How I Know I'm Not Young Any More What’s cooking? Cornbread-Sausage Stuffing with Apples and Grapes

I lost my cellphone a few months ago. There’s hardly anything more disruptive to your life, but once it’s gone, there’s not much you can do about it but start reconstructing your contacts from scratch. I decided to make the best of the loss, and upgrade to one of those phones that actually has a real keyboard on it, rather than the phone pad I’d been limping along with for so long. I’m sure it’s an age thing, but it made me completely understand the need for abbreviations. (“Let’s see, the O is on the 6, so that’s three touches...beep beep beep beep – oops, not FOUR touches...arggghhh.”) Making matters worse, one of my sons is a voice-mail-avoider, so pretty much the only way to get a message to him is via text.

A Fun, New Cookbook What’s cooking? Bacon and Pecan Pralines

I’m back! Back from the wedding abyss. Back from the beautiful fall colors in New Jersey. Back to the Austin days when you can leave all the windows open and luxuriate in the warm breezes of October. Frankly, I don’t know which place I’d rather spend these months in.

Austin is a town of outdoor events. Start with South by Southwest (SXSW), the massive week-long music (and now film and interactive) festival that makes Woodstock look like a meeting of the Tuesday Ladies Lunch Club. Then there’s the Texas Hill Country Wine & Food Festival in April, part of which is an outdoor fair. Only a couple of weeks ago, we celebrated Austin City Limits – a glorious weekend of music held in Zilker Park. And this weekend was the Texas Book Festival, which occupied the center of town and many of the rooms in the capitol building. Admission was free, and presentations ran all day long, with opportunities to hear lots of authors and get signed copies of their books.

Pardon the Interruption

You may be wondering where I've been these past few weeks. There's a song by the group, Sugarland, with a line that goes, "Life is a runaway train you can't wait to jump on." That's pretty much how I feel about weddings, too, these days. My son is getting married in nine days, and as much as I love the planning and the list-making and the excitement -- and, of course, the soon-to-be daughter-in-law -- I have a feeling I'll be really glad when it's over. But it may be another week or so before I can get my head into anything else, so please excuse the hiatus. I've got a bunch of recipes I'm aching to try, and I promise to share them all.

Falling in Love Again -- with Tomatoes What’s cooking? Green Tomato and Lemon Marmalade

I didn’t grow up liking fresh tomatoes. In fact, for most of my life, I avoided tomatoes as tasteless and of a texture I didn’t like. And even when farmers’ markets began sprouting up all over New Jersey, I took a pass on the tomatoes.

Then on the trip south to deliver our first born to college, we left a few days early to check out the mountains of the Carolinas, where my husband envisioned retiring. (That would be before I convinced him that we needed to go to Austin.) We found a bed and breakfast that was straight out of a Tennessee Williams story, and I called for reservations. When I told the owner where we were coming from, he said, “New Jersey? I’ll give you a discount if you’ll bring me a cooler of Jersey tomatoes.”

That’s when I began to suspect there was something special about them.

Gladys’s 99th – Happy Birthday! What’s cooking? Apple Pound Cake

Not everyone gets good in-laws. And very few get really great in-laws. I am one of the lucky few. Adding to that good fortune, yesterday, my mother-in-law celebrated her 99th birthday.

It’s amazing what can happen in 99 years. In addition to outliving fellow 1911 babies Ginger Rogers, Ronald Reagan, and Mahalia Jackson, Gladys has watched a sea change in our daily lives. Just to give you an idea of what was happening in the world when she was born, here are a couple of milestones from the year of her birth.

■ An expedition led by Roald Amundsen was the first to reach the South Pole.

■ Chevrolet officially entered the automobile market in competition with the Ford Model T.

■ President Taft presided over the dedication of the New York Public Library.

■ The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, one of the largest industrial disasters in the history of New York City, caused the death of 146 garment workers, almost all of them women, who either burned or jumped to their deaths because ladders couldn’t reach them on the 9th or 10th floors. It was the worst workplace disaster in NYC until September 11, 2001.

■ Calbraith Perry Rodgers, a pioneer American aviator trained by Orville Wright, made the first transcontinental airplane flight across the U.S. The trip took from September 17 to November 5, and included some 69 stops, both intentional and accidental.

■ The number of motor vehicles in the U.S. was 470,000.

My sons can’t imagine life without cell phones or computers; when Gladys was born, there also were no electric traffic lights (invented in 1912), household refrigerators (the earliest, in 1922, cost almost twice as much as a car), zippers (1913), or ballpoint pens (1938).

So we celebrated on Sunday, with a family gathering at which Gladys’s daughter (my fabulous sister-in-law) baked one of her mom’s most delicious cakes.

Gladys’s Apple Pound Cake

2 cups sugar
1½ cups vegetable oil
3 eggs
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon vanilla
3 cups finely diced apples
1 cup walnuts, chopped
1 cup coconut

Preheat oven to 350º. Combine sugar, oil and eggs in bowl and beat until thick and creamy. Sift together the flour, soda, and salt (or combine the dry ingredients in a separate bowl, and stir well). Beat the dry mixture into the wet, and stir in the vanilla. Fold in apples, nuts, and coconut. (Kitchen Goddess note: It's a stiff batter, but take heart – it’s a great cake, and needs no icing.) Pour into a greased and floured tube pan. Bake at 350º for 1 hour 20 minutes.

Top 10 Herbs and Spices What’s cooking? Summer Salad

On an airplane a couple of days ago, I was reading the latest issue of Writers’ Digest, in which the editors took on a theme of “Top Ten” and pretty much wore it out. But you know how something like that will get inside your brain, so before I knew it, I had pulled out my notebook and begun writing down a few of my own Top Tens, mostly to do with cooking. I’m going to try not to wear it out here, today, so I’ll take just one, and write about the others over the next few weeks. It’s a cheater’s way to write – after all, you don’t have to develop any flow to the text; but for a now-and-then sort of thing, it’s fun.

I’ll start with my 10 Favorite Herbs and Spices, because I want to tell you about a simple and delicious salad I made as I was trying to pack. And one of the ingredients is in this list.

Garlic salt. OK, right off the bat, this probably doesn’t qualify as either an herb or a spice. But I keep it in my spice cabinet, and both garlic and salt are flavor enhancers. (I buy the Lawry's brand, which has freeze-dried flakes of parsley in it; maybe the parsley flakes help it qualify for this list. But if you’re going to clench your teeth and mutter curses at me for this, you’d better move on.) In any case, I put it in almost everything that’s not dessert. I add it to a lot of soups, and sometimes I sprinkle it on salads that don’t want a strong garlic taste. Garlic salt and lemon pepper are my standard seasonings for meat or seafood of almost any kind, especially if I’m grilling or broiling, and not adding any sort of sauce. So naturally, my number 2 is...
 
Lemon pepper. Lemon definitely doesn’t qualify as an herb or a spice, but it does make the flavor of so many things sparkle. And in combination with garlic salt, lemon pepper helps bring the flavor out on most kinds of protein.

Mint. I’m starting to believe that southerners have a specific taste bud that periodically sends out a call for mint. Sort of like oregano for Mexicans and basil for Italians.(This may be why English food has a tendency toward bland – I can’t think of a single herb that’s particularly English.) Whatever the reason, I will happily add mint to a range of dishes. Fresh fruit, salad dressings, ice cream,... And the drinks: lemonade, iced tea, mojitos, even plain old water with ice and lemon.

Thyme. A staple of my chicken soup, which is, ahem, fabulous. (Soon, soon, I will post it. Just gotta get out of this summer heat.) Actually, many broth soups call for fresh thyme in the bouquet garni. It’s easy to grow, and pretty hardy. And if I’m baking chicken breasts for a salad, I always throw a sprig of fresh thyme and a thin slice of lemon on each breast – it gives a great flavor to both the chicken and the broth that accumulates.

Dill. Dill is the lemon juice of the herb garden. There’s a sparkle to it that really perks up the flavor of broth soups, of baked chicken, and many kinds of fish. It’s another staple of my chicken soup. Fresh dill is also good in a salad.

Ginger. I’m going to distinguish here between fresh ginger and powdered ginger. I love fresh ginger, but it’s already on a list of my 10 favorite ingredients for cooking, which I’ll write about in a future posting. So here, I’m just talking about the powdered form. One of my favorite baked chicken recipes, called Bobbie’s Chicken, is from the first Silver Palate Cookbook. It uses an obscenely large quantity of powdered ginger and powdered mustard to create a rub that produces – oh, my goodness – just the best baked chicken ever. And my friend Pam has a ginger snap recipe that I’m hoping she’ll let me post one day. Ginger is another of those sparkly spices that do more than add flavor – they make your mouth do an oh-wow thing. Which must be good, yes?

Cumin and Chili Powder. I can’t seem to talk about one of these without the other, so I’ll stop trying. Maybe that’s because chili powder actually contains cumin. But sometimes you want more of that earthy, roasted flavor that cumin alone imparts. Of course, any good chili recipe requires both of these spices, but have you ever considered mixing them with a tiny bit of sugar and tossing sweet potato spears in it? Oven-roasted sweet potato fries will make you weep.

Nutmeg. This stuff is one of the best fall flavors I know. It’s essential in my Aunt Marcy’s pumpkin chiffon pie, wonderful if grated on top of whipped cream for many desserts, often found in sweet rolls, and completely amazing when grated over cooked fresh spinach. The grating part is so easy, I stopped buying grated nutmeg years ago. Buy the nuts in a jar and get a fine grater (or rasp) – you’ll never regret it.

Basil. I left this for last because it’s a key ingredient in today’s salad recipe – not because I like it any less than the others. In fact, pesto is a strong contender for My Favorite Pasta Sauce. [See my July 31, 2009, post for the recipe.] After Sun Gold tomatoes, it’s the best thing I grow in my Austin garden. And among farmer’s market lunches, nothing could be simpler than sliced tomatoes with mozzarella and basil, topped with a bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. But the following comes very close (and, in fact, is not too different).

Kitchen Goddess Note: I recognize the heresy of using bottled salad dressing, but Julie’s Caesar Salad Dressing (from The Silver Palate brand) is really good, and you will note that this is a salad made as I was literally on the run. So there.

Leaving for the Airport Summer Salad

1 medium tomato, cut into half-inch cubes
2 ounces fresh mozzarella, cut into half-inch cubes
1½ cups watermelon, cut into half-inch cubes
1 peach, peeled and cut into half-inch cubes
2 tablespoons fresh basil leaves, sliced into thin ribbons
2 tablespoons Julie’s Caesar Salad Dressing (Silver Palate brand)

Toss it all together and enjoy. Serves one hungry person – or two, if it’s not the only thing on the menu.

Out of the Frying Pan...? What’s cooking? Corn Salad

As of about three weeks ago, my husband and I have become part of the great North/South seasonal migration. After last summer’s 66+ days over 100º in Austin, we decided we’d been maybe a bit hasty in our flight from the frozen Northeast. At least for the summer months, we figured we’d hide out in New Jersey, where we remembered temperatures mostly in the 70s and 80s, with the occasional night that didn’t even require air conditioning. So we found an apartment in Jersey City – near the water and the energy of NYC – and prepared to be cooler this summer.

Well, it was theoretically a good idea. But not so much this year. So far, since we’ve been here, temperatures in Jersey City have rivaled – rivaled, you hear? – those in Austin. In fact, for the first few days after we arrived, it was actually cooler in Austin. Maybe we’ll just stay inside.

But even with the heat, I am so thrilled to be back in the land of the farmers’ markets. They do have farmers’ markets in Texas, but none that I have seen can hold a scented candle to the fresh produce of the Northeast. (The photo here is from the market on Martha’s Vineyard, which we visited last year.) And it turns out that even in the urban heart of Jersey City, a handful of small farmers’ markets are blossoming. I’ve discovered a list of NINE markets, nicely scheduled so that there’s at least one every day of the week except Sunday, which is fine by me because that’s the day I wander back to Summit, where the best farmers’ market of all (in my humble opinion) takes place.

Another nice thing about coming back to our old stomping grounds is the opportunity to see friends we’ve been missing. And last weekend offered a sort of bonanza of New Jersey’s best when we visited friends who made an amazing salad that featured Jersey Fresh corn. Kitchen Goddess note #1: I added the olive oil when I made it a couple of days later, just because it seemed like a nice touch; but Kathrin, who is much thinner than I am, left that out. It’s terrific either way. Kitchen Goddess note #2: Kathrin grilled her corn, but I had no grill available, so I boiled mine, for 3 mins. The key is not to cook it too much, as a tiny bit of crunchiness is essential to the freshness of taste.

Kathrin’s Corn Salad

6 ears corn, grilled or boiled (3 mins)
1 pint cherry tomatoes, quartered, or 1 large tomato, cut into half-inch dice
2 avocados, cut into half-inch dice
½ c chopped cilantro (or more, depending on how much you like cilantro – and I love cilantro)
juice of 2 limes
1 Tbl olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Using a sharp knife, cut the kernels off the corn into a bowl. Add remaining ingredients and stir to combine. Serves 6-8.

Kitchen Goddess note #3: This works fine as a buffet item, but if you are serving it plated, I’d recommend using a leaf of butter lettuce (also known as Boston or Bibb lettuce) to hold it.

Soup to the Rescue! What’s cooking? Cream of Broccoli Soup

I really didn’t want to go grocery shopping yesterday, and we’d eaten the only frozen pizza we had a few nights ago; so once again, I was in a dinner quandary. The night before, I’d used up the zucchini and yellow squash and mushrooms in a throw-it-all-in pasta dish, and I shy away from the same sort of thing two nights in a row; so pasta was out. I had a package of chicken tamales in the freezer – one of the great benefits to living in Texas is that very good tamales are broadly available – but was still stuck for what to go with them.

It didn’t have to be Mexican food, I decided. But something not too spicy, to balance the tamale seasoning. In fact, my choices were what you would call extremely limited: to wit, one slightly sad head of broccoli. But I know what to do with veggies that are past their prime: it’s called SOUP. I checked out a couple of recipes and took what looked like the easiest one, which was also the one with the A that I noted at the top of the page. I winced slightly when I saw that my notes also said it takes 2½ hours, but overweening optimism won me over – surely, I can be faster than I was the last time. This is the sort of mindset that gets me into trouble.

Kitchen Goddess Tip: Life became a lot easier once I got past the Felix Unger pristine approach to cookbooks. So: TAKE NOTES. Grade a recipe the first time you make it, note how long it took, and if the garlic flavor is too strong or it needs more salt, write that down. These are the sorts of things you won’t remember – trust me.

For the broccoli soup, I started with the Culinary Institute’s Book of Soups, and adjusted to fit the ingredients at hand. The CIA called for a leek, which would have been lovely, but I didn’t have one. I discovered a fat shallot among my onions and threw it in along with a couple of tablespoons of chives from my garden. And I upped the amount of celery they suggested. I added a bit of butter (for flavor) to the vegetable sauté, and went a bit heavier on the lemon juice. The result was fabulous, and when I realized it was all going into the blender, I stopped obsessing over carefully chopped broccoli, so it took much less time. We had it hot with the tamales, and today, I ate it cold for lunch.

Cream of Broccoli Soup

1 pound broccoli
2 tablespoons olive oil
½ tablespoon butter
1 small onion, chopped (about ¾ cup)
1 medium shallot, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped (about ½ cup)
2 tablespoons fresh chives, chopped
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
3½ cups chicken broth
¼ cup heavy cream, warmed
2 tablespoons lemon juice
salt and white pepper to taste (you can use finely ground black pepper, but it’s not as pretty)

Trim the tough outer skin from the broccoli stems and set aside about ½ cup of the better looking small florets for garnish. Coarsely chop the rest of the broccoli – stems and florets. (Remember, this is a cream soup, so the whole thing is going into the blender. No need to be dainty about the broccoli cuts. Admittedly, the trimming will take some time.)

Heat the oil and butter over medium heat, add the broccoli, onion, celery, shallot, and chives. Cook, stirring frequently to coat all the veggies with the oil/butter, for 8-9 minutes, until the onion is translucent. Add the flour, stirring almost constantly to keep it from burning, for another 4 minutes.

Add the broth, whisking if necessary to eliminate chunks of flour, and simmer 45 mins, stirring occasionally. Make sure you scrape up and incorporate any flour residue that has stuck to the bottom of the pot. Toward the end of the 45 mins, steam or boil the reserved florets until tender and set them aside.

Purée the soup well (I run it a good 2 minutes), then add the cream and lemon juice and salt/pepper and blend again briefly. Serve immediately, garnished with the reserved florets. If you don’t want to serve it immediately, return it to the pot and reheat (do not boil) before serving. Or chill it for a couple of hours and serve cold. Serves 4.

Me and Dr. Scholls -- Gellin’ What’s cooking? Strawberry-Watermelon-Cucumber Salad

The thermometer here in Austin has been in the 90s almost every day for the longest, and all I could think of was... gelatin salad. I’ve been a molded salad snob for years, disdaining the green wobbly squares with floating bits of  pineapple and celery that would invariably appear on the menu at my mother-in-law’s house. She’s a wonderful woman and way too fond of Jello salad.

But in the midst of this summer heat wave, I was desperate for something cool that didn’t involve a lot of calories. I looked around my cupboard but had too little powdered gelatin for a salad, so – against all my better instincts – I made do with a package of sugar-free orange Jello. I mixed it with a heavy cup of grated carrots and an orange that I peeled, sliced and chopped into small segments, then added the juice of half a lemon to balance the sweetness of the Jello. Quite tasty – cool with crunch, and a dollop of creme fraiche took away even more of the sweetness.

Still, I yearned for the clarity of a plain gelatin base. So the next time I went to the store, I picked up a couple of boxes of Knox, and wandered the produce aisles for what to put with it. Strawberries are still in season, so I started with those. To add crispness or crunch, I chose an English cucumber – less bitter than the standard garden cuke, and with a thinner skin. And in a moment I can only describe as inspired, I discovered some seedless watermelon in the frig. I cubed everything – half-inch cubes for the fruit and quarter-inch cubes for the cucumber – to give it a more attractive presentation. For flavor and the hint of sweetness, I included minted simple syrup in lieu of some of the water. Wow. It tasted light and fresh, and it looked like jewels suspended in champagne.

I may be in my own little world, but it’s okay, they know me here... What’s cooking? Salad Monique

I spent four days last week at the beach, writing with another woman who is both a lifelong friend and a writer. We drove to the Texas coast, to a tiny fishing village named Port Aransas. Basking in relative obscurity, Port A lolls at the far north end of Mustang Island – a home to as many deep-sea sport fishing boats as crusty shrimpers. A place so laid back that dressing up mostly means a clean pair of flip-flops. And running south from the town, 18 miles of broad creamy beaches. The BP disaster hasn’t reached this part of the Gulf Coast, but early June is still seaweed season, so the crowds are minimal. For the past 10 years, my friend and I have been going there to write for a week, and we typically go in the spring, when the place is really deserted, so just seeing others on the beach was a bit of a shock. But what really hit us was the heat – the index was 105 one morning, and that was all it took for me to decide that a view of the ocean was all I really needed.

My family took a house on this part of Mustang Island every summer when I was growing up, and I guess when you are a kid and the bottom line is that you get to go to the beach, the heat becomes less of a factor. But when you’re an adult who has spent the past 30 years in New Jersey, I can tell you it makes a difference.

There’s something remarkable about how just watching the waves stirs up the creative juices in my head, and even though I’d been feeling completely blocked, it took less than a day for the ideas to start flowing. The Texas coast between the mainland and Mustang Island is an amoebic pattern of vast shallow bays – more green than blue – home to herons and whooping cranes and roseate spoonbills, and the flatness of the land begins to draw the tension out of me long before we can actually see the ocean.

By the time we got home, I’d had my quota of fresh seafood for about a month, so all I really wanted to eat was a salad. I remembered a recipe I’d found when I was reviewing the famous chefs’ cookbooks, an amazing concoction at the front of Eric Ripert’s Return to Cooking. It’s sort of a Kitchen Sink Recipe – it takes a good hour just to assemble the ingredients. But I promise it’s worth the trouble. And while this recipe says it serves 6, my husband and I shared it as our dinner and were fighting over the remains.