Bad Home Cooking

Tanned, rested and ready

Sorry no post last week. I was on VACATION!

But while I was away, my paella pan finally came.

Stay tuned. It's gonna be bad.

Aunt Vere's Slush

Hot young starlets like Britney and Lindsay have nothing, nothing on the hardy, salt-of-the-earth folks who populate Minnesota. Sure these girls party. But their partying lacks subtlety and subversiveness.

It would never occur to them to create a cocktail as insidious as Aunt Vere's Slush.

Lynne had described to me the delicious lemony adult drink before. She'd gotten the recipe from her neighbor, our mutual friend Colleen. Colleen explained that she had gotten the recipe herself from her Aunt Vere, a quiet, gentle and proper lady from Owatonna, Minnesota (seen pictured above with her husband Harvey).

Today I had my first taste of Aunt Vere's Slush at a 7-year-old's birthday party. Lynn dished it out to three of us moms, as our kids ran amok around us. Several of them, attracted by the scoops of light tangerine color slushy in glass tumblers asked if they could have a taste. "This is for mommies," we told them gently.

And how. Delicious. Refreshing. Sweet with a ping of tangy-ness. And a gratifying, very sneaky buzz.

I haven't included cocktail recipes on Bad Home Cooking before this, either. But it was that good. Or rather, it was that bad. In the very good sense of the word.

Here's what you do: Pay attention.

boil and cool:
8 cups water
1 cup sugar

In a large bowl or Tupperware container, add:
one 12 oz can frozen orange juice
one 12 oz can frozen lemonade
one 46 oz can of pineapple juice
two and 1/2 cups vodka

Freeze this concoction overnight. The vodka will keep it from freezing solid. The next morning (or whenever you need your first mood-enhancing beverage) scoop out the resulting "slush" with an ice-cream scooper and add it to a glass until it's 3/4 fill. Add 7-up to fill.

Aunt Vere, wherever you are, we, the Moms of Southern California hoist a glass and salute you. Long-live prairie-woman ingenuity!

Toot Sweet

Some things just can not be rushed.

Other things go best with planning. Or a few minutes of thought before execution. Or barring any of the above, a recipe.

I didn't really have any of that Sunday night when I dove, ill-equipped, into the lamb tagine idea. I did have some lamb, thoughtfully provided by the Flamenco guitarist, whose idea this was in the first place.  "Where's this lamb tagine you're always promising me?" he said, late in the languid afternoon. I muttered the standard excuse of not having any lamb and was duly pulled off the couch and driven to the market.

Now I had the ingredients at least. Pre-marinated kabobs! And I had some Kalamata olives. And some onions, and some baby carrots, and some chicken stock. And a lemon.

What I didn't have was a recipe. It was getting late, and turning the computer on to Google lamb tagine was almost more than I could muster. Besides, I had some vague notions about what goes into a lamb tagine already. Not concrete ideas, mind you, but a loosely-sketched out melange of ingredients I hoped would miraculously blend together and fill my kitchen with heavenly aromas from the Levant. Underneath this hope lurked the thought that I could just improvise, and be rewarded for my bombastic creativity with something really yummy and impressive.

Who do I think I am? Christina Bess?

The tagine itself didn't turn out un-edible. In fact, it was....well it turned out better than could be expected for someone of my experience working without a recipe on a short notice. But as always, the details were many, and flawed.

Let's call this one, Toot Sweet Tagine, shall we? Here's what we put into it:

Two skewers of lamb kabob, purchased because there were no other lamb chunks available. These are already marinated in a tangy asada sauce, and probably should have been grilled. Please note that by using kabobs marinated for the grill, we have already compromised the Middle Eastern taste we're going for.  I know. I KNOW!

half an onion, sliced into big chunks
four garlic cloves, roughly chopped, because we're like that
two handfuls of baby carrots
half a cup of raisins
handful of slivered almonds
about 8 Kalamata olives, sliced in half
some honey
a slice of lemon or two
chicken stock to cover
some paprika
some salt, some pepper

Are you following me down the path to disaster? 

OK. Brown the kabobs in some olive oil, then remove from the tagine. Saute the onions for a bit, add the garlic, then the carrots. Add some sweet paprika. Saute, saute, saute.

Dollop some honey over that stuff.

put the lamb back in and add chicken stock...not quite to cover....but enough to generate some steam.

Throw in the raisins and almonds.

Cover and let simmer for a while. I don't know how long.

Throw in the olives when you're ready to really descend to the point of no return.

At some point you will have overcooked the lamb until it's dry. You will notice that the aroma is not what it could be. Not that it's bad in any way. It's just not "OMGWhatisthat?"

Make couscous using only chicken stock.

Offer your children some lamb. Offer to wash the sauce off. Ignore their wide-eyed lamb imitations. "Baaaa! Baaaa! Maaaa-myyy, don't eeeaaatttt meeeee!" Wonder when they got indoctrinated about mutton products. Make them hotdogs instead.

Serve in festive plates, with nothing else as side dish or garnish.

Get really defensive when asked by boyfriend whether you were domestically disinclined in your '20s.

Pour yourself a large, sparkly alcoholic beverage.

Now. The gruesome details: Toot Sweet Tagine is not terribly bad. But it's way too sweet. And the melding of sweet and savory, honey and paprika, raisins and olives, I suspect wasn't ever going to work. Or maybe it would work in more capable hands. And I should have made the couscous with just water and butter to make it less heavy, to better counteract the sweetness of the lamb in its sauce.

Also, I'm not entirely clear on how this all cooks differently in a tagine. Couldn't I have cooked it up in a pot? Isn't a tagine a slow-cooker of sorts? It was Sunday night and I didn't have time for that. I wanted to use the tagine, though. It's pretty. I want to utilize it more. But I don't understand its secrets.

The flamenco guitarist ate most of his dish. He didn't rant. But he complimented politely. And he ate. Which is more than I can say for me. I found the dish altogether too cloying. Again, not bad, just way too rich.

Next time: Think. Or use a recipe. Or hell, just go to Greenblatt's for takeout.

Kitchen Goddess One

This is the third in a series of profiles of the Kitchen Goddesses: Friends who cook and can coax major culinary experiences out of a handful of fresh produce and a few utensils. Each of these women over the years has inspired me in some way. If I can't exactly follow in their footsteps, then they've encouraged me to gimp along behind as best I can.

 A moment etched in time: Early '90s. Christina Bess (nee Thompson) and I, sitting on the porch of her 100-year-old apartment building in rural Hopewell, NJ. It was summer. Sticky, hot and green. Very unlike the summers I grew up with in Southern California. We smoked cigarettes and fretted over loves lost and loves unrequited. When it was time for lunch she took me to her garden in the back and plucked a few plum tomatoes off the vine and gathered a handful of basil. She threw them into a bowl with some olive oil and seasoning. It was perfect. We ate it with the bread she'd baked that morning. And although I've tried several times, I've never once been able to recreate that taste experience.

Chris is a poet, once silencing an entire basement-level bar in the East Village with just a few words written on paper. She is passionate about everything. She has a sprawling, crazy Italian family who fell upon me all at once one Christmas with food and questions and more food and what could I do but eat?  She's lived abroad, in England, Ireland, Italy. She was the one who first said "There are two kind of people: Pie people and bread people." (she pronounced me a pie person.) From her I learned the value of an old iron skillet and the versatility of Haiku.  Before her I hadn't realized that it was possible to make an entire day out of preparing the evening meal. Before her I didn't know about the hill towns in Tuscany or about the Jersey Shore. I didn't know about Michael Ondaatje. I really knew precious little about living well until I'd met Chris Bess.

Never mind that her first comment to me was about my advanced age (I was 27. She was 22.) She's since caught up. She's been nothing but inspiring from the start.

What's the first dish you remember making by yourself?
Cherry pie, the summer I was 11. I had worked on it all day--picking the cherries off my grandmother's backyard tree, making crust, etc. I tried to pass it out onto the porch (through an open window) where the family was eagerly anticipating their dessert, and flipped it upside-down onto the porch floor. Broken glass.  Broken heart/ego. We picked out the shards, ate it anyway, and very soon put a door in where that annoying window had been.

What's your earliest kitchen memory?
Mixing up a batch of cornbread when I was about 4 years old.  I was standing on a chair with my 2 year old brother at the counter. Mom walked away for a moment, and my brother and I elbowed each other to get control of the wooden spoon. I suddenly ended up on the kitchen floor with the bowl over my head, with grainy yellow batter dripping into my ears. Mom returned and my brother instantly began protesting "I didn't do it!" over and over, while she carried us to the tub (bowl and all) and stuck us in there, laughing like a lunatic. Looking back, it may have been then that I learned that no "catastrophe" in the kitchen ever really matters that much. Kind of liberating, no?

Who inspired your love of cooking/baking?
My Italian-American mom and grandma. They really know how to throw together a few ingredients with garlic and olive oil and make people happy. I learned a lot of the nitty gritty  from my mother-in -law who worked in the Nabisco test kitchens and will try any recipe at least once.

What's your favorite dish to make right now?
Hard to say. Once or twice a month my husband and I and our 10 and 8 year old try to make a soup to nuts meal together.  These are always the best, no matter what we make,  but lately  we have been having a lot of fun and great results w/ our ice cream maker..But , if I absolutely have to choose, it would be a pasta sauce made w/ bacon, garlic, Tabasco, white wine and cream.  Heart-cloggingly amazing, and known throughout NY and NJ to make even my Jewish friends taste the pig on a cold winter night. There is never any leftover, which is always satisfying for the home cook.

Are you a bread person or a pie person?
Pie.  I actually know quite a few folks who don't/won't eat pie. I don't get it. Life is far too short not to embrace pie. I love to bake bread too. But bread is deceptively complex, being the staff of life and all. I prefer the sweet simplicity of pie. All kinds.

Describe a dish you botched badly.
A lovely French creamed fish soup that involved creating a rich stock with crustacean shells, multiple strainings through cheesecloth, etc. In the final moments before the guests arrived I added the sherry.  But wait!  It wasn't sherry -- I grabbed the wrong bottle and it was actually the triple sec  that I had set out for that refreshing fruity aperatif!  YUCK.

Your favorite cookbook of all time?
Julia's Kitchen Wisdom by Julia Child. Slim yet generous (what I constantly strive to be.)  But I am addicted to my Cook's Illustrated subscription, too.

If you could be anywhere in the world, eating anything you wanted, where would you be, and eating what?
At the top of Monte Morello, a few miles outside Florence, at the Vecchio Ranch, eating a Pizza ai 4 Formaggi. Think farmhouse in the woods with a view over the Tuscan countryside, stone fireplaces big enough to stand in, long family-style scarred wooden tables and pitchers of cold beer to go with pizza that has the thinnest crust, and richest cheese you can stand. 

Big Bang theory

Fourth of July has come and gone. We grilled hamburgers for the kids, cut up a giant watermelon and steamed some corn on the cob. Although Tony manned the grill, the nits found displeasure in the honey-wheat buns I'd bought, and the unfamiliar flavors of fresh ground beef burgers, and didn't eat more than a few bites of their meal. Apparently, though, it is possible to fill yourself up with half a watermelon.

The fillet mignon we grilled for ourselves fared better. And there was Mexican beer courtesy of my neighbor, and a very good Pinot Grigot.

In a brief moment of inspiration, I considered taking another whack at that blackberry cobbler. In the end, with blackberries costing $4 a basket at Trader Joe's, I thought better of it.

This is your cue, gentle readers, to dazzle me with your Fourth of July fare.

In other news, I've ordered the paella pan online, and I expect it to arrive next week. I promised you paella, or my version thereof. And danmit, you'll eat it, and like it.