What's for Dinner

I hear that the things my Facebook friends like to read most are my status updates about my adventures in the kitchen.  Since I was little, I enjoyed helping Mom in the kitchen, creating fantastic things from combinations of other basic things.  I am always dubious of the true quality of the products from my  kitchen -- I am not professionally trained and my skills are far from great, and I am sure that anyone, following the same recipes can create the same dish better than I could ever do.  But my personal doubts do not stop me from trying out new-to-me recipes.

With that in mind, I thought it might be interesting to do a recap of this week's cooked from scratch meals.  Here in my own kitchen, I have to make more things from scratch.  There are fewer convenience products available in Australian groceries -- for example, there is no biscuit/baking mix or refrigerator biscuits.  So every time a recipe calls for biscuit mix or a tube of refrigerator biscuits, I have to add the extra step of making the biscuits.  As a result, my collection of cookbooks from the 1950s and 1960s have come in handy.  I do not know for sure, but based on the products available in my local stores, groceries have not really advanced beyond the US 1960s here.

Dearest works late most Mondays and Tuesdays, so I do not bother cooking those nights, as we usually have plenty of leftovers to choose from, and I keep a pantry stocked with quick meal ingredients.  So my cooking week runs Wednesday to Sunday.

This week, the plan was:
Wednesday: Skillet Burger Supper, purchased hamburger buns, and corn on the cob
Thursday: Risotto-Style Peppered Rice & bean burritos
Friday: Country Chicken Casserole
Saturday: Cream of Cheese Soup, Corn-Meal Buns and Hot Milk Cake with Mocha-Chocolate Frosting
Sunday: Three Cheese Chicken and Noodles and green beans

Right now, it's Saturday night and we are planning to go for a drive tomorrow (Sunday) so that meal will be pushed back to Monday, which is a State Holiday in Victoria.  I'll report on that meal when I have actually prepared it.

Wednesday:
Skillet Burger Supper would be more recognizable if it were to be called Sloppy Joes.  I found the recipe in my 1953 Edition of Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook (yes, the red plaid one everyone's mother had).  BH&G reprinted the 1953 edition in the late 1990s and I bought a copy from the bargain book table at Barnes & Noble.  I prefer it to the newer versions as it has meal planning guides and better instructions for some techniques than the newer versions.  And as I found, it is easier to get the ingredients from older US edition cookbooks than it is from newer ones.  This one of the recipes that I used merely as a guide, and did not follow exactly.  I realized when I was gathering the ingredients, that I had forgotten to buy the required celery at the grocery that morning, and was not going to make a special trip for one stalk of celery.  I had a tomato left over from last week's menus so I seeded and diced that instead.  And since I have discovered I do not particularly care for the celery with beef, I thought the substitution made a better end result anyway.  My menu plan had been to purchase hamburger buns or Kaiser rolls, but I had some Basic White Bread cloverleaf rolls left over from the weekend that really needed to be used, so I served the Skillet Burger Supper atop the rolls.  I purchased frozen corn on the cob, prepared it as per the package instructions, and served the ears with whipped butter and salt and pepper at the table.

This meal was a meal my mother would have prepared for us growing up, so there was an element of comfort food about it.  But this version of sloppy joes called for bottled barbecue sauce in addition to ketchup, so it had a smokey flavour to it, that traditional sloppy joes lack.  I would rate it better than Manwich, but not the greatest recipe I have tried.  I am still on the hunt for a good from-scratch sloppy joe recipe.

Thursday:
The Risotto-Style Peppered Rice was actually a recipe from my copy of 3 Books in 1 Rival Crock Pot:  Slow Cooker Favorites, Winning Slow Cooker Recipes, and Slow Cooker Recipes for All Occasions (a brand-name back-of-box cookbook I picked it up from the bargain book table at Barnes & Noble one time), but I knew that it would be too much for just the two of us if I prepared it in my Crock-Pot, so I decided to alter the recipe a bit and use my rice cooker to prepare it.  That was a brilliant idea and I will definitely add that to my stock recipes for rice to accompany other meals.  I cooked the rice in vegetable broth with the diced red pepper and onions, as well as the seasonings the original recipe called for.  When bell dinged, I added milk, cheese and butter leaving it to simmer for another twenty minutes.  That resulted in a smooth, creamy, flavourful, but not over-flavoured mock-risotto.  It was great by itself, but I had some tortillas leftover that needed to be used, so I heated a can of refried beans in the microwave to make rice and bean burritos.  After I rolled the burritos, I put them in the oven for a few minutes, to crisp up the tortillas for another texture in the meal and served them.

I will definitely do this again, though I will buy a different brand of refried beans.  Even though this brand was listed as "mild," I found the chilies in the mix to contribute too much heat which overwhelmed the delicate flavour of the cheesy rice.  I can highly recommend this rice preparation to anyone, even to my mother who swears she does not like risotto.

Friday:
I altered my meal plan for the week today.  I had planned to bake the Hot Milk Cake with Mocha-Chocolate Frosting on Saturday, but I decided I needed the dessert sooner.  And I was glad I made the decision.  Friday was one of those days that just needed buttercream to make it better.  Both the recipes for Hot Milk Cake and the Mocha-Chocolate Frosting come from the 1953 Edition of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook.

I was looking for either a flavourful cake with a simple frosting or a simple cake with a flavourful frosting.  This creation is the latter combination.  I am used to baking cakes from boxed mixes, so I have very little experience with from scratch cakes.  This was simple enough.  The hardest part for me was scalding the milk.  I heated it in the microwave rather than the traditional method of heating the milk in a saucepan, but once I figured out how long to warm the milk, everything was good.  I also found the process for mixing this cake a bit different than I am used to.  In this recipe, the eggs were whipped with the sugar, then the flour was added, and finally the hot milk was stirred in.  I was a bit nervous using the unfamiliar process, but it turned out beautifully.  The only issue may have resulted from overmixing the batter, or baking the cake a bit too long, as the cake was tougher than I would have liked, but it was still a very nice cake.  The frosting was easy as anything to put together and produced a great buttercream, though I can say DO NOT take a test taste before adding the sugar to the coffee/cocoa/butter mixture.  Just trust me.

The Country Chicken Casserole was from my copy of From Amish and Mennonite Kitchens.  It's a creamy spaghetti casserole made with chicken, carrots, peas, cream cheese, milk and mayonnaise.  I don't like mayonnaise, so I substituted an equal amount of sour cream.  The other tweak I made was to sprinkle buttered seasoned breadcrumbs on the casserole before baking for a bit of crunch.  Like most casseroles go, any of the additions could be switched out.  In fact, I have plans to do the same thing again, adding some Taco Seasoning to the cream sauce and using whole kernel corn, sauteed bell peppers, and onions in place of the carrots and peas.  This is not something I would prepare it for a meal when company was coming (though dearest often wonders why when I say that about a particular dinner), but for an average weeknight family dinner, this is perfect.

Aside:  In the US, I used Tyson frozen chicken chunks for most recipes calling for cooked chicken.  That product is not available here in Australia.  I have the choice of buying a prepared roast chicken or roasting my own chicken.  This week I took the latter option and roasted my own chicken.  I seasoned a self-basting whole chicken with my personal blend of dry rub seasoning, both on and under the skin, and roasted the chicken according to the directions on the package of oven bags.  If I do say so myself, this was one of the best chickens I have prepared yet.  I picked the meat from the bones and used 1/3 of it for Friday's County Chicken Casserole and have planned to use the remainder for the Three Cheese Chicken and Noodles on Monday.

Saturday:
With 3/4 of the cake still to enjoy, I set about preparing the other aspects of this meal.  Both recipes come from the 1953 Edition of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I am experimenting with yeast breads.  Most of my yeast bread recipes come from the Breaking Bread with Father Dominic series, but this one looked interesting so I decided to give it a try.  I thought the Corn-Meal Buns sounded like they would be a yeasted cornbread, which would, in my head at least, go beautifully with a creamy cheese soup, but the rolls actually turned out more like hearty dinner rolls.  They turned out well, though I think I overworked the dough trying to work in the 5 1/2 cups flour, so they were a bit tougher and denser than I would have preferred.  If I make them again, I am going to trust my judgment with the amount of flour, even if it means ignoring the recipe.  Father Dominic may say "It's bread, it's going to forgive you," but that doesn't mean it always will.  Overworked dough will bake up tough.  The rolls were good, but I know they could have been better.

Cream of Cheese soup is a at its heart a cream sauce (bechamel sauce) with cheese, thinned with broth to be a soup consistency.  This version adds cooked shredded carrots, celery and onions to the cream sauce before the cheese is incorporated. I think it was a very good soup, though I may need to re-think my choice of cheese.  I used Colby and I think it could stand up to a stronger flavour such as a sharp cheddar.  I will most certainly make this quick soup again, though I may make additions of either potatoes to create a cheese chowder, or macaroni to make a "macaroni & cheese soup."

On the whole the week's meals were a success.  Some of them could have definitely been executed better, but none were failures in my eyes and most recipes can be added to my list of things that can be made again.  I am very pleased with the efforts that came from my kitchen this week -- so much so that I am off to get a slice of Hot Milk Cake with Mocha-Chocolate Frosting.  Can a bring a slice to anyone else?

Required Reading

Some years ago, I undertook a personal challenge to read all the books generally considered to be Classics I had not read already.  Most of the Classics I had read were required reading in high school or college.

I firmly believe that the best way to ruin a book for the readers is to make it required reading.  It is also my theory that Classics are only required reading because some previous generation was required to read a crappy novel and wanted to share the torture with future generations.  Either that, or some bookstore manager somewhere had a surplus of copies of A Tale of Two Cities and thought "what better way to get rid of the crap than require classes to read it?"  Whichever theory is correct, and I have no doubts that one of them is, it stills ends up that most of the so-called Classics, are in fact, crap.

Even with the belief that most Classics are crap, I began my challenge by reading Jane Eyre.  I decided fairly early in the book that I did not like it, but I persevered to the end, enjoying not one single second of the book.  After failing to enjoy one word of Jane Eyre, I gave up on my challenge to read all the Classics for a while, but kept the other books I had purchased when I was gung-ho about the challenge.  Along with Jane Eyre, I had copies of:  The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wuthering Heights, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Vanity Fair.

Years after I began my Classics project, I re-evaluated it, thinking that maybe I picked a bad book to start and there really were good Classics out there.  I read and actually enjoyed The Magnificent Ambersons, so I thought I would continue the project.  I dived readily into Wuthering Heights and immediately regretted it.  Back on the shelf it went for another few years, until a message board I frequent picked it as the inaugural Classics Book Club read.  I thought, why not give the personal challenge another go?  The book club had been scheduled to read approximately five chapters a week, with a weekly discussion to make it easier and to generate continuing interest.

It's not helping.  Three weeks in and I am slogging through Wuthering Heights as much as I did when it was required reading in high school.  Though to be fair, in high school I gave up long before Chapter XIII, where I am currently mired.  I am torn between wanting to give up now and place the book on the very tip top of my to be donated as soon as possible pile -- I cannot bear to throw away or destroy books just because I do not enjoy them -- or to persevere through to the end of the horrid, hated volume, coming out with a sense of a accomplishment and grateful knowledge that I never, ever have to read the book again.

Still on my shelf are The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Vanity Fair.  I may at some distant point in the future decide to once again attempt to read all the Classics that everyone should read, but that point will not be any time soon.  Right now, I think "Life's too short to read crap, even Classics crap."

More Kitchen Magic

I have waxed poetic on the kitchen magic that can come from mixing flour, pantry staples, and liquid.  And my amazement now is in no way diminished.  But I have found the magic that is yeast breads.

Sitting on my new cookbook shelf is my collection of cookbooks from the Public Television series, Breaking Bread with Father Dominic.

I "bought" the first as part of a pledge drive incentive and collected the other two over time as I saw them in the bookstores.  The series dates from before the time of 24-hour cable cooking shows and has a familiar comfortable host, who made familiar, comfortable food.  There was no pretense about being a gourmand, about needing specialized, celebri-chef branded tools, or using esoteric ingredients.  Father Dominic made honest and humble breads.  He demonstrated simple techniques using old fashioned hand tools, and even your own hands.  There was a bit of information about the loaves he created, whether history or folklore, and a bit of fun relating his personal experience with testing the loaves on his more than willing fellow-brother guinea pigs.  It was a fun show to watch, and the memory of the enjoyment has stayed with me longer than the three seasons the show was on.

When I got the first book, I attempted a few of the recipes when the show was being aired.  Unfortunately, my house then was kept too cool for happy yeast and my creations were so less than stellar that I left them for the appreciative canal bank denizens.  But now that I have my own house, and can control the ambient temperature, I remembered the books, and after the success of my King Cake, I pulled out the books with the intention of actually making some bread, instead of just dreaming about it.

I think my experimentation so far has been a success, and judging by my dearest's reactions, I'm not the only one who thinks that.  So far I have tried:

• Pizza Dough (several times)
• Red Onion Focaccia (twice)
• English Muffin Bread
• Basic White Bread 
• Pesto Swirls.

And there are so many more tempting recipes in the books.  I have plans for a sweet dough lattice bread (similar to a fruit-and-cheese-filled danish), honey-oatmeal bread, and challah for starters.

The magic that is flour and liquid is no less amazing when it's a loaf of beer bread than it is when the beer is replaced by warm water and yeast.  The latter may take more than two hours, but the end result is worth waiting for.

(Pesto Swirls)