Snowbound! What’s cooking? Pasta with Collards and Sweet Italian Sausage

When we made our reservations for Christmas in New Jersey, we told ourselves, “It hardly ever snows before January.” At least, that was what I said. My husband was less sanguine. But our recently married son is working crazy hours as a first year law firm associate, and our med school student had time off and was looking forward to seeing his NJ friends. So up we came.

And then the Blizzard of 2010 hit. It was already snowing Sunday morning when I convinced my husband – as a time-saving measure only, as I’m sure if we ever decide to get a divorce it’ll be in the produce aisle – to go with me to the grocery store. What madness. Although New Jersey regularly gets its share of snowstorms, the people never seem prepared. They react to the forecast as if they’d be stuck inside for a couple of weeks, clearing the grocery shelves of everything but a few jars of anchovy paste and some cleaning fluids.

Party On! What’s cooking? Champagne Cosmopolitans

The first holiday party was Sunday, and already I’m exhausted.

It was our neighborhood party, and in addition to being on the Social Committee (but of course), I volunteered to make my roll-out cookies. And as long as I was making one batch, it seemed like no big deal to make two and send one to two kids who are sons of families in my church and are stationed in Afghanistan.

As usual, no good deed goes unpunished. It took me TWO full days to decorate them all – two full days in which I blissfully immersed myself in a world of tiny gold and silver balls, squiggles of icing, and a full color palette of sanding sugars and edible glitter. And I’ve recently discovered a new line of edible metallic glitter – red and gold and copper and brass, so fine that you apply them by dipping an eye shadow brush into the powder and oh so delicately tapping on the brush. It’s a mind-numbing process, but the effect is so beautiful I spent waaay more time than I should have finding extra places where I could dab a little metallic glitter.

I was feeling particularly creative this year, adding designs of red and green stripes to the tiny stockings, embellishing the hats of the snowmen with minuscule flowers, and completely obsessing over the possibilities for my new ornament shapes.

My husband knew enough to steer clear of the kitchen island, where I had set up shop, and didn’t even mind that we had pizza two nights in a row. Needless to say, after the party that night, I slept NINE hours. But now that I’m fully rested, I'm thinking maybe I should make some for my sons,... Somebody just shoot me, please.

My other contribution to the neighborhood soirée was a most festive drink that we used to serve at our annual soup party in New Jersey. It was a little more dangerous to serve them in New Jersey, because those parties were catered by yours truly, and the dinner part was, well, often somewhat later than I planned, with the result that a few of the guests got a bit snockered by the time the food showed up. But for the neighborhood party in Texas, the food was mostly catered, and that danger didn’t present itself. So with the caveat that you should not overindulge on an empty stomach, I can heartily recommend these for a holiday gathering. They’re simplicity itself to make, beautiful to serve, and delicious.

Champagne Cosmopolitan (adapted from Gourmet magazine, December 1999)
Makes 10 drinks

1¼ cups Cointreau (or Grand Marnier or Triple Sec)
1¼ cups cranberry juice cocktail or pomegranate juice
½  cup plus 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice
3 tablespoons superfine granulated sugar
chilled Champagne or other sparkling white wine

Stir together Cointreau, juices, and sugar and chill, covered 2 to 6 hours. Just before serving divide among 10 champagne flutes and top off with Champagne. Garnish with sugar-coated fresh cranberries or fresh raspberries or twists of lemon or lime. If you use pomegranate juice, drop a few fresh pomegranate seeds into the glass.

Kitchen Goddess Note: You can make a number of alterations to this without hurting the flavor: substitute pomegranate juice for the cranberry; use regular juice instead of cranberry cocktail; leave out the sugar for a less sweet drink; and substitute the cheaper Triple Sec for the Cointreau (Cointreau being just a high-end Triple Sec). It’s really best when cold, though, so if you’re serving a large group, keep the base ingredients chilled in a pitcher, then top off with champagne in a flute right before serving. I like to greet guests at the door with a tray of them – it gets people into a festive mood from the start.

Happy Holidays!!

My Season of Red and Orange What’s cooking? Sweet Potato Ginger Soufflé

I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with fall. It’s the end of warm weather for a good six months; the leaves, while briefly beautiful, are a lot of work to clean up; and my garden reminds me of Medusa on a bad hair day.

But it’s not just the leaves that turn red and orange these days. So many gorgeous foods are at their peaks in these months that I wander the farmers’ markets and the grocery aisles just dreaming of what to cook. Pomegranates, apples, cranberries, oranges, beets, carrots, radishes, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and butternut squash. And I’m sure I’ve left some out.

I start most days with pomegranate seeds mixed with creamy Fage yogurt and a spoonful of honey. Seeding a pomegranate is so tedious, there are times when I want to scream at it and throw it in the trash. But those little jewels with their bright, sweet-tart flavor give a lively start to even the dreariest day, so it’s well worth the effort. They also add wonderful sparkle – in look and taste – to a spinach salad. In the store, look for the fruit with the deepest red skin, because underripe pomegranate seeds taste...well, “bleah” is the best I can do to describe the sensation. Then park yourself in front of the television, find something interesting to watch, and seed the whole thing at once. One good pomegranate will do for several breakfasts or enough salad for 8-10. And the calories are practically nothing.

I found acorn squash at the farmers’ market last weekend. Ok, it’s green on the outside – but deep gold on the inside, so I think that counts. Split one in half, remove the seeds, and roast the halves face down on a greased pan at 400º for 45 minutes. Then turn them over, swab each inside with a half tablespoon of butter, and sprinkle on a tablespoon of brown sugar. Then send those babies under the broiler until the sugar bubbles. Whew – it’s like dessert, and it’s a vegetable!

As much as I love sweet potatoes, I’ve never been a fan of those casseroles with the marshmallows on top. So I was thrilled to find what I regard as the best ever sweet potato recipe, from one of those thin Williams-Sonoma cookbooks that I don’t think they print any more. Although they call it a pudding, it’s really more of a heavy soufflé. When we lived in New Jersey, my sister-in-law and I used to make one together every Thanksgiving – until our children grew up, and we had to make two. It’s a bit of work, but you can trust me that this is absolutely the best sweet potato dish you have ever had.

Kitchen Goddess note: In regard to nutmeg, you can use the already grated stuff in the jar, but it’s really nothing to buy the little nuts and grate them yourself on a fine grater or one of those rasps. The aroma of freshly grated nutmeg will tell you the difference in a way that words cannot hope to. I actually bought a small rasp made just for grating small stuff like nutmegs and hard chocolate, but then you knew I would have, didn’t you?

Sweet Potato Ginger Soufflé
from Chuck Williams’ Thanksgiving & Christmas

2 lb sweet potatoes
finely grated zest of one lemon
½ tsp salt
⅓ c crystallized ginger, finely chopped
1½ c heavy cream
¼ tsp freshly grated nutmeg
4 egg whites

Cut the unpeeled sweet potatoes into fourths and place them in a large saucepan with cold water to cover. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer covered for 30-40 mins, or until tender. Drain and cool.

Meanwhile, preheat oven to 350°. Butter a 2-quart soufflé dish.

Peel the cooled sweet potatoes and place in a food processor. Process to a smooth purée. (You should have about 2½ cups of purée.) Transfer the purée to a large bowl and stir in the lemon zest, salt, and crystallized ginger. Stir in the cream and add nutmeg to taste.

In a separate bowl, using a mixer set on medium speed, beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. Add about a quarter of the beaten whites to the potato mixture and combine well. Then, using a rubber spatula, gently fold in the remaining whites. Spoon into the prepared baking dish.

Bake until risen and slightly golden on top, 40-50 minutes. [Kitchen Goddess note #2: I often have to bake it an hour. It’s done when the top is firm but the center is just a bit jiggly.] Serves 8.

Preserving the Season What’s cooking? Quick "Preserved" Lemons

Some two or three years ago, I read for the first time about preserved lemons. I thought they sounded way cool as a condiment – they come out of Moroccan cuisine, and while I have no idea what that means, they apparently are best made from Meyer lemons, which I greatly love.

Here’s the story: you take 8-10 lemons, slit the sides, jam them together in a large jar with enough salt to choke a kosher horse, and after about three weeks, the skins become pickled and are apparently great in relishes or lemon-herb butters, in salads, to dress up cooked green veggies, and as a flavoring in soups. (FYI: Meyer lemon season runs for the next 3-4 months, so if you want to try preserving some, check out this site for a more cogent description of the process.)

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.