Brigit's Flame Week 1 - A Brand New Recipe
o/` "Hey, hey, good lookin',
Whatcha got cookin'?
How's about cookin' somethin' up with me? " o/`
----- "Hey Good Lookin'" performed by Hank Williams Jr
I love to cook.
Unfortunately, cooking hates me.
I never learned to cook properly. When my father died, my mother decided thirteen years of playing hostess had been enough. When I asked her about cooking, she simply shrugged.
“Follow the recipe,” she said and handed me the family copies of Betty Crocker’s Cookbook and Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. These books were at least two generations old and therefore written with some obscurity. After all, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that cookbook writers even began to realize that assuming your reader knows the basics might be underestimating the would-be cook’s abilities. The recipes in these earlier books look devastatingly simple on the page…but they’re a disaster in the kitchen. The earliest of them are written in a kind of cook’s shorthand designed to keep the specifics of the dish a secret; the later ones do mention measurements and portions but stick with seasonal local ingredients which may not be available to a modern cook.
I decided a simple oatmeal cookie recipe provided the best chance of success. Following the instructions in a recipe must have been only part of the magic involved in cooking edible dishes. I confused wet and dry weights and I mistook baking powder for baking soda. Twenty minutes later, I had unappetizing puddles of goo sitting forlornly on the cookie sheet. The cookies refused to bake!
“That’s not possible!” my husband exclaimed. “You must not have left them in long enough at the right temperature.” He increased the temperature of the oven to 350 degrees and we waited another hour.
“Did…did they cook?” I asked as he peered into the oven.
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “they did not.” I joined him in staring at the little patties. The individual oat kernels had seared to a nasty grayish brown color, but the cookies were as raw as ever.
We couldn’t scrape them off the cookie sheet and had to throw that away as well. He drove all the way into town and brought back some oatmeal cookies, still warm from the bakery, but I couldn’t be consoled. I threw my apron over my head and cried.
“Look, cooking just isn’t your strong suit,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”
His mother believed every boy should know his way around the kitchen. Fox's meals never burned or scorched. He never had cumin or turmeric incidents (whereas I got them confused simply because they were similar colors). He could produce a roux of any sort, from tan to brick, without destroying the cast iron.
I envied him. A woman is supposed to nurture her family through her cooking skills. Mine would have had us all in the hospital with food poisoning.
It was quite a while before I felt I could show my face in the kitchen again.
Our girlfriend Dorie, a gal from the bayou country who insisted the Cajuns invented cooking, came to visit. “Anyone can cook,” she insisted. “Come, I’ll show you.”
She and I dug through cookbooks, made lists, and then drug my poor husband off to the grocery store. Dorie only let me select the freshest ingredients. I spent at least twenty minutes in the produce aisle not only using the approved standards for choosing the right fruit or vegetable but 'feeling' out its life energies to see whether or not I have a 'live' one.
In the canned good aisle, she insisted I read each label as though it were a classic novel. The best ones were simple: they stated what food had been canned, listed salt as a preservative, and the water used in packing. If it had more than one or two things I couldn't pronounce and the primary ingredients weren’t recognizable as food, I couldn't buy them.
Our grocery store has an actual butcher on duty and a real meat department. The meat comes from local farms --- not a brand name wrapper in sight! --- and is truly fresh. I made my choices and waited for him to package them in their crisp white paper wrappers.
The gumbo recipe she gave me was one of those with obscure directions:
Lard
A handful of flour
1 pound boudin
1 pound chicken breasts
1 pound fresh shrimp
Equal parts celery, green pepper, and onion
Garlic cloves to taste, chopped and crushed
1 gallon of fish stock
White rice
“Is an icebox cleaning recipe,” she said, referring to the availability of the ingredients. “You can use road kill too if it’s fresh enough.” I would like to say she was kidding, but she probably wasn’t. She had already explained that a lot of things normal folk considered inedible constituted meal fixings in the bayou.
I noticed she didn’t simply chop everything up and throw it into the pot with the lard and the flour as I would have. Each ingredient went into the pot in precisely the order listed. In fact, she was horrified when I suggested the dish might be ready sooner if she added them all at once.
"You can't hurry good gumbo!" she exclaimed. "Each herb, each vegetable makes its own contribution. If you just throw them around like that, you'll bruise them and lose some of the flavor. The essences don’t mix right if you add them in the wrong order."
It took almost two hours to assemble everything in the dutch oven; two days later she pronounced it edible. I had to admit it tasted far better than anything I'd ever managed to produce.
"Just watch what you're doing," she advised. "Remember, you can't hurry food and the ingredients in a recipe are listed just so for a reason."
When she left, she gave me a book titled What to Cook When You Think There's Nothing in the House to Eat.
That book became my new best friend.
We're horrible about using what's in the house before we go grocery shopping. Most of the fresh stuff disappears fairly quickly but the cupboards are groaning with items like dried legumes, canned tuna, and other goods sitting forgotten on the shelves. I opened the book, found a simple recipe for lentils and carrots, and decided to make that my first test recipe.
This time, I heeded Dorie’s advice. I measured everything, remembering to differentiate between dry and wet measurements, and I stayed close by to supervise the cooking of the vegetables. The recipe called for olive oil, which heats up quickly and burns fast. The book suggested tossing the chopped onions in the oil until they were coated to help them turn golden more quickly and keep the oil from burning. It worked like a charm! I added the garlic next and set the timer for the minute required to soften the bulbs and distribute their flavor. While I waited, I measured out the lentils and chopped up the carrots. The carrots went in next, tossed like the onions until they were firm but the bitterness of the raw vegetable had cooked out. I wondered why it called for adding the rosemary at the last minute and then smiled as it perfumed the steam. Normally when I added dried spices the scent would have been more like wet, burnt twigs… and it would have tasted about as good.
I nearly screwed it all up when I balked at adding so much liquid: thirty-two ounces of stock plus one quart of water. A vague memory of watching my grandmother soak lentils and other legumes overnight before adding them to anything served as a reminder. The packaging said they didn’t need soaked overnight any longer, but I bet they needed the “extra” liquid the recipe indicated.
I served the lentils and carrots to my husband with trepidation.
“Did you make this from scratch?”
“I did.”
He heroically wiped the expression of dismay off his face and examined his dinner. I really couldn’t blame him for sniffing it before tasting; most of my cooking could be redeemed with plenty of salt, pepper, and garlic but on the nights I burnt the food, we ordered pizza. I hadn’t the heart to taste it myself and wondered which type of night this would be. One bite, followed by another…and the expression on his face completely altered to one I’d never seen before at the dinner table: absolute delight.
“This really is good!” he exclaimed.
Fox ate two bowls of the stuff that night and then took the leftovers to work with him for lunch.
Yup, the devil really is in the details.
It should be noted that the actual books my mother presented to me were much older than those to which I've linked. The first had been printed in the 1950s and the second in the mid 1930s. They were not facsimiles. Also, I would like to credit The Economist's article Pluck a Flamingo: What Cookbooks Really Teach Us for the information regarding the evolution of cookbooks and recipes.
Whatcha got cookin'?
How's about cookin' somethin' up with me? " o/`
----- "Hey Good Lookin'" performed by Hank Williams Jr
I love to cook.
Unfortunately, cooking hates me.
I never learned to cook properly. When my father died, my mother decided thirteen years of playing hostess had been enough. When I asked her about cooking, she simply shrugged.
“Follow the recipe,” she said and handed me the family copies of Betty Crocker’s Cookbook and Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. These books were at least two generations old and therefore written with some obscurity. After all, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that cookbook writers even began to realize that assuming your reader knows the basics might be underestimating the would-be cook’s abilities. The recipes in these earlier books look devastatingly simple on the page…but they’re a disaster in the kitchen. The earliest of them are written in a kind of cook’s shorthand designed to keep the specifics of the dish a secret; the later ones do mention measurements and portions but stick with seasonal local ingredients which may not be available to a modern cook.
I decided a simple oatmeal cookie recipe provided the best chance of success. Following the instructions in a recipe must have been only part of the magic involved in cooking edible dishes. I confused wet and dry weights and I mistook baking powder for baking soda. Twenty minutes later, I had unappetizing puddles of goo sitting forlornly on the cookie sheet. The cookies refused to bake!
“That’s not possible!” my husband exclaimed. “You must not have left them in long enough at the right temperature.” He increased the temperature of the oven to 350 degrees and we waited another hour.
“Did…did they cook?” I asked as he peered into the oven.
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “they did not.” I joined him in staring at the little patties. The individual oat kernels had seared to a nasty grayish brown color, but the cookies were as raw as ever.
We couldn’t scrape them off the cookie sheet and had to throw that away as well. He drove all the way into town and brought back some oatmeal cookies, still warm from the bakery, but I couldn’t be consoled. I threw my apron over my head and cried.
“Look, cooking just isn’t your strong suit,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”
His mother believed every boy should know his way around the kitchen. Fox's meals never burned or scorched. He never had cumin or turmeric incidents (whereas I got them confused simply because they were similar colors). He could produce a roux of any sort, from tan to brick, without destroying the cast iron.
I envied him. A woman is supposed to nurture her family through her cooking skills. Mine would have had us all in the hospital with food poisoning.
It was quite a while before I felt I could show my face in the kitchen again.
Our girlfriend Dorie, a gal from the bayou country who insisted the Cajuns invented cooking, came to visit. “Anyone can cook,” she insisted. “Come, I’ll show you.”
She and I dug through cookbooks, made lists, and then drug my poor husband off to the grocery store. Dorie only let me select the freshest ingredients. I spent at least twenty minutes in the produce aisle not only using the approved standards for choosing the right fruit or vegetable but 'feeling' out its life energies to see whether or not I have a 'live' one.
In the canned good aisle, she insisted I read each label as though it were a classic novel. The best ones were simple: they stated what food had been canned, listed salt as a preservative, and the water used in packing. If it had more than one or two things I couldn't pronounce and the primary ingredients weren’t recognizable as food, I couldn't buy them.
Our grocery store has an actual butcher on duty and a real meat department. The meat comes from local farms --- not a brand name wrapper in sight! --- and is truly fresh. I made my choices and waited for him to package them in their crisp white paper wrappers.
The gumbo recipe she gave me was one of those with obscure directions:
Lard
A handful of flour
1 pound boudin
1 pound chicken breasts
1 pound fresh shrimp
Equal parts celery, green pepper, and onion
Garlic cloves to taste, chopped and crushed
1 gallon of fish stock
White rice
“Is an icebox cleaning recipe,” she said, referring to the availability of the ingredients. “You can use road kill too if it’s fresh enough.” I would like to say she was kidding, but she probably wasn’t. She had already explained that a lot of things normal folk considered inedible constituted meal fixings in the bayou.
I noticed she didn’t simply chop everything up and throw it into the pot with the lard and the flour as I would have. Each ingredient went into the pot in precisely the order listed. In fact, she was horrified when I suggested the dish might be ready sooner if she added them all at once.
"You can't hurry good gumbo!" she exclaimed. "Each herb, each vegetable makes its own contribution. If you just throw them around like that, you'll bruise them and lose some of the flavor. The essences don’t mix right if you add them in the wrong order."
It took almost two hours to assemble everything in the dutch oven; two days later she pronounced it edible. I had to admit it tasted far better than anything I'd ever managed to produce.
"Just watch what you're doing," she advised. "Remember, you can't hurry food and the ingredients in a recipe are listed just so for a reason."
When she left, she gave me a book titled What to Cook When You Think There's Nothing in the House to Eat.
That book became my new best friend.
We're horrible about using what's in the house before we go grocery shopping. Most of the fresh stuff disappears fairly quickly but the cupboards are groaning with items like dried legumes, canned tuna, and other goods sitting forgotten on the shelves. I opened the book, found a simple recipe for lentils and carrots, and decided to make that my first test recipe.
This time, I heeded Dorie’s advice. I measured everything, remembering to differentiate between dry and wet measurements, and I stayed close by to supervise the cooking of the vegetables. The recipe called for olive oil, which heats up quickly and burns fast. The book suggested tossing the chopped onions in the oil until they were coated to help them turn golden more quickly and keep the oil from burning. It worked like a charm! I added the garlic next and set the timer for the minute required to soften the bulbs and distribute their flavor. While I waited, I measured out the lentils and chopped up the carrots. The carrots went in next, tossed like the onions until they were firm but the bitterness of the raw vegetable had cooked out. I wondered why it called for adding the rosemary at the last minute and then smiled as it perfumed the steam. Normally when I added dried spices the scent would have been more like wet, burnt twigs… and it would have tasted about as good.
I nearly screwed it all up when I balked at adding so much liquid: thirty-two ounces of stock plus one quart of water. A vague memory of watching my grandmother soak lentils and other legumes overnight before adding them to anything served as a reminder. The packaging said they didn’t need soaked overnight any longer, but I bet they needed the “extra” liquid the recipe indicated.
I served the lentils and carrots to my husband with trepidation.
“Did you make this from scratch?”
“I did.”
He heroically wiped the expression of dismay off his face and examined his dinner. I really couldn’t blame him for sniffing it before tasting; most of my cooking could be redeemed with plenty of salt, pepper, and garlic but on the nights I burnt the food, we ordered pizza. I hadn’t the heart to taste it myself and wondered which type of night this would be. One bite, followed by another…and the expression on his face completely altered to one I’d never seen before at the dinner table: absolute delight.
“This really is good!” he exclaimed.
Fox ate two bowls of the stuff that night and then took the leftovers to work with him for lunch.
Yup, the devil really is in the details.
It should be noted that the actual books my mother presented to me were much older than those to which I've linked. The first had been printed in the 1950s and the second in the mid 1930s. They were not facsimiles. Also, I would like to credit The Economist's article Pluck a Flamingo: What Cookbooks Really Teach Us for the information regarding the evolution of cookbooks and recipes.