All posts tagged recipe

You’ll need:

• 2 bags organic roasted dandelion root tea (teabagged in Canada if possible)
• 2 cups cold water (or so)
• couple teaspoons Grade B maple syrup (or so)

“Decoct” the tea by simmering it in the water for about 10 minutes. Remove teabags, let cool. Stir in maple syrup to taste. Pour into an old Ball jar for storage. Refrigerate and drink cold, straight from the jar, while re-reading an ancient copy of the Tassajara Cookbook.

Once a staple in lunch boxes of blue-collar workers, sardine cans now collect dust in pantries and cupboards — the last resort in a power outage, perhaps.

Nation’s Last Sardine Cannery Closing

Sandwiches

1. Rye or pumpernickel bread, red onion, slices of hard-boiled egg, sardines, mustard and/or mayonnaise to taste.

2. White or whole-wheat bread, sardines, mustard, a couple drops of hot sauce if you have it. (This is the simplest, and also my favorite. If you are out of bread you can apply the mustard directly to the sardines and eat with a fork.)

3. White or whole-wheat or anadama bread, sardines, a fancy spread: spicy chutney or a good red pepper jam.

4. Baguette slices, sardines, drop of olive oil, drizzle of lemon, chopped parsley.

5. I’ve never tried this one myself but someone told me sardines and mashed avocado with a squeeze of lemon juice, on sourdough or other sturdy bread, is delicious.

Pasta

1. Thinly slice and roast one fennel bulb. Saute an onion in some olive oil, then add a large jar of crushed tomatoes or your favorite jarred pasta sauce. Stir in the roasted fennel and a can or two of sardines (remove bones and flake). Toss with cooked rotini or other twisty shape. Garnish with chopped fennel fronds and black pepper.

2. Stir a can of de-boned, mashed sardines into a bowl of leftover plain pasta, any shape. Squeeze of lemon. Lots of pepper. Eat.

2a. Variation: Stir a can of de-boned, mashed sardines into a bowl of leftover plain pasta, any shape. Squeeze of lemon. Some leftover cooked cannellini beans and/or a few handfuls of strong-tasting greens, like arugula. Asparagus or fiddleheads would work too. Pepper. Eat.

Etc.

1. Sardine dip: Put 2 cans of sardines, a block of cream cheese, the juice of half a lemon, a tablespoon or two of minced onion or scallion, and a tablespoon of minced parsley in a blender or food processor.

2. Fried sardines: Pat dry. Dredge in flour, roll in seasoned crumbs, fry. Careful, they fall apart.

3. Sardine pie: Use sardines instead of canned salmon in your friend’s Canadian grandfather’s famous salmon pie recipe (sorry, I can’t give you any more details than that).

Mashed Squash with Vicodin

• 1 squash (kabocha is good)
• 1 Vicodin, or to taste

Roast the squash. Mash the squash. Serve with Vicodin. Go to sleep.

Take one bunch of knobbly golden beets and that sweet potato that’s been languishing. Scrub, pare root ends and slice off the eerie alien hair-growths. Reserve the beet greens for soup tomorrow. Cut the beets and potato into cubes and toss with some olive oil. Spread on a baking sheet and roast at 400 for about 30 minutes, until the vegetables start to caramelize around the edges.

You may decide to skip the salt for once.

Eat hot, while it’s snowing.

It is almost Christmas and that means it is time to make tourtière, the French-Canadian meat pie that’s served at réveillon or any time thereabouts. Apparently the proper pronunciation is “tou’-tYARE,” with the rolly R, but in my homeland of central Maine we say “toochay.” I’ve heard that there are $30 tourtières for sale in my former/adopted homeland of New York this Christmas, courtesy of a Montreal restaurant called Au Pied de Chochon. These tourtières are made with Heritage Foods meats, including guinea hen and brisket! They come with a side of cranberry ketchup! I’ll bet they are delicious. But if I told a local French-Canadian grandma (mem-AYRE/memmay) that the toochay cost $30, mémère would roll her yeux and laugh.

All you need to make a toochay is 3/4 lb. ground pork, whatever’s cheap at your nearest store, and 3/4 lb. ground beef, ditto — not too lean but not too fatty either, maybe the stuff labeled 85%. If the 80% is cheaper, though, go for it. Then you need one finely-chopped onion, two small yellow potatoes, some salt and pepper, allspice, an egg, and a double pie crust. The Pillsbury kind in the red box is fine if your memmay never taught you how to make crust.

(Note: You may not have allspice in your cupboard, unless you’ve been making gingerbread cookies, but it is absolutely not optional here. Go buy some allspice. You can substitute cloves, which are equally traditional, but if you are the sort of person who has ground cloves on hand I feel like you’d also be the sort of person who has allspice on hand.)

To prepare the filling, put the ground meats and the chopped onion in a large pot with half a cup of water, bring it to a boil, then stir well and lower the heat. It will look disgusting. Put a cover on it and let it simmer on very low heat for two hours. Yes, ground meat cooks quickly. No, this isn’t a pot roast. I don’t know. You cook it for two hours.

When the meat has about half an hour left to go, get the rest of the filling ready. It’s the opposite of complicated! Boil the peeled, diced potatoes in salted water, then drain them and mash them. Do not think about using a mixer or a food processor for this task. Use a potato masher. The French-Canadians traveled down the Kennebec-Chaudière corridor in carts containing all their worldly possessions; you are lucky to even have a potato masher.

After the potato is mashed and the meat is almost done, preheat the oven to 325 and line a pie plate with half the crust. Has it been two hours? Yes? Then skim any visible fat and excess liquid from the cooked meat and mix the meat into the potato, or vice versa, if your pot is bigger than your bowl (inadvertent stoner reference!). Use the potato masher to smush the filling around, then add a teaspoon of salt, a half-teaspoon of allspice, and several grinds of black pepper. The mixture will still look disgusting, unless the thought of mashed meatloaf appeals to you, but at this point it will smell intoxicating.

Scoop the filling into the pie pan and apply the top crust. Crimp the edges and cut a vent in the middle — a couple of slashes is customary, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t carve your initials or a patriotic fleur-de-lis. Remember the egg? Get it out of the fridge, break it into a small cup, beat with a fork, brush over the crust.

Into the oven! It only takes 20 minutes to bake, which is nice considering how long the meat has to simmer. The hard part is letting the toochay stand until it’s cool enough to slice. Like meatloaf the taste and texture get better with time, so if you can leave it alone for a few hours that’s the way to go. In my opinion toochay is best the day after it’s made, reheated or not, with plain old tomato ketchup from a squeeze bottle or your memmay’s Ball jar.

Bon appaTEE/Enjoy.

Bonus: A heated tourtière “debate” from 1991, via the CBC digital archives.

HASH, best ever

• 1 large sweet potato, peeled and diced
• 1 large yellow potato, peeled if you want, and diced
• 1 mediumish onion, diced
• 1 knobby little green bell pepper, very pungent, diced
• About 2 cups leftover cooked meat, diced (in this case: turkey)
• A heaping tablespoon of tomato paste
• A couple tablespoons of leftover gravy, or something gravy-ish… roux? White sauce? Alfredo? There must be something in the fridge!
• A couple tablespoons of vegetable oil
• Salt, pepper

Boil the diced potato in a little bit of salted water; you want it very soft. Drain, mash slightly with a potato masher. You could use leftover potatoes if you have them, but I didn’t. While that’s happening, saute the onion and green pepper in some oil, in a large skillet.

Add the cooked, mangled potato to the skillet, along with another drizzle of oil. Stir in the chopped meat, tomato paste, and gravy. Maybe a little more oil. You want enough to get things crispy but not so much that it’s greasy. This may depend on your gravy or gravy-ish substance.

Hash is really more about technique than ingredients. What you need to do is get a large spatula and flatten the hash into the skillet, really flat, and then turn the heat up to medium-high and let it go for at least five minutes. Maybe more. Press it with the spatula a few more times while you make some coffee.

You could, if you want, just serve the hash with one crispy side and one soft side. But I’m an overachiever, so I used the large spatula to scoop the half-crisped hash over in chunks. A little more oil, a little more spatula-pressing. (Get any extra gravy out of the fridge, or find the ketchup.)

After another few minutes you won’t be able to wait any longer, so scoop the fully- or mostly-crisped hash onto plates (in this case, chipped Wedgewood depicting landmarks of the Harvard campus, relics from my last apartment in Brooklyn). Drizzle extra gravy or ketchup over the top, maybe some salt and pepper.

This doesn’t look like much but it tastes like a LOT.

Monday! You sleep through the alarm, stagger through the first blog post of the day, then force your unthinking carcass into running clothes. You zip up your hoodie, pat the pocket, ascertain the presence of the ipod, and stumble into the sunshine. You leave your inner apartment door unlocked, because the front door locks automatically, and the upstairs neighbors aren’t going to rob you (they are your landlords). Said front door always sticks; you pull it shut and it’s not quite shut, so you do the responsible thing and go back up the stoop and pull it closed with a satisfying bang.

You pull out your ipod and pat the other pocket where the keys are only the keys aren’t there.

In your stupid haze, you think this is a mistake. It will be revealed as a mistake if you pat your pockets harder. The problem will be solved if you throw your shoulder against the well-slammed front door and force it open. Only the pockets are empty and the door stands firm. There is a spare key, somewhere, maybe, but where? You scramble around the porch and the basement door and the mailbox and the driveway and there is no spare key. You run down the street to J.’s house, J. has a spare key, only no one answers when you knock.

You run further down the street to the coffee shop where D. works, because D. has all the necessary numbers in his phone, but D. is not working today. Luckily his co-worker takes pity on you, and what follows is a long story of borrowed phones and relaying messages between people in four towns and in the end people come to your rescue and then, later, your boyfriend calls from New Jersey and reminds you where the spare key is. And it was there all along.

There is only one thing to do: write about it in the second person and bake a lot of pumpkin chocolate-chip bread to thank everyone who helped.

(As usual, I looked at some recipes and proceeded to ignore them. This is my own creation and it makes four 9x5 loaves. You could halve it, use four eggs, but surely you have three friends who want pumpkin chocolate-chip bread. Or you could make three friends with pumpkin chocolate-chip bread.)

• 2 c. neutral vegetable oil
• 3 c. white sugar
• 2 c. light brown sugar, packed
• 7 large eggs
• 2 15 oz. cans solid-pack pumpkin
• 1 c. water
• 6 1/2 c. unbleached flour
• 4 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 3 tsp. salt
• 3 tsp. cinnamon
• 2 heaping cups semisweet chocolate chips, the best you can get

Preheat the oven to 350 and grease four 9x5 loaf pans. In the largest bowl you have, cream together the oil and sugars. Don’t bother using a stand mixer, you have a whisk and arm muscles, don’t you? Beat in the eggs, then the pumpkin and water. In a separate large bowl, whisk together all dry ingredients except for the chocolate chips. Gradually add dry ingredients to wet, switching from the whisk to a wooden spoon halfway through. Leave a few tablespoons of the flour mixture in the bottom of the dry ingredients bowl; add the chocolate chips to that and toss them to coat, so they don’t sink in the batter.

Divide the batter evenly between the pans. (I found there was a heaping 3.5 cups of batter per pan, if you’re measuring it out and baking in batches.) Bake for about an hour, or until a toothpick tests clean. If your oven is slightly aggressive, as mine is, you may want to tent the tops of the pans with foil in the last 15 minutes of baking to prevent overbrowning.

Cool loaves in pans for five minutes, then turn out onto wire racks. Cool completely, wrap securely, and let rest overnight before serving/delivering with a sheepish smile.