Uncategorized

The evolution of a cookie, or Darwin was right

/ momsequitur / Leave a comment

A jillion years ago, when Seinfeld was still on, Us magazine interviewed the caterer that fed the cast and crew onset. She talked about the favorite dishes of Jerry and the other stars. And she mentioned a kind of a chocolate chip cookie that she made that everybody adored. The recipe was printed within the article.
As with almost everything that exists, I have an opinion about chocolate chip cookies. The naked cookie, sans chips, should be chewy and delicious, or don’t bother. Don’t make a miniature piece of chocolate be the sole savior of a cookie. It’s like having a baby to save a faltering marriage. It just ain’t right. And it usually goes wrong.
The nice lady used mocha chips. I’m guessing they’re some kind of chocolate/coffee chip. They sound good, but I have never in all the years between then and now, found them on a store shelf. There are many foods that professional cooks use that home cooks can not get their hands on. It’s a pet peeve of mine. I guess those chips are on that list.
So, I made the cookies with regular Hershey’s milk (don’t like semi-sweet) chocolate chips. They ran all over the cookie sheet in a frenzy. These cookies were more like a tuile, an extremely thin crispy cookie that is often rolled into cigars when warm and stuck into ice cream.
Imagine chocolate chip ice cream cones (you know, that actually sounds interesting).
The cookie had too much fat without enough flour. I tinkered with the flour for a few batches, and finally found the amount that would give structure, without becoming cakey. After I found the right flour ratio, I switched the all-purpose I had been using to cake flour, the measurement of which had to be adjusted, as well. The cake flour lightens the feel of the finished cookie, and made the texture more layered and distinct, while keeping the sticky, chewy mouth feel.
As for the chips, I put in all kinds of things. Chocolate chips, toffee chips. Coconut and dried fruit. In fact, in this incarnation, we called them, “Whatever Kind of Chip Cookies.” This cookie was also the beneficiary of the discovery of cheap abundant vanilla beans at Costco. Instead of two lowly teaspoons of vanilla extract, this recipe had two lowly teaspoons of vanilla extract, and the caviar of an entire vanilla bean.
Then one summer, The Kid went to camp. Like any American mother who’s seen her share of Leave It To Beaver and The Brady Bunch, I sent my child off to camp with a big box of homemade cookies. My Whatever cookies.
I offered to make another batch, and asked what kind of chips were desired. Since the cookie-eaters (The Kid’s entire dorm floor), couldn’t come to a concensus, chipless was requested. The spotless treats were a huge hit. Without the chocolate flavor competing, the cookie became all about the vanilla. The campers loved it, and renamed it, “Vanilla Explosion”.
The Kid and I were planning on making the cookies one day, and were thinking about what would enhance the rich, buttery, caramelized taste. Simultaneously, we had the same thought. Brown butter. We already loved the nutty, complex flavor that browning imparted to regular, old butter. It’s terrific on pasta, but we just adore it on cauliflower. We hadn’t yet tried it in a sweet application.
The butter in the cookie dough is used softened. First I scraped my vanilla bean, and put the caviar aside. The empty bean, I put in a pan with the sticks of butter. I melted, then browned it with the bean floating alongside. I poured the newly brown butter into a bowl. After it has cooled for bit, I stir in the vanilla caviar. While the butter is cooling to solid, I stir it from time to time so it won’t be separated into layers when it hardens again. I do this the day before I intend on making cookies, so the flavors can intensify with a night in the fridge.
When I’m ready to make the cookies, I soften the brown butter, and use it just like normal.
I would never offer someone else’s recipe as my own, but this recipe has been through so many permutations that I don’t think the original caterer would even recognize it. So, here you go, this is what happened when I cut a recipe out of Us magazine.
Thanks for your time.

Vanilla Explosion Cookies

1 Cup brown sugar
1 Cup white sugar
8 ounces butter, browned with vanilla bean, and resoftened
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 1/4 cups cake flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 4oo degrees (make sure the oven is HOT when the cookies go in). In a large bowl, mix butter and sugar. You can mix this cookie dough by hand, but a stand-up mixer makes it much easier. Add eggs and vanilla. In a separate bowl, sift together dry ingredients. Slowly stir together wet and dry ingredients. Make the cookies any size you like, baking all one size together. A large cookie bakes for about 10-12 minutes, a bite-size cookie may only need 7-8. Bake until golden brown, the darker the chewier. Makes about 3 dozen large cookies.

The untitled Joe Cuffy Project

/ momsequitur / Leave a comment

In high school, there was a guy named Kenny Brite. He was one of those old geezers that sit around the general store spinning yarns, only in a teenager’s body.
One of his stories was completely fictional, but so epic, everybody remembers it to this day. If you asked Petey and the Kid, they could recite it verbatim—although neither has met Kenny.
Way out in the country lived a solitary man named Joe Cuffy. Every morning, almost before the sun came up, Joe would get up and go for a walk. He’d pull on his overalls and work boots, and walk a couple of miles along the rutted roads near his house.
In the fall in eastern North Carolina many farmers burn their harvested fields, to clear them and nourish them for the next growing season. This is also the time of year when fog often lies heavy and thick in the flat countryside.
This particular morning was a perfect storm of fog and smoke. Visibility was almost nil. It was as if the world was a snow globe filled with cotton batting.
Any other man might have waited for the sunshine to eliminate the miasma, but Joe was not any other man.
When the Maola milk truck knocked him into the ditch, neither the driver nor Joe saw the other. On such a bumpy road, it was just a little more jostling in a spasmodic drive. The truck quickly vanished into the murk.
Because Joe lived alone, and sour and misanthropic were some of his better qualities, it took a bit before anyone in the community noticed he was missing.
Finally, three days later they found the old farmer’s corpse just off the road.
And. The Rats. Had. Eaten. His. Head.
Why, you may ask did I just share this legendary tale?
Because every time I grab a carton of Maola buttermilk out of the dairy case, I think of poor old Joe Cuffy.
And when I buy buttermilk, it’s always that brand, because they consistently carry the fat-free variety. To me, this odd, tart liquid is almost magic. It’s thick, rich, and clingy. It makes the best biscuits, my famous chicken fingers, and the most authentic ranch dressing.
When doing a three part dredge, normally it’s flour, then an egg wash, and a top coating. But when you use buttermilk, it seals the first coating, and perfectly becomes the glue for any type of top coat, no matter whether it’s more flour, breadcrumbs, or even something heavier.
Recently I picked up some chicken cutlets on sale. I did a quick inventory to see what I could do with them. I had some pecans in the fridge, but I was low on eggs. I did have some buttermilk, so I decided to make pecan chicken, and instead of an egg wash, I would use buttermilk.
It exceeded my hopes. There was a golden crust of pecans, and the buttermilk added a bit of a bite to what could have been cloying. The meat was juicy, and you could actually pick out the chicken flavor amongst everything else.
Joe Cuffy’s Pecan Chicken
4 chicken breast cutlets
2 cups flour, divided
1 cup fat-free buttermilk
2 cups pecans, chopped in a food processor until about the size of large breadcrumbs
2 tablespoons butter
Oil for frying
Salt and pepper
Make a three-part dredge. First, 1 ½ cups flour. Second, buttermilk. Third, the pecans and ½ cup flour, well-seasoned. Season the chicken. Coat with flour, shaking off excess. Dip into buttermilk, then lay them into the pecans, patting them onto entire surface of chicken. Plate and refrigerate for thirty minutes for coating to set.
Heat skillet with butter and about ½ inch of oil until hot. Turn heat to medium, and place in chicken. When the first side is browned, flip and cook on the other side (about 5 minutes on each side).
Remove to paper towel-covered plate. Makes four servings.
I hope you enjoy Joe’s chicken.
Two pieces of advice: keep some buttermilk on hand. You’ll be surprised at the places you can use this rich, tangy stuff.
And please be careful when walking in the fog.
Thanks for your time.

Things I’ve done with a butt

/ momsequitur / Leave a comment

 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The pork butt torte.

When Petey and I first married, not only could I not cook, I had no idea how to cook for two. At home, my mother always made enough at each meal to feed many, many unexpected guests. In my entire childhood, while it may not “have been fancy,” as mom would say, there was always plenty, no matter how many sat at her table, or needed a to-go plate or fourteen.
So when I made meat loaf for my handsome groom, it was always at least four pounds, and then I couldn’t figure out why I had a frat party’s worth of food going fuzzy in the fridge.
It took a long time, but I finally figured out how to cook for a realistic number of diners. Since then I am obsessed with using all the food that I buy, and wasting as little as possible.
But when I plan on making Boston Butt, the shoulder of a pig, I always buy a cut as large as my big dutch oven, “Old Blue” can handle. Usually about five pounds. When the Kid was at home, I could make an eight pounder in“Mrs. Lovett”, The Kid’s massive cooker. But the pot went north, along with our child, and most of our money.
And not one ounce of an oinker goes to waste.
Last Monday night I made a 4 1/2 pounder. I cooked up a pot of yellow rice with pigeon peas as well. I marinated the hunk of pig in the fridge over night. Early in the day I dried it off, rubbed seasoning all over it, and gave it a dark brown sear on all sides. I brown my aromatics (the flavoring veg, and spices) in the same pot, deglaze, put the roast back in the pan fat side up, and pour in liquid until it comes about halfway up the sides of the pork.
I am purposefully not advising on other ingredients. You can make it any style you want. From beer, cabbage, and carrots to fish sauce, yuzu and five spice. Have fun, but keep tasting your concoction for flavor and balance.
Bake it low and slow. The lowest safe oven temperature to cook it is 225. Monday, my little piggy took six and a half hours. This meat will tell you when it’s done. When the muscle groups of the roast are falling away from each other, and you can easily shred even inner meat with a fork; it’s done. Don’t try to force the pig, it doesn’t work.
For our rice and pigeon peas, I put some pig chopped, into a pan with achiote-garlic oil. I crisped it up, and put a handful on the top each serving of rice.
At the end of cooking it, I had four bags of slow-roasted pork to freeze for later.
Last night, I added some Mexican spice and made a torte in a spring-form pan. I layered rice (leftover from Monday, and spiced with poblanos) and pork with freshly roasted corn between tortillas. I put sliced tomatoes, and sliced Oaxaca cheese on top. At the end, I spread a lime-cumin sour cream, into which I’ve whisked some fine white masa. This bakes up like a super creamy polenta. I sprinkled shredded cheddar, snipped chive, and a fine dusting of smoked paprika on the top of the polenta. It went under the broiler to puff, and brown. I let it rest for a bit, release the ring, and am left with a layered cake kinda thing, full of a Mexican dinner.
Another night my bag o’ pork might be used on tacos, sandwiches, or baked potatoes. I put it in pies, casseroles, and pasta. I have the slowest of slow-roasted pork, which only takes defrosting time.
If I’m in the kitchen, making a huge batch of something, Petey, veteran of many dinners for two, featuring casseroles for eight, looks nervous. But if I have a piece of pig the size of lawn mower in the oven, he just looks hungry.
Thanks for your time.

Dull?

/ momsequitur / Leave a comment

When I mentioned the idea of this column to The Kid, it was met with a politely suppressed yawn. “Really? Roasted chicken breasts? That’s…nice…” I swear I heard crickets.
Dull they might be, but my child has never stood in the meat department of the grocery store for the 4,000th time (literally; my journalistic standards and morbid curiosity compelled me to break out the calculator), almost faint with desperate longing for a new take on dinner.
So in honor of any mutual sufferers (and to maybe prove The Kid wrong), here are a few musings on the subject:
Roasted Chicken Breasts
When they’re on on sale (Carlie C’s recently had them at 89 cents a pound), and you’ve got room to freeze, stock the heck up. Buy them with skin and bone. Not only are they cheaper, but you will use them both, to great benefit.
You can serve them hot. Serve them alone (they are really juicy), or with a sauce of whatever you have a hankering for.
On top of pasta? Marinara, or a hot relish made of halved grape tomatoes and chopped garlic, tossed in a little olive oil and tons of fresh, coarsely cracked black pepper and kosher salt until just hot. Don’t let the tomatoes get hot enough to either shrivel, or start giving up their juice. After you take it off the heat, check for salt.
You can serve them over a bed of mashed sweet potatoes, or acorn squash, or any other kind of mashed veg you want. You can mix them, sliced, into a saute of fresh vegetables. I love a little hollandaise, drizzeled over the top (okay, standards again, I could drink a glass full of yummy hollandaise sauce, I love that stuff).
You get it, you can go all Da Vinci on these puppies.
The best way to cook these guys couldn’t be easier. 350 degrees, until a thermometer which has been inserted into the thicket part of the biggest breast before putting in the oven, registers 165 degrees. Don’t mess around here, rare chicken can kill. Let them rest for 5-10 minutes, covered, before removing the thermometer and serving.
But, here’s the cool part. You can make the chicken meat itself a canvass where you can really let you freak flag fly. Before cooking, carefully open a pocket between the skin and meat. Do it with your fingers, and be very gentle.
Into the pocket put a tablespoon of whatever flavor you want. Pesto, chiles, herbs du Provence, pancetta and lemon, american cheese(eww.). Go for it.
If you want to make them ahead, leave covered until they’re cool, remove the skin, but don’t discard, take the meat off the bone and freeze. If you like, you can crisp up and carmelize that skin, and use it like bacon. Start in a dry pan, no need for fat here. If you keep the rendered fat you have created “Schmaltz”, a frequent ingredient in traditional Jewish cooking, this is the Kosher alternative to pork fat, and tasty (not quite duck fat, but then, what is?).
You can do pounds of chickies when you have the time. And another night when time is of the essence you could have cool, homemade chicken salad, or comforting chowder, or healthy veggy lasagne in less time than it takes to make your kid do his homework.
Thanks for your time.