious to some of my readers, but it took me a while to figure out.

Sunday Afternoon Soup

I made this yesterday afternoon-- hence the name. I think that I have written down fairly accurately how much of what I used. It might still need more bullion or salt. "Better than bullion" is a bullion alternative. I use it because it is vegetable-based.

Sunday Afternoon Soup (made on 21 September 2008)

3 onions
4 medium pieces of chicken (boneless, skinless breast, but any would be fine, I’m sure)
1 T (?) cinnamon
2 cloves garlic, minced pretty fine
lots of oil (sure, olive oil)
3 quarts of water
4 carrots
2 large potatoes
bullion (1 ½ T Better Than Bullion, approximately)

I chopped the onions and the potatoes big and the carrots small. I fried the onions in oil first (in a frying pan); then I added the frozen chicken (meaning, if you use non-frozen, then don’t put it in as soon); then I put the cinnamon in. I also added the garlic. I put the water on to boil. When the onions and meat and stuff were done (onions were golden-ish and the chicken was browning), I put them in the water. I chopped the carrots and fried them, then added them to the water. I then chopped the potatoes, added them to the water, and added the bullion. I cooked it until the vegetables were done, which was about half an hour after the potatoes went in.

This was darn good, in my opinion, and pretty good in the opinion of others who ate it. I definitely think that it would have been better with a few bones in it.

One More Tomato Recipe

A note: I have modified the Pineapple Upside-Down-Cake recipe, and would (again) love feedback. The recipe is findable on the left side of this blog.

The other day, I ran in to one of my Spanish students from last semester (she is from Spain; I taught her English), and seeing her reminded me of one of my all-time favorite tomato recipes, one which is imperative to make during tomato season, and is so delicious that I often succumb to the temptation to make it even when the only tomatoes available are barely-pink watery-tasting Romas.

It is a sort of fancy meal, but it is also wonderful because it is made of some of the cheapest ingredients around. The cost comes with the time and care required to prepare it. I personally know people who grow every single one of these ingredients, to eat (except for the salt). I have tried to separate out the recipe from the commentary, so that more experienced cooks don't have as much to wade through the first time through. As usual, I would love feedback.

Spanish Omelette (also, authentically, known as "Spanish tortilla")

Time: up to 45 minutes; can be as short as 20, if you chop stuff small enough and pay attention so that you don't burn things you are cooking on high heat and also if you don't mind using a little extra oil (again, so things don't burn).

One Small Potato
One Small Onion
Olive Oil (Spanish, if you can, just for the sake of authenticity, even though we all know that both tomatoes and potatoes originally came from the New World. But I guess that Ferdinand and Isabella did fund Columbus, so Spain probably has as much right to claim New World agricultural goods as as the next country.)
An egg
A tomato
a little bit of fresh Parmesan, if you have it and have time to use it (this is NOT authentic, as far as I know, but it is very yummy)

Chop the onion first, and then chop the tomato while the onion is frying in some olive oil.

I will not tell you what size to chop your vegetables, but I will tell you that the smaller a piece of produce is, the more quickly it cooks, and the more evenly a bunch of vegetable pieces are chopped, the more evenly they will cook (translation: smaller pieces cook faster, and if your pieces are all the same size, you are less likely to burn the ones that are smaller than all the others, because there WON'T be any that are smaller than all the others).

When I am having an averagely busy day, I chop my onions into approximately 1/8" thick half-rings. I chop the potatoes approximately the same size.

When I am having a very busy day, I'm not so careful about making my slices thin, and then I compensate by chopping the flat slices into smaller pieces. (Please tell me this makes sense. Darn, I really need to get a camera.) The other thing you can do, at least on the potato front, is to either 1) grate your potato, or 2) buy grated potatoes, which are ridiculously cheap at the grocery store (no, really, ridiculous is the word, but here is not the place to go in to U.S. farm subsidy policy). The advantage of grated potatoes is that they quickly achieve our two desired attributes: they are small, and they are evenly sized. The only disadvantages happen if you don't like the texture of grated potatoes, or if you have difficulty (as I sometimes do) in grating potatoes without also grating your fingers.

If you want to broil this at the end, you can either use something that can both be fried and broiled in (like a cast-iron skillet), or else plan to transfer your omelette to something broil-able at the point in the recipe where you broil.

So. Fry your onions until they are (pretty) soft and (pretty) brown-looking. Either one of these things can happen without the other. Soft comes from cooking on low heat and with the lid on; brown comes from cooking with higher heat, with the lid off, and it is also a good idea to stir your onions with something that can scrape the bottom of the pan while you are browning them. I normally go for soft first, then brown, but I'm not too picky about making them completely soft because they get a second chance when I cook them the second time around. If I'm in a hurry, I just go for even a little less soft before browning them.

Scrape the onions out of the skillet on to a plate.

Fry the potatoes. This time, don't worry quite so much about soft, since this seems to come more easily to potatoes than it does to onions. Once the potatoes are mostly cooked, add the onions in again. Cook 'em until they smell so heavenly that you are strongly tempted to just eat the whole mess without finishing the rest of the recipe. If you choose to cave to this temptation, I beg of you to please try again later to finish it-- it really is worth it.

Crack the egg in to a bowl. Whisk it with a wire whisk, if you have one (I don't, and am quite adept at doing this with a fork) until the white and the yolk seem pretty well mixed together. Pour the egg over the sizzling potato-and-onion mixture. Turn the heat down just a little. If you want, swirl the pan a little so that the uncooked part of the egg goes into those parts which are more cooked, thus making the whole thing cook a little more evenly.

Grate some Parmesan on to the cooked omelette. That's right, "some". That is how much. I don't know; pretend it's a really sparse pizza or something. Put the whole thing in the broiler. (Wait. Did I say to use a cast-iron skillet or otherwise oven-proof pan? OK. Now I have.) If I recall correctly, about two minutes will do you. You just want the cheese a bit toasty-golden.

If you don't use the Parmesan, you will want to salt your omelette. Either way, the last step is to slice the tomatoes as thick as you want (both thick (up to a quarter of an inch) and thin (about a sixteenth of an inch) slices taste good in different ways, so try what sounds good and see what happens) and then spread them in a single layer over your omelette.

I eat this with a fork, from a breakable plate, with a cloth napkin on hand if I can.

[Food purists may want to plug their ears for this next sentence.] Occasionally, when I am forced to make this with dreadful, store-bought winter tomatoes, I will eat this meal with ketchup.

Pineapple Upside Down Cake that I made for my Grammar 4 Class

I teach ESL. Last week, I made a pineapple upside-down-cake for a couple of student birthdays, and they asked me for the recipe.

To Buy:
1 plain (I used Western Family) cake mix
1 16-oz. can of sliced pineapple (in rings)
1 small container of Wallaby Organic Vanilla Yogurt (picture is on the left)

Also, if you don't have them, buy brown sugar and butter and eggs.

Note: I bought the Wallaby Yogurt at a store called The Good Earth; the one I went to is on State Street in Orem. The last time I bought the small size, it was $1.05, which is kind of expensive for yogurt, but on the other hand, it really does taste very good. If you don't want to go to Orem or spend that much money on yogurt, you will be happy to know that I tried this recipe with the much cheaper and more easily available Western Family brand, and everyone seemed to like that, too.

First, melt 2 T of the butter and 1/4 cup of the brown sugar together in a pan. Mix them while they cook. When this boils, pour it in to one small cake pan. Spread the mixture around a little, until it is kind of evenly spread over the bottom of the pan. I always end up with little parts that aren't covered, and it always works out fine.

Next, melt two more tablespoons of butter and another 1/2 cup of brown sugar, and then pour that in to another small cake pan, and spread it out.

Next, open the pineapple. Pour as much of the juice as possible in to a measuring cup (and don't drink it). Put half of the pineapple slices in the bottom of one pan, and half of them in the other pan. Arrange them so that they are not on top of one another.

Now you make the cake mix. Follow directions on the back of the box, but instead of water, use the pineapple juice, and instead of oil, use the vanilla yogurt. If you don't have quite enough pineapple juice, then just fill in the rest of the cup with water.

Because in Provo, we are at "high altitude," (I believe that the city is about 5,000 feet up-- no, I just looked, it's 4,500), cakes rise faster here than they do elsewhere. This means that you may want to make a "high altitude adjustment" to the recipe. You do this by adding a little bit of extra flour and/or liquid to the batter. This dilutes the leavening (the stuff that makes the cake rise) a little bit, so that the cake is in less danger of over-rising and then falling.

Pour the cake batter in to the pans. You can divide it evenly by using a measuring cup. First pour one cup of batter in to one pan, and then another cup in to the other pan, and then one in the first pan, and then in the other pan.

Bake the cake according to the directions on the box. (The box I got said to bake it at 325 degrees centigrade, for 35 minutes, for the size of pan I was using.)

Once it is done baking, you are supposed to turn it out, upside-down, on to another surface (like a plate), which is why it is called "upside-down cake." I sometimes skip this part, because I am lazy, and because it tastes just as good that way.

Good luck! If you have any trouble with these instructions, please make a comment so that I can make the recipe better.