Cooking dinner all day long

 

It didn’t really take all day, but cooking Eggplant Parmesan took up much of my day. I had invited Teddy and Sue for dinner and promised to cook it because Teddy’s favorite food is apparently eggplant. So this morning, knowing I was between projects, I planned to spend the morning cooking. I read my emails, took a quick look at comments on Facebook, and was ready to roll.

When I cook what Jordan calls casserole dishes, the worst part to me is the chopping. So I did it in order of hardest to easiest—chopped and sauteed the onion. The recipe said for each thing, “In another skillet ….” How many skillets do they think I have? I cooked one thing, dumped it into a bowl, cooked the next, dumped it into the same bowl, and moved on. So I got to a point where I had onion and ground beef cooked and in the bowl. I added breadcrumbs, pecorino cheese, tomato sauce, egg—and then tackled the eggplant. Halved the two eggplants Sue had brought me and found, to my dismay, that both were—I don’t know—not right. Eggplant discolors quickly when cut, but these were discolored form the getgo. Teddy brought me two new ones.

It’s not easy to scoop the insides out of an eggplant half, but I did it, using the cross hatch method my girls have taught me for scooping out avocados. The recipe said to boil the diced eggplant, but my note on it said sauté, so I did. By early afternoon, I finally had four stuffed eggplant halves. I took a nap. One thing about this dish is the lovely presentation—so of course I forgot to take a picture.

We had a fine dinner, and they seemed to like the eggplant. And we had long discussions, ranging from relatives and friends to politics. Sue insists trump will be president in 2024 because Republicans will vote their pocketbooks. I insist that he may be indicted by then, and whether he is or not, enough Americans, even Republicans, have the good sense not to vote for him. His presidency was a disaster for everyone but the one percent—and those who are brainwashed by disinformation.

Those are the folks that worry me—the ones who believe every conspiracy theory that comes down the road. They still think Hilary Clinton was operating a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor, Joe Biden is responsible for everything from supply chain problems to the shortage of baby formula, Democrats are replacing whites with people of color as a path to power (can you believe anyone believes that?). I am particularly angry with those who claim that Biden is senile—everything he has done and accomplished, from stopping the pandemic deaths to orchestrating international support for Ukraine, argues that he is a man in full command of an incredible mind. His style is certainly different from trump—he goes quietly along, often with his head slightly down, doing what he thinks is right and not bothering about ratings and the like. I have felt the sincerity of his words several times, most recently at the memorial to the victims of the Buffalo shooting.

I just don’t believe that Americans will vote again for the man who unleashed that much hate on America, a man who is now supporting Putin and criticizing US support for Ukraine—he never was able to think beyond the immediate moment to the consequences, in this case of Russia rolling over all of Europe. Yes, he has followers, but their numbers are not overwhelming when compared to the citizens of this country. And those Republican pocketbooks—really, how many will vote that way?

I didn’t start out to proselytize, but now I find I have backed myself into a corner, but it’s a corner I’m comfortable in: Vote blue at all levels. The future of this country, the future of women depends on it.

Sorry. I didn’t mean to rant. But politics engages so much of my mind these days. It’s either politics or cooking with me, unless you want to hear more about the writing process, which also fills my days.

Cooking up a holiday storm

Chicken Stroganoff

Easter and Passover are holidays I associate with a lot of cooking. When I was married, I hosted a few seders, but I don’t remember much about what I cooked. I remember the seder plate with its symbolic foods and how I struggled to sip Manischewitz. I found a recipe for Manischewitz ice cream the other day and a friend, who had also been married to a Jewish man, agreed with me it might be really good and was probably the best way to serve that wine. Probably I cooked a brisket, a la my mother-in-law who called it first-cut breast and could make it delicious. Mine was a pale imitation. For Easter I always think of ham and either scalloped potatoes or potato salad, though I long each year to cook a leg of lamb. Some year the circumstances will be right, but not this year.

We are having ten for brunch, one a vegetarian and one who will not eat anything with onions in it. Limits your menu choices. I am fixing sausages for the meat eaters and a leek/ricotta/pesto pie for all but the onion-hater. Christian will fix a Spanish tortilla with potatoes and eggs, and we’ll have fruit salad, hot cross buns, and bloody Marys. Should be fun.

Meantime I’m cooking. You know if you order chicken Caesar salad these days, you get Caesar salad with rotisserie chicken slices? Most of the time I want old-fashioned chicken salad with mayonnaise, so I was delighted to find a recipe for Caesar chicken salad that called for cut up chicken and a Caesar salad-like dressing. But when I made it tonight, it didn’t seem to have anything to bind it together. It’s going to be liked marinated chicken bites. I’ll assess tomorrow, but I suspect I’ll add a bit of mayo for tomorrow night’s company supper.

Meantime, I’ve had the same thing for supper, lunch, and supper—and probably will have it for lunch tomorrow. I invented a quick way of doing chicken stroganoff, mostly because I had a large piece of chicken that really needed to get out of the freezer. Here’s my rough approximation of how I made what I thought was enough for one and turned out to be one and between a half and three-quarters.

Make a cup of beef bouillon or use a cup of refrigerated broth.

Pre-cook some pasta, about a cup of whatever you have on hand. I used rigatoni because that’s what I had.

Sauté a generous cup of cubed chicken in a mixture of butter and olive oil. Dump in baby green peas to taste—or omit. When chicken is heated and beginning to brown, stir in one Tbsp. flour. Mix thoroughly.

Stir in the broth in about two batches, waiting until it thickens enough to make a sauce. Add pasta. At the last minute, dump in a Tbsp. of sour cream. Stir and serve.

Your instinct may be to use chicken broth, but trust me, the beef gives it a more robust flavor.

What are you cooking this weekend?

It’s all Facebook’s fault—and a tasty dinner

I’ve been absent from Judy’s Stew for at least a couple of days. I posted a whiney blog two nights ago but I’m not sure it made it on to Facebook, and I figure that’s how most of my readers get to the Stew. For some reason, Facebook would not let me post anything with a link. I was somewhat relieved to post that fact and find out that several others had the same problem. So last night I didn’t post because I didn’t think Facebook would let me link—and I didn’t have anything remarkable to report.

Not that I do tonight. This has been a week of doctor appointments and a little work and not much else. But today I was much more energized, although still didn’t get much of my work done. Jordan and I went to the grocery—always an outing I enjoy—and to Local Foods to pick up lunch stuff for me. I did odds and ends at my desk and did take care of several details that were nagging at me.

Ever since I was in the hospital, I’ve been bothered by a loss of appetite, sometimes severe, sometimes not so much so. Gradually, though I’ve felt it returning and, with it, my interest in discovering what I can cook in the cottage and what I can’t. We’ve worked out a routine—Jordan orders Fresh Home meals for two nights, and I cook for one night. The rest of the time we either eat out or catch as catch can. I am perfectly comfortable scrambling for leftovers in my freezer. Indeed, there are things in there I really need to cook—like a lb. of ground lamb that I want to do something creative with. Tomorrow night I will eat at home alone, and I am a bit excited about the dish I’m going to try—eggs poached in red wine and served with herbed crusty bread. Plus, I think I’ll cook some mushrooms in that red wine.

But tonight, ah tonight. Red beans, sausage and rice. Christian asked me why I decided to cook that, and I told him it was because I thought he’d like it. A bit of a mix-up: I forgot to buy the beans at the store last week, so Jordan brought me canned beans. Wouldn’t do. Christian got dried last night, because you have to cook them from scratch to get that good pot likker. I followed a really easy recipe this afternoon, and we had a slightly spicy but really good dinner. Not hard to do, and a recipe that goes in my keeper file.

But it was a hectic evening. Neighbors came to sit on my patio and stayed till 7:30, at which point I was inside cooking the rice to go with the bens and sausage. Then Jordan had five little boys, including Jacob, to feed. We finally ate in shifts after 8:00. But that’s the kind of confusion I associate with happy family life, and I enjoyed it. Again, the cottage is a plus—I simply excused myself from the patio when I felt so inclined.

Jordan just brought me a chocolate chip cookie, still warm from the oven. What a nice way to end the day.

Rain, food, and things I didn’t sign on for as a mother

One of those almost-rainy, dull Saturdays when you stay home alone all day and try not to feel sorry for yourself. My solution was to read, and I spent much of the day finishing The Velveteen Daughter, which I am to review for Story Circle Network. I even roughed out the review. But that historical novel is not light reading and didn’t do much to lighten my mood

My kids are in their forties, and I should not be worrying about them. But I am. One is periodically hiding in a closet with his family in Tomball because they get one tornado warning after another. Spinoffs from Hurricane Harvey. Another in Austin said this morning it’s just an ordinary rainstorm, but I’m afraid she’s in for a rude awakening. The third is with his family in Boulder, delivering the oldest daughter to college—surely a bittersweet moment for that close family. And the local one? She woke with a splitting sinus headache. I guess Harvey gets all of us one way or another, though we’ve had only one brief sprinkle of rain.

I did keep one eye on the TV (with the sound muted) for hurricane reports and watched the national news avidly. The devastation from landfall is awful, but they say the worst is yet to come—flooding over the next few days as Harvey lingers almost in place and dumps inches and inches of rain. I think of the Tomball kids again, with a stable next door that becomes a sea of mud, with a lot of horse poop in it. And the snakes that may come sliding out of their small lake. Of course, being a mother, my mind can go quickly to the worst-case scenario, for which Colin would scorn me.

Cooking always brightens my day, so I made myself a new recipe for supper. A baked egg on a bed of toast, spinach, crumbled bacon, and thin slices of cheese. Think of it--all the food groups at once. Drizzled a little cream over the top because the original recipe said to do that, but I’m not sure what good it did. With a single burner kitchen, I had to cook dinner in several steps—make the toast, sauté the bacon that I’d already diced rather than trying to crumble after it cooked—that doesn’t work well for me because bacon doesn’t cook evenly. Then I sautéed the spinach ever so quickly in a tiny bit of bacon grease, and assembled the whole thing in a ramekin. I had to finish with the hot plate before I could turn on the toaster-oven to heat 400, but that gave me time to do some dishes and put away food. When the oven was 400, I put my dinner in for 15 minutes—perfection! The egg white was set nicely but the yolk still runny.

If I ever do a cookbook I will emphasize that some of the recipes must be done with a love of cooking, because they are neither quick nor easy. But for me it was fun, and the result was scrumptious. I had found a recipe, but the cheese was my addition, as was the substitution of a half slice of sourdough toast, well buttered, for an English muffin. And I had to reduce the recipe to serve one instead of four, but by now that’s old hat.

Now what to do with the rest of my evening? Read, that’s what. When I was deep in the review book, which did call me back with a siren call, I occasionally felt I had to escape from that intense world to a cozy mystery. Now I’m free to read that cozy without interruption.