Tag: food and cooking

It’s All in the Timing

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

We had breakfast for dinner tonight.

To be more precise, we had buttermilk pancakes, maple syrup, bacon, and scrapple for dinner tonight, and our established grammar and syntax of dining say that this is breakfast, even if eaten at 8 PM.  And a meal that would be eminently satisfactory in its accustomed time slot becomes something even better — unexpected and even a little bit subversive — when consumed at a time of day normally reserved for roast meats and steamed vegetables, for soups and stir-fries and casseroles.

The same principle holds for writing.  Put a character into a setting that’s out of sync with his or her normal environment, and you add interest.  Move an event out of its traditional or expected place in the storyline, and you generate suspense — if the author has played fast and loose with one set of expectations, all of the others are fair games as well, and anything can happen.

It’s not always necessary to invent new things.  A lot of the time, you can do just as well simply by putting familiar things in unexpected places.

More Semi-Mindless Cookery for Busy People

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This one is only truly mindless if you have access to a crockpot (which every hardworking freelancer should) and a food processor and a source of pre-made frozen meatballs.  Make the meatballs yourself from scratch when ground beef is on sale, or get the storebought ones when those are on sale — either way, they’re good to have in the freezer as meals-in-the-bank for nights when you can’t be bothered to cook anything requiring thought.

And when you’re not in the mood for meatball subs, or spaghetti and meatballs, you can make this:

Mexican Meatball Soup (Albondigas)

  •     2 (14 1/2 ounce) cans diced Ro-Tel tomatoes & chiles (Don’t try to substitute some other brand of tomatoes and chiles, and go for the original, not the mild, version.  Those of us who hail from Texas know that Ro-Tel makes the one true brand.)
  •     2  14-ounce cans beef broth
  •     2  14-ounce cans chicken broth (I use Better Than Bouillon stock base, and make up four cups of it using 2 teaspoons each of the beef and chicken bases.)
  •     1 box frozen cooked meatballs (or about a pound’s worth of homemade ditto)
  •     1 medium onion, chopped (I run the onion through the food processor on “chop” along with the cilantro, but if you want a coarser chop you can always do it by hand.  It’s not as mindless that way, though.)
  •     1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped (To be honest, I always just eyeball the fresh cilantro.  If you belong to the cilantro-tastes-like-soap portion of the population, this probably isn’t the recipe for you.)
  •     1/2 cup pastini pasta, uncooked
  •     2 teaspoons dried oregano
  •     1 can black beans
  •     salt and pepper, to taste
  •     sour cream, garnish (optional)
  •     shredded cheese, garnish (optional)

Chop onions and cilantro.

Combine all ingredients in a crock pot.

Cook for 4 hours on High or 8-9 hours on Low.

Ladle soup in bowls and garnish with a dollop of sour cream and a sprinkle of shredded cheese.

On the line stretching from Convenience to Authenticity, this recipe is firmly pegged down at the Convenience end.†  But that, in this case, is the point.

†If you’re interested in moving a bit closer to Authenticity, the internet is full of recipes for making albondigas from scratch.

More Cooking for People who are Thinking about Other Things

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Sometimes it’s fun to tackle a complex recipe with many steps and lots of ingredients. Then there are the other times, when most of your brain’s processing power is tied up with something else, and you can only default to frozen pizza and take-out Chinese so often before the rest of the family — not to mention the family budget — start revolting.  At that point, you need something simple but tasty, like this:

Beef with Garlic and Three Peppers

  •   1 eye round of beef (about 2-3 pounds)
  •   about 5 cloves of garlic
  •   1 teaspoon Szechuan peppercorns
  •   several brisk grindings (coarse) of Tellicherry black pepper
  •   liberal pinch of cayenne pepper

Preheat the oven to about 350 degrees F.

Peel the cloves of garlic and cut them lengthwise into slivers.

Heat the Szechuan peppercorns in a cast-iron pan with a scant  pinch of salt until the peppercorns go from grey-brown to brown-black and start smelling wonderful.  Then grind them in a mortar and pestle.

Take the eye round and put it on a rack in a large roasting pan.  Stab the roast repeatedly all over with a sharp knife (a Fairbairn commando dagger or a Gerber survival knife works best, because of the diamond-shaped cross-section, but any kitchen knife will do.)

Put a sliver of garlic into each stab wound, pressing down so that the beef closes over the garlic.  Meditate upon efficient weapons design.  (This is perhaps the only socially acceptable use of a commando dagger.)

Sprinkle the roast with the cayenne pepper, and then with the ground Szechuan pepper.  Then take the pepper grinder with the Tellicherry black pepper and grind it over the roast until the top looks crusty.

Cook, uncovered, until a meat thermometer at the thickest part reads 160 degrees F.  (About 30 minutes per pound, depending upon the roast and your oven.)

Take out of the oven, and let stand for about ten minutes while you make rice or instant potatoes or thick slices of toast or whatever your personal code of roastbeef says should round out the meal.  Slice thin, across the grain.

Serve.

Say a regretful goodbye to your plans for the leftover roast and tomorrow night’s supper.

Good Tech, Better Tech, Really Good Tech

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I’m as fond of toys as the next she-geek, but Really Good Tech — as in, the stuff that gets replaced at once, no question, if and when it ever dies — is something else again. In my book, to qualify for that title, the piece of technology involved has to:

1. be better than I am
2. at something I really hate doing
3. that nevertheless is usually my job to get done anyway.

This rules out my e-book reader, much as I adore it, because it just facilitates something that I’d enjoy doing regardless of the tech involved. The same goes for my crockpot, no matter how much I rely on it, because I could always fall back on the dutch oven if I had to. In fact, there are only four items, at the moment, that make my Really Good Tech list:

  • The computer/word processor/printer combination. Not for writing, but for turning what I write into a submittable electronic or paper MS. I’m enough of a dinosaur to remember the bad old days, when it would take me half an hour and an unconscionable amount of White-Out to produce a single page of submission-quality typescript. There’s a reason I didn’t start getting published until we got our first computer, the Atari 800 of blessed memory.
  • The GPS for our auto. Because it used to be me riding shotgun with my lap full of maps and triptiks, frantically doing arithmetic (at which I suck) in order to answer urgent questions like “How many minutes until our next exit?” and “What’s our current projected arrival time?”
  • The dishwasher. Because it maintains the fragile barrier between us and total (as opposed to merely partial) household disarray, and without it I would fall behind in the dishwashing and never catch up again.
  • The rice cooker. Because while it only does one thing, it does that one thing right every single time, whereas rice cookery by any other method, for me, is a project with only about a 50% chance of success.

I’ve been giving considerable thought to adding the electric wok to the shortlist, but I’m still on the fence about that one.  I could fake stir-frying in a different pan, or I could adjust my meal plans to make up for the loss if I had to, and besides, I kind of enjoy cooking and I’m not all that bad at it . . . on the other hand, I really like having a proper wok.

The observant reader will have noticed that only one of the items on the Really Good Tech list has anything to do with writing, and the one that does, has more to do with the mechanical end of the job than the creative end.  All you really need for the creative end are the contents of your own head and some means — pencil and paper, typewriter, dictaphone, computer, whatever you’ve got handy — of getting them fixed in permanent form.

For the mechanical end, there’s no magic in either retro or cutting-edge technology.  Use whatever tech you like and can afford and are comfortable with, so long as it can get your material to the marketplace in a form that the marketplace can handle.

Follow-Up: Apple-Pie Order

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Because I can’t hand out physical samples in a virtual world, the apple pie recipe:

Apple Pie

  • 5 large apples or 9 small ones (about 1 and 3/4 pounds — a mixture of two or more pie-apple types is best), cored, peeled, and thinly sliced.
  • 1/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup light brown sugar
  • 1 and 1/2 tsp cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp nutmeg
  • 1 T cornstarch
  • 1 T butter
  • 1 tsp grated lemon peel (fresh!)
  • sprinkling of fine tapioca

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Line a pie pan with pastry.  (Use what ever pie crust recipe suits you.  These days, the store-bought uncooked pie crusts from the refrigerator case, that you unroll from their waxed-paper wrappers, have reached a respectable level of edibility, which is a good thing if you’re in a hurry, or if you’ve never had the proverbial light hand for pastry.)

If you’re making a two-crust pie, moisten the edges of the lower crust. Sprinkle the bottom of the pie crust with the fine tapioca.

Mix together the sugars, spices, and cornstarch.

Fill the pie crust with the thinly-sliced apples:  Place slices around the edges of the pie pan, then pile the rest in layers.  As you make the layers, interleave the apple slices with sugar, gratings of lemon, and dots of butter.

Top with either the other pie crust (pricked or cut to vent steam) or with streusel (see below.)

Bake 15 minutes at 450; lower the heat to 375 and cook another  25-30 minutes.

Serve hot, warm, or cool (if it lasts that long.)

Streusel

  • 1/4 cup butter
  • 2 T sugar
  • 1 T cinnamon
  • 1 cup flour

Cream butter; add sugar and cinnamon mixture alternately with flour.  Blend until crumbly.

The most recent apple assortment we’ve been using is a combination of Granny Smith, Macintosh, Rome, and Lady Alice apples.  These are all good baking or baking/eating apples.  What you don’t want are Red or Golden Delicious, or any of the other varieties that are meant to be eaten out of hand rather than cooked.  They will make your pie filling turn out mushy, and you don’t want that.  The filling in a good apple pie, like the prose in a good short story or novel, should be crisp and toothsome.

(Admit it.  You were waiting to see how I was going to work in the obligatory writing reference.)

The Return of Pie

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We had apple pie for dessert tonight.  My husband and co-author is the household’s designated piemaker, and he does a mean apple pie.  One of his secrets: using two or more different types of apple.  Tonight’s pie featured a couple of Granny Smiths, a Macintosh, and two large Rome apples.  Why more than one type of apple?  Because it give a depth and complexity of flavor that you just don’t get in pies made with a single variety of apple.

And this is related to writing, how?

Just as a pie is better when it’s made with more than one variety of apple, a novel is better when it doesn’t just have a single mood or tone.  Horror is made more frightening by being lightened from time to time with humor; adventure and mystery can often benefit from a dollop of romance.  The contrast works to add depth, and the relief of tension lures readers into a momentary security.  And it’s the momentary security that makes them jump even higher when the surprise twist comes around.

Leftovers

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We roasted a leg of lamb for Easter dinner.  It would have been a half-leg of lamb — which is more in line with the number of people in the house these days — but the grocery store didn’t have any half-legs left by the time we did our shopping, so a whole leg of lamb it was.  We stabbed it with a knife and put in slivers of garlic, then laid rosemary sprigs on top of it and cooked it at 325F for 25 minutes per pound, and served it up with mint sauce and roasted potatoes and asparagus in hollandaise.

The potatoes and the asparagus are gone, along with the hollandaise, but we’ve still got half the lamb in the refrigerator, and now I’m thinking about leftovers.  Lamb sandwiches, probably, and maybe a shepherd’s pie.

It isn’t just cooking that has me thinking about leftovers.  Writing jobs have leftovers, too — the paths the story tried to take that turned out to be dead ends; the bits of other as-yet-unwritten stories that cropped up in the current project by mistake; the occasional perfectly good, yes-it-really-happened scene that nevertheless had to be excised from the finished text because it slowed things down at a point when they needed to be moving fast, or because it threw unwanted emphasis on something that needed to be kept in the background, or because the book had a firm word count requirement and was already threatening to run long.

But the dead-end paths and the outcroppings of other narratives can often be reworked into fully realized stories in their own right.  In fact, their appearance in a story where they don’t fit can often mean that your subconscious muse is telling you something about what your next project ought to be.  As for those snippets that were removed in the service of the greater good — it used to be, there wasn’t much a writer could do with them except put the pages away in a desk drawer with a sigh of regret, but the internet has helped us with that as it has helped us with so many other things.   Those snippets can now be posted on a novel’s web page as extra treats for faithful readers, or turned into Kickstarter rewards, or compiled into a self-published chapbook and put up for sale by the author.

So don’t throw out those leftovers, any more than you’d throw out a perfectly good half-eaten leg of lamb.

Pi Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

That is, 3.14.

Over at the Boskone blog, they’re posting pie recipes.  Which inspires me to post one here:

Pecan Pie

  • 1 cup white Karo syrup
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 3 eggs, well beaten
  • 1 and 1/2 cups chopped pecans
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 2 T butter, melted
  • 1 uncooked 9″ pie shell

Mix syrup and sugar well.
Add eggs, butter, vanilla, and pecans.
Mix well; pour into pie shell.
Bake at 350 for 45-50 minutes or until firm.

I haven’t made this recipe for about a decade now, because the canonical version of it, in my mind, requires the pecans that grew on the three pecan trees in the yard of my family’s house in Texas.  My father would spend the autumn picking up the pecans from those trees (two Georgia papershells and one native pecan — the latter were smaller and harder to dig out of their shells, but sweeter), get the shells cracked at a pecan-packing plant across the Red River in Oklahoma, then spend the winter picking the nuts out of their shells while he watched television.  Some years, those three pecan trees would yield 70 pounds or more of pecans; every spring, most of the ones that hadn’t gotten used up over the course of the previous year would get baked into apple-nut cakes and sold at the parish bazaar.  And a lot of them found their way to me, wherever I happened to be living at the time — instead of crumpled newspaper or styrofoam packing peanuts in boxes of stuff from home, I’d get ziploc freezer bags full of fresh pecans.

I was, of course, spoiled forever for store-bought pecans.  They always tasted dry and rancid by comparison.  After my father died, nobody picked up the pecans from the yard anymore, and the house in Texas belongs to someone else now anyway . . . but I still don’t have the heart to make this recipe with any other pecans.

There’s not much connection to writing in all of this, except maybe for the principle that almost everything has a story attached to it if you look hard enough.

The Hazards of the New

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The other day I tried a new recipe — Pollo Oaxaca, from Allrecipes.com — and as I did so, I had some thoughts about writing.  (Writers can relate almost anything to writing.  But it was my co-author who explained how a lime pie is like a short story.)

Although I’d decided to try this recipe, I still had misgivings.  For one thing, it was green.  Tomatillos, cilantro, and jalapeños, put through a food processor with some garlic and onion and lime juice, are never going to be any other color.  And green food is always an iffy proposition, even for an audience that will happily eat pasta with pesto (known around the house as “green slime sauce”, because, well, it is) and spinach lasagna and pork stew with green chiles.  For another, it was spicy — and again, even when you’re playing for an audience that likes things rather more spicy than otherwise, there’s no telling whether or not a particular combination is going to please.

It didn’t help that I’d had a recent experiment with a recipe for curry meet with a distinct lack of enthusiasm from all parties, including me.  (I’ve more or less decided that Indian food goes into the category of “things I will pay somebody else to cook for me.”)  There’s nothing like a recent lackluster effort to put one off of the idea of making another experiment.

Writing is the same way.  It’s tempting to keep the same list of known reliable dishes in regular rotation.  You know how to make them, your audience likes them, you tend to have most of the ingredients right there in the pantry, it’s all good.  Sometimes, though, you want to expand your range a bit — you want to do the writer’s equivalent of trying out a new regional cuisine, or some new ingredients, or a new kitchen technique.  Maybe you’ve always written romance, and you want to write a gritty, noir-tinged mystery for a change.  Or maybe you write hard science fiction, and you want to add a romantic relationship to all the rivets and equations.  Or maybe you want to try something risky with narrative voice or chronological order or point of view.

And you’re scared.  Because maybe your audience will devour it with glad cries of great joy, and demand that you add this one to the regular list.  But maybe they’ll taste it, and eat just enough to be polite (if you’re lucky and their mamas raised them right), and say that they’re sure you must have worked hard on it but they really don’t think it’s a keeper.  And there’s nothing you can say to that, because if they don’t like it, they don’t like it, and you don’t get points for effort in this game.

But the thing is, you have to try new things.  Otherwise, you’ll end up cooking the same dozen or so meals over and over again, and eventually your audience will get bored, and so will you.

(Oh.  Yes.  That chicken recipe I linked to up above . . . it was declared a keeper.)

Return from the Road

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I’m back in the frozen north after a week in Boston and points south; regular blogging will probably resume tomorrow.

In the meantime, have a recipe:

Fresh Salsa

  • 1 onion, quartered
  • about 1/4 of a bunch of fresh cilantro (depending upon taste and how big your grocery’s bunches are)
  • 5 or 6 nacho jalapeño rings
  • red pepper flakes to taste
  • 4 or 5 cloves of garlic, peeled
  • 1 can of diced tomatoes with green peppers, drained (you could use fresh tomatoes, if you live where fresh tomatoes are plentiful and cheap and good.  I live in northern New England, where the local cookery tradition has a lot of recipes for what to do with green tomatoes that haven’t ripened by the time the first frost comes around.)
  • cumin, to taste (start with about a quarter-teaspoon and work up)
  • pinch of salt

Put the onion, garlic, cilantro, jalapeño rings, cumin, and red pepper flakes in the food processor.  Run it on pulse until the onions and other stuff are at the state of chunkiness you prefer for your salsa.  I like mine chopped fine but still recognizable as separate substances, not a unified puree.

Add the can of drained diced tomatoes.  Pulse once or twice more, carefully — you don’t want the tomatoes turning into a mush.

Remove the salsa to a container with a lid.  Add the pinch of salt.  Stir gently, put the lid on the container, and refrigerate it.

This will keep for several days in the refrigerator, probably longer — I’ve never had it stay around long enough to go bad, anyhow.